Mantle of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting in Meena Alexander’s Fault Lines: A Memoir

Abstract

Memory plays a key role in the unraveling of past experiences of Life Writings which are in
themselves great literary documents. Generally deemed as the faculty of the mind, memory
encodes, stores and retrieves the information. Memory by its very nature is in past tense and
points towards absent things and this absence is turned into presence by making conscious
attempts in memoirs. The present research paper will analyze the mantle of remembering and
forgetting by taking into account both of the versions, 1993 version and revised version of
2003 of Fault Lines. This process of retention and forgetting doubly delineates Alexander and
in the wake of it, fragments both her ‘self’ and ‘writing’. It presents memory as a process of
filtration itself and Alexander seems to make up memories by constantly inventing it as a
means to keep her narrative flowing. How memory presents only a patchy version of past,
how the memory of a traumatic event is repressed and how it surfaces again, are some of the
key issues studied in this paper.