Poetics of Dislocation (review)

In Meena Alexander's Poetics of Dislocation, the question of home—and the impossibility of that question—gives rise to a new kind of architecture: poetry. For readers unfamiliar with the prolific author outside her poetry, this text shifts and enriches an understanding of her oeuvre, as it presents Alexander in another writing guise, steeped in philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and literary criticism. This wide-ranging compilation of essays and interviews privileges reading as the sustenance of a postcolonial life and future. The act of reading, according to Alexander, dislocates the writer so that a movement between reader and writer, self and other, home and strange lands, establishes a sensibility linked to an ethics of hospitality. For Alexander, the function of poetry is to build imaginary homes for the migrant subject, and this function emerges from the flesh of language, the framing capacity of poetry. It is always a homeless home, a paper boat, a tent, whose impermanent shelters encourage extensions of the self—peregrinations—both on foot and via the imagination, across the world from India to the Sudan, England to the United States, and beyond. We are thus born again in the poetic journey.

Poetics of Dislocation is divided into five layered parts, critical bridges that link Alexander's theoretical concerns ("Poetry and Place," "Picturing Sense," "Migrant Memory," "Poetics of Dislocation," and "In Conversation"). These trips are mediated by the act of reading, by poets in different lands whose works invite us to cross the borders of ourselves in order to expand, to live anew, maybe even to survive. For Alexander, like Édouard Glissant (whom her title directly addresses), poetry intensifies our relation to the world by teasing out "the living fabric connected by affective threads to other geographies, other histories, other languages, other ways of naming the sun and the moon." The brilliance of this text lies in its capacity to combine the quotidian and the cosmic via a phenomenology that "edges into dream" (xi) and displaces violence with poetic vision.

Poetry in this sense stands in contradistinction to violence. Its weapons are words; its outcomes are friends in Jacques Derrida's sense that only those who know homelessness can give hospitality; its value is a concern for justice; its function, building knowledges and the experience of pleasure. For Alexander, creativity, not territory, establishes the porous parameters of home. They are moments of translation and encounter between, for example, the Indian poet Mirabai and Adrienne Rich, Walt Whitman and Glissant, or Emily Dickinson and Gloria Anzaldúa. We are, Alexander reminds us, not only born into language, but translated by poetry's requirements: "the sort of translation the poem requires—'translate' in an early sense of the verb, meaning to carry over, to transport, for after all what is unspoken, even unspeakable must be borne into language—forces a fresh icon of the body, complicates the present until memory is written into the very texture of the senses" (93). In what ways, she asks, does poetry complicate our present, buttress memory, and instantiate itself in the texture of our senses?

Hospitality, in an aesthetic and ethical sense, is inscribed in Alexander's architecture of poetry. For Alexander the task of poetry is to "reconcile us to our world" (189). Here she speaks of poetry in response to violence. If we take this to its logical end, a world without poetry is a world that can only turn to violence in response to its divergent realities. Yet Alexander insists that poetry thrives in dislocation, that it exists in spite of history, "for most of the forces in our ordinary lives as we live them now conspire against the making of a poem" (190). If the aim of violence is to give order to identity, to control the estranging aspects of ourselves, or to use foreign populations as fodder for the nation's enhanced existence, then poetry's task is to emerge from this violence like a phoenix, born and burned in conflict but, through traumatic insight and alternate...