Meena Alexander in conversation with Prem Poddar
PP: You've described yourself as a no-nation woman in your last collection The Shock of Arrival, and to talk about location in your case is sometimes difficult, often meaningless. What I´m interested in knowing is: where do you write from? How do you locate yourself—if at all? And how does your writing work—given that location is so intractable, given that you seem to be striving towards borderline identifications?
MA: It is so difficult but it is also terribly important—I'm very aware of it. Writing is a physical act and it is labour and it becomes very important to me, you know, just the immediate location where I´m able to write. I write in all sorts of places: I´ve often written in moving vehicles, I´ve written in the subway for instance… I also write in transit lounges or I write when I´m in between places, because somehow that seems to open up something for me. And yet, at the same time, I think location is terribly important to me, which is perhaps why I spoke about memory today; it´s as if there was a palimpsest of place, layer upon layer.
In a way I try, not consciously perhaps, but I construct what I write in terms of the memories that places bring and the kinds of correspondences or associations that may exist between geographically distant places but which can cohere or fuse together in the imagination which then is attached to a place in the mind—a place that both is and isn´t. For instance that poem called "Passion"—I wrote it in a room in Manhattan by a window on 103rd street and Broadway—I started writing in there, and I wrote some of it in an apartment on the Upper West Side. But as I was writing I was really translating into a totally different scene and the scene was a mud hut on a road in my childhood in Kerala. So the act of writing was also for me an act of translating across zones. But that doesn´t enter into the poem. That is part of what allowed me to make this poem but it doesn´t come into the poem. So in that sense, there is a way in which location for me has… it´s almost as if it has to attain the condition of music because it has to exist in time.