The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience

In the last fifty years, since India's independence from England in 1947, the writings of the Indian diaspora have proliferated and are now a popular focus of literary studies. Along with such acclaimed authors as Salman Rushdie and Bharati Mukherjee, Meena Alexander is a prolific, postcolonial author who has written two novels (Nampally Road and Manhattan Music), several books of poetry (I Root My Name, River and Bridge, and Night-Scene, The Garden, to name a few), an autobiography (Fault Lines), and several scholarly publications, all of which have earned critical praise. The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience, a collection of prose and poetry and a combination of the real and imaginary, is one of her recent works. With The Shock of Arrival, Alexander, who has lived in India, Sudan, England, and the United States, offers a poetic expression of postcolonial aftermaths and the diasporic experience, a revision of memory and history, and a perceptive examination of women's writing and contemporary Asian American art. The Shock of Arrival is Alexander's second work that combines poetry and prose. The first, of a Thousand (1988), deals with similar immigrant themes, but the highlight of the earlier book is Alexander's rendering of her maternal grandmother's poignant letters to Alexander's grandfather. While the House of Thousand Doors alludes to Alexander's ancestral home and familial heritage, the volume is also Alexander's preliminary look at the diasporic experience. In a later work, Fault Lines, Alexander explains how her ancestral home, with its teak and brass fixtures, was torn down to construct a new residence with modern conveniences. In many ways, Alexander does her own rebuilding, though of the literary type, in The Shock of Arrival, which focuses on writing, relocation, and habitation in the United States.