Meena Alexander, voice of exile | Sophie d’Aubreby, Sarah Voke & Yasmine Yahiatène

Reading and meeting around the work of Meena Alexander, a major voice in the literatures of exile, multiple identities (one might speak in her case of thresholds) and trauma, in the presence of Sarah Voke and Sophie d’Aubreby, who each translate a part of her work. Meena Alexander was born in 1951 in India and is the author of a rich body of work, between poetry and literary essays. An important poetic figure of transatlantic poetry from the 1980s until her death in 2018, this event will be an opportunity to discover her for the first time in French, with previously unpublished translations of her memoirs and her last two collections of poems. Readings will punctuate a dialogue between Sarah Voke, who teaches at the university Savoie Mont Blanc de Chambéry and translates her memoirs, and Sophie d’Aubreby, who translates her poetry. Sarah Voke is a professor of Anglophone literature at Université de Chambéry and Sophie d’Aubreby is an author. Both work on the translation of the works of Meena Alexander, and they will read unpublished excerpts of them with the actress Yasmine Yahiatène. The writing of Meena Alexander is part of a rich weaving of affiliations to literary and intellectual traditions from very diverse horizons. This immense plurality echoes her own life journey, shaped by the crossing of geographical, linguistic, and cultural borders, and her desire to anchor her writing in a broader corpus, and to find a place in the world that surrounds her. Her reflection aligns in many respects with postcolonial studies, notably through her interest in colonial history, the notions of identity and otherness, power relations, the relationship to language, and cultural mixing. She thus draws inspiration from the writings of theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, and Edouard Glissant, as well as writers from various postcolonial spaces, among them Salman Rushdie from India, V.S. Naipaul de Trinit from Trinidad and Tobago, Derek Walcott de Sainte from Saint Lucia, Tahar Ben Jelloun du Maroc, Wole Soyinka du Nigéria, Ngugi wa Thiong’o from Kenya, Tayib Salih du Soudan, and also Aliffa Riffat and Nawal el Sadaawi from Egypt. She also relates to the Asian-American Literature movement in the United States, which brings together writers and artists troubled, like her, by dual belongings, such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (Dictee, 1982), and Zarina Hashmi. Without forgetting the major role of feminist poets and theorists, particularly American ones, such as Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Gloria Anzaldua, but also Indian poets engaged in the struggles for independence and women's rights such as Sarojini Naidi, Kamala Das, Eunice de Sousa, Toru Dutt, Lalithambika Antherjanam, or even Assia Djebar from Algeria. The voice of Meena Alexander thus bears the traces of these multiple filiations and sources of inspiration. It feeds on plural literary, cultural, and intellectual heritages, which she constantly brings into relation, making this multiplicity one of the foundations of her writing. LAST COLORS In another country, in a tent at the foot of a tree, A child places a sheet of paper on a stone, Chooses a pencil, draws a woman with a scarlet face, Arms outstretched, body hurled into the blue. (Hashsha—to strike a tree until its leaves fall to the ground) The child draws an armored vehicle, weapons protruding from it Purple flames, orange and yellow strikes, A box of colored pencils, a shack restored to its splendor. (Yatima—to be an orphan, intransitive verb.) The child draws what is common and within reach Not what is far—not the phantom house In Khartoum where his father lies Ears and hands severed. (Idhash-shamsukwwirat—thus the sun is overthrown.) Meena Alexander Traduction unpublished by Sophie d'Aubreby