Can Third World Women Speak?: Meena Alexander’s Fault Lines and Decolonial Feminist Pedagogy

Abstract

My essay examines the political and pedagogical possibilities of reading Meena Alexander’s memoir Fault Lines (1993, 2003) as a decolonial feminist text, especially in the west. Published in two editions, Alexander’s memoir bears witness to the gendered and racial violence that she experienced as a postcolonial migrant woman across India, Sudan, and the United States. Central to her narrative is the instability of memory and life writing, as she recounts her experiences across multiple geo-temporalities of trauma. The second edition introduces Alexander’s account of racial violence in post-9/11 New York, which, as she writes, triggered her repressed childhood memories of sexual abuse by her beloved maternal grandfather. In revising her earlier nostalgic portrayal of her grandparents’ home — transformed into a site of violence in the revised edition — Alexander reflects that she “had written a memoir that was not true” (241). I examine Alexander’s depiction of this fraught relationship between trauma, memory, and self-representation, particularly in relation to the shifting landscape and politics of third world women’s life writing in the west. I contend that Alexander’s foregrounding of the contingency and non-linearity of trauma writing — enacted through her self-reflexive, fragmentary, and layered narrative — destabilizes the figure of the third world woman as “native informant” or “authentic insider” within what I call the “neo-Orientalist memoir-industrial complex.” In particular, I argue that Alexander’s non-linear trauma aesthetics highlight the interconnected structural violence experienced by third world women in both the global South and the global North, and in turn, produce alternative imaginaries of decolonial feminist homes that resist the linear teleologies of western colonial, anti-western nationalist, and white feminist narratives.