It is not uncommon to have doubts within oneself in regard to self-worth. Especially in the society in which Meena Alexander grew up, feeling a secure sense of belonging contributes heavily towards an individual’s perception of their own identity. However, during her life, she was never able to attach herself to a home, having moved multiple times. Through her autobiography, “Fault Lines,” Meena Alexander stretches to exclaim that she is lost within herself. She details her struggles of moving cities often and questions her own worth to self-reflect, ultimately concluding that it is okay to feel lost and alone within oneself. Primarily, Meena Alexander uses loaded diction to accentuate emotional responses from the audience in representation of her fractured identity. She puts emphasis on her own experiences using titanic words as an act of self-reflection. Alexander states, “That’s all I am, a woman who has been cracked by multiple migrations. Uprooted so many times she can connect with nothing.” Alexander gets the point across that she feels no sense of self nor a connection to anything at all. She feels lost to the extent that her confidence is cracked and left without a true identity. “Everything I think of is filled with ghosts.” While displaying her feelings of …show more content…
These are used specifically to show how she constantly questions herself and does not know the answers to her own questions. “What would it mean for one such as I to pick up a mirror and try to see her face in it?” Meena Alexander represents her fractured identity through internal conflict, being lost within herself versus wanting to be somebody. She makes it apparent that she does not know who she is, and she cannot see herself straight, “What might it mean to look at myself straight, see myself?” Alexander explores her fractured identity by asking these rhetorical questions in attempts to learn more about
Meena Alexander through her diasporic writings and experiences exemplifies that diaspora, displacement or dislocation essentially stems from a sense of loss of identity, an intrinsic need to find one’s ‘self’, one’s roots in a land that is basically alien but where one needs to establish oneself and treat as one’s own. The discussed introductory chapter briefly introspects the diaspora and the diasporic experiences of the people in the diaspora, their reaction to its changing meanings, and the