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Contemporary Women's Writing 2007 1(1-2):54-58; doi:10.1093/cww/vpm010
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Writing Space

Meena Alexander

City University of New York, USA malexander@gc.cuny.edu

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.


   Migrant Poetics
 
But thought in reality spaces itself out into the world.

Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1997: 1)

A migrant life lived through continents, across waterways and islands, creates the space where I write – a space that infolds memory, marking whorl upon whorl of time, mutating palimpsest I have learnt to reckon with.

I write in solitude, using the materials of a shared life: pathways of sky and soil and water.

I write on paper pages, or in fitful electronic flashes that appear on a screen, or occasionally with a sharp stick on soil, just as I used to do as a child.

Like many others I cross as best I can ordinary streets filled with the rumour of war, airports decked out with barbed wire, underground places threatened by sudden explosion.

This day to day life is scored by the burden of discrepant nationalisms, fevered ethnicities. But it is . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Crossing the Indian Ocean
 

   Threshold City
 

   In Time
 

   Island City
 

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