Culture, unlike biology, should allow us to free ourselves from cruel and uncomfortable practices. But culture wraps us in a suffocating embrace. ...are the crops discrete or limited? ...Who defines the boundaries of culture or enables change? Do cultures infiltrate each other? Can a person from one culture criticize another culture? (Prashad xi)Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on 'Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned'?Get Original Essay Vijay Prashad, Addressing Racial Tension Between Asian Americans and African Americans in Los Angeles, Makes the Case of a new type of reflection on the fusion and clash of cultures in America and the rest of the world. Multiculturalism, broadly defined, attempts to preserve and respect different original (or divergent) cultures within a unified society, such as the United States. Polyculturalism claims that it is “based on anti-racism rather than diversity” (xi) and “assumes that people live coherent lives composed of a multitude of lineages” (xii). The difference is a matter of perception and practice. While respecting different cultures, polyculturalism does not necessarily embrace the negative aspects associated with each culture (homophobia, sexism, classism, cruelty at work, racism, etc.). On the contrary, it discovers and seeks to understand the common threads of culture that run through all heritages. It also asserts that racial or cultural purity of any kind is illusory and ultimately divisive. Meena Alexander's memoir about her own life, Fault Lines, illustrates how one person can have many different influences and cultures over the course of a lifetime. The fact that the author struggles with her identity and attempts to "map a provisional self" (Alexander 196), overcome by feelings of memory and loss in her own life, argues strongly in favor of accepting a point from a polycultural rather than a multicultural point of view. His final decision, however, is unclear. Thus, this essay will instead focus on the process of creating and defining oneself over a life spent on four different continents. A brief overview of Dr. Alexander's life would read as follows. She was born in Allahabad, northern India. Her maternal grandparents lived in the state of Kerala, in a house in Tiruvella, where she returned for part of the year and felt at home. In Meena's early childhood, her father accepted a position in Khartoum, in the newly independent North African country of Sudan. She lived there with her parents and eventually her younger sisters for most of the year, spending time each year in Tiruvella. As a teenager, Meena graduated from the University of Khartoum and decided to pursue a doctorate. from the University of Nottingham, England. After graduating, she returned to India to her parents' new home in Pune and found a job in Delhi. There she met an American Jew named David Lelyveld, an Indian historian, and three weeks later they decided to marry. The couple went to Paris; During her pregnancy with their first child, Meena had a difficult bout of malaria. They came to New York, where Meena met her husband's family, and the couple and their son tried to live together in Minnesota, where David worked. Meena found Minnesota stifling. She returned to New York and David commuted. Meena and David's second child was born in New York. Today, Meena is an English professor at Hunter College in New York. She speaks Malayalam (the language spoken in the Indian stateof Kerala), Hindi, Arabic, French and English. The facts alone are fascinating. Significant parts of this woman's life were lived on four different continents, in very different cultures – and much of it during the volatile 1960s and 1970s. Additionally, her Indian family of educated people and landowners raised her in a culture of privilege and conservatism. The difference between Meena's childhood in Tiruvella in the 1950s and her adolescence in the rapidly changing culture of 1960s Khartoum, her years as a student and first job in 1970s England and Delhi, and her life in New York in the 1990s couldn't be much more different. For example, in Tiruvella there were servants, a five-acre garden, and “an ancient religious center, seminary, cemeteries, and churches of the Syrian Church of Mar Thoma” (Alexander 7). The Syrian Christian Church was a source of great pride and inspiration for her grandparents and parents, and Meena grew up in a traditional Indian culture that was entirely Christian. His days in Khartoum were also limited by privilege and religious upbringing, but also disrupted and redefined by cultural change. . Civil unrest, political movements and reconceptions of feminism punctuated Meena's days. In fact, before she graduated from college at eighteen, she participated in student protests. In England, Meena lived a typical student life. Yet she encountered a different type of socialization than she was accustomed to: romance. Some men wanted to date her; others, to marry him. The strong passion and individualistic nature of love affairs differed markedly from its ancient culture, with its arranged marriages and sheltered daughters. Unsurprisingly, in England she experienced such cultural shock that she had a “nervous breakdown” (141). Meanwhile, the secular, urban world of New York life is as far removed from its Tiruvella roots as one can imagine. There, Meena is a minority rather than a member of a privileged class. Furthermore, her ethnicity and femininity make her feel that “in Manhattan, I am a cracked thing, a body crossed with fault lines” (182). His fragmentation is not only "of a broken geography"(2) of his itinerant life thus far, but it is in his soul. She doesn't feel at home in New York, but she also doesn't feel completely at home in India, where her elderly parents go to live in her mother's family home in Tiruvella at the end of the memoir. She writes: “In contemporary India, where ancient, hierarchical and exclusive cultures exist in tension with a rapidly changing society, the place prescribed for women becomes a fault line, a site of potential rupture” (Truth Tales 11 ). Likewise, she asks her adopted country, “What does it mean to be non-white in America?” ”, where she can be insulted with a racial and sexual epithet while walking down a Minneapolis street with her infant son (Alexander 169). Where is she at home if both worlds are closed to her and both make her feel alienated? The fact that Meena has lived in “exile” for most of her life may contribute to her feelings of alienation. Although she spent much of her time in Tiruvella, where her beloved grandfather lived, she never lived there permanently. So, every time she left, she took with her the feeling of exile. In a sense, Meena's family was a small colony of Tiruvella living in Allahabad, Khartoum, and then Pune, always far from her Kerala roots and always remembering them and therereturning. Colonial cultures are often conservative and nostalgic; thus, this mini-familial colonialism may have contributed to Meena's feelings of fragmentation and "cracks." Repeatedly in the memoir, moments of Meena's deep alienation are exposed. The two most notable were her “nervous breakdown” in England and her serious attack of malaria in Paris during her first pregnancy. At the University of Nottingham, she felt "untangled" (141) and for months she was unable to work or even concentrate enough to read. The physical separation from the India of her childhood and the North Africa of her childhood manifested itself in the shutting down of her brain for a period of time, perhaps so she could readjust to her new English surroundings . Later, while pregnant with her son Adam, she contracted a severe case of malaria. The physical, geographic, and cultural changes she experienced were influenced by the illnesses of her body, which “expressed her divergent otherness.” There seems to be no home for her, no place where she can be Indian, be a woman, or even be American. In the words of A. Robert Lee, the memoir thus “bears the almost perfect multicultural badge. She could not be more explicit about her desire to see her own divisions bridged, to join her past to her present” (Lee 60). But was it multiculturalism – the recognition of the influence of many cultures on one's own life – that tore her apart? Would a different perspective, that of polyculturalism and the acceptance of cultures as being not separate but simply variations, have brought him more peace? There are some clues in the memoir that suggest this process may be happening. Meena connects the locations of her childhood and young adulthood through geographically divergent metaphors. She sees the colors of a Sudanese dove on the sunlit tiles of a New York morning (165), and she compares the beggars of the subway to the poor of her native India. A synthesis begins to occur as Meena slowly adapts to life in America, but it is not the kind of assimilation that Americans usually assume. As she writes: “Ethnicity for those that I am is born as a pressure, an inner violence which resists such a fracture. It is and is not fictional. It relies on the stranger grabbing you from behind, in the darkness. of hierarchy, authority and decorum that I learned as an Indian woman, instead of purity and pollution, right hand for this, left hand for that, we have an ethnicity that reproduces in the perpetual present and will never be fully stated. (202)Thus, Meena discovers that her Indianness, her roots in the soil of Kerala, with its cracks in the laterite, will indeed support her. She no longer needs to be torn apart by the multiplicity of America or the frenetic pace. and the ethnic fusion of New York. Thus, Tiruvella's house becomes her anchor, and "...because it was, I am whole and whole. I don't need to think to be. I was a child there- down, and here I am, and even though I can't find the river that brought me here, yet I am because it was And this stubborn, brilliant thing persisted for me. what has been happening for so many years” (197) Does this mean that it has a polycultural rather than a multicultural bent, or is it a radical form of multiculturalism, which asserts that? Indianness in her, her "dark woman's body", must be preserved and affirmed above any Americanness she possesses - even if her children will grow up in America Meena's book is too complex?.