The Margins Excerpts Reprint of Meena Alexander's Memoir, Fault Lines

Last week, the Feminist Press released a new edition of Meena Alexander's Fault Lines to commemorate the two-year-anniversary of her death. The memoir, excerpted at The Margins, features a new afterword by Guyanese-American writer Gaiutra Bahadur, who writes: "The house that Meena envisioned, her house full of women, required no permissions. Yet her entire body of work gives permission. That house is packed with guests, women living and gone, each sworn to the 'disclosures that a writing life commits one to.'" 

From the excerpt, "Stone-Eating Girl":

Now there was mud on my skirt and on Chinna’s chatta from that car wheel, and now the tiny malnourished children of the cobbler who lived by the train tracks were forced to crouch in the dirt to avoid the speeding vehicle. When the black car was well out of sight, and we had pulled ourselves forward and moved on to the garlic seller, Chinna, patting down her garments, expressed her approval of Vatsala’s posture: “Such a good girl, now you should be like that, Mol,” but having spoken out in this way, her own skepticism got the better of her thoughts, and she turned back to the stone-eating girl. “She’ll never be a shameless thing like that one out there!” Chinna stabbed her thumb in the direction of the stone-eating girl.

Read on at The Margins.