Culture, unlike biology, should allow us to seek liberation from cruel and uncomfortable practices. And instead culture envelops us in a suffocating embrace. ...are cultures discrete or bounded? ...Who defines the boundaries of culture or allows change? Do cultures interpenetrate 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 Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayVijay Prashad, addressing racial tension between Asian-Americans and African-Americans in Los Angeles, argues for a new kind of thinking about the fusion and clash of cultures in America and around the world. Multiculturalism, in general, attempts to preserve and respect diverse native (or divergent) cultures within a unified society, such as the United States. Polyculturalism claims to be “grounded in anti-racism rather than diversity” (xi) and “assumes that people live coherent lives made up of a range of lineages” (xii). The difference is one of perception and practice. While respecting different cultures, polyculturalism does not necessarily embrace the negative aspects associated with each culture (homophobia, sexism, classism, workforce cruelty, racism, etc.). Rather, it discovers and seeks to understand the common threads of culture that run through all heritages. It also claims that racial or cultural purity of any kind is illusory and ultimately divisive. Meena Alexander's memoir about her life, Fault Lines, exemplifies how a person can have many different influences and cultures in a lifetime. The fact that the author struggles with identity and tries to "define a provisional self" (Alexander 196), overwhelmed by feelings of memory and loss of her life, makes a strong case for accepting a polycultural rather than multicultural point of view . His final decision, however, is unclear. Therefore, this essay will instead focus on the process of his creation and self-definition during a lifetime spent on four different continents. A brief sketch of Dr. Alexander's life would be as follows. She was born in Allahabad, Northern India. His maternal grandparents lived in the state of Kerala, in a house in Tiruvella, where he returned part of the year and felt at home. In Meena's early childhood, her father took a job in Khartoum, in the newly independent North African country of Sudan. He lived there with his parents and eventually his younger sisters for most of the year, spending time each year in Tiruvella. As a teenager, Meena graduated from Khartoum University and decided to pursue a PhD. from the University of Nottingham, England. After graduation, she returned to India to her parents' new home in Pune and took a job in Delhi. There she met an American Jew named David Lelyveld, an Indian historian, and within three weeks they decided to marry. The couple went to Paris; during the pregnancy of their first child, Meena had a difficult attack 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 suffocating. He returned to New York and David commuted. Meena and David's second child was born in New York. Today, Meena teaches English at Hunter College in New York City. He speaks Malayalam (the language spoken in the Indian state of 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 years60s and 70s. Furthermore, her educated, landowning Indian family 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 the 1960sKhartoum, her days as a student and first job in 1970s England and Delhi, and her life in New York in the 90s they couldn't be much more different. For example, in Tiruvella there were servants, a five-acre garden and "old 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 within an entirely Christian traditional Indian culture. His days in Khartoum were also bounded by privilege and religious upbringing, but also unstable and redefined by cultural change. . Civil unrest, political movements and reconceptions of feminism marked Meena's days. In fact, before graduating at the age of eighteen, he participated in student protests. In England, Meena lived a typical student life. Yet she encountered a different type of socialization than she was used to: romance. Some men wanted to date her; others, to marry her. The strong passion and individualistic nature of romantic relationships differed greatly from its previous culture, with its arranged marriages and sheltered girls. It is perhaps not surprising that in England he experienced such culture shock that he had a "nervous breakdown" (141). Meanwhile, the secular, urban world of New York life is about as far from its Tiruvella roots as one could 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 crisscrossed by fault lines" (182). His fragmentation is not only "of a broken geography" (2) of his itinerant life thus far, but 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 At the end of the memoir her elderly parents go to live in her mother's family home in Tiruvella. She writes, “In contemporary India, where ancient cultures, hierarchical and exclusive, exist in tension with a rapidly changing society, the place assigned to 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 home if both worlds are closed to her and both make her feel alienated? The fact that Meena has lived in "exile" for much of her life may contribute to her feelings of alienation. Although he spent much of his time in Tiruvella, where his beloved grandfather lived, he never lived there permanently. So, every time he left, he took with him 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 their Kerala roots and always remembering and returning to it. Colonial cultures are often conservative and nostalgic; thus, this familial mini-colonialism may have contributed to Meena's feelings of fragmentation and “fissures.” Moments of Meena's profound alienation are exposed many times in the memoir. The two most significant were her "nervous breakdown" in England and her severe attack of malaria in Paris during her first pregnancy. At the University of Nottingham you could feel it"undone" (141) and for months she was unable to work or even concentrate enough to read. The physical separation from both the India of his childhood and the North Africa of his growth manifested itself in his brain shutting down for a period, perhaps to be able to readjust to his new English environment. Later, while pregnant with her son Adam, she fell ill with a severe case of malaria. The physical, geographic, and cultural changes he was experiencing were enacted by his body's illnesses, which "speak to [his] discrepant 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 near-perfect multicultural banner. It could not be more explicit about its desire to bring together its divisions, to unite its past with its present" (Lee 60). Is multiculturalism – the recognition of the influence of many cultures on her life – what tore her apart? Would a different perspective, that of polyculturalism and the acceptance of cultures not as separate but simply as variations, have given her more peace? There are some clues in the memoirs that indicate this process is perhaps taking place. Meena connects the places of her childhood and early adulthood through geographically divergent metaphors. He sees the colors of a Sudanese dove among the sunlit tiles on a New York morning (165), and compares the beggars in the subway to the poor of his native India. A synthesis begins to occur as Meena slowly adjusts to life in America, but it's not the kind of assimilation Americans usually assume. As he writes: "Ethnicity for people like me arises as a pressure, a violence from within that resists this fracture. It is and is not fictitious. It is based on the unknown that seizes you from behind, in the darkness. At its instead 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 is generated in the perpetual present and will never be fully explained (202) Thus, Meena discovers that her Indianness, her roots in the soil of Kerala, with its cracks in the laterite, will indeed sustain her. She no longer needs to be torn apart by America's multiplicity or frenetic pace and the ethnic fusion of New York, Tiruvella's house becomes his anchor, and "...since it has been so, I am whole and entire. I don't need to think to be. I was a child there, and here I am, and though I cannot find the river that brought me here, yet I am because that was it. And this stubborn, brilliant thing persisted for me. It has been this way for many years." (197) Does this mean that she has a polycultural rather than multicultural bent? Or is it a radical form of multiculturalism, which states that the Indianness in her, in her "dark female body", must be preserved and affirmed above any Americanness he possesses, even if his children grow up in America? to publish through The Feminist Press and publicly examine issues related to ethnic and sexual oppression. Therefore, she found some aspects of America helpful, despite the difficulties of living her "fragmented" life and learning to be a modern Indian woman. America One of the precepts of polyculturalism is the rejection of the (perceived) negative aspects of traditional cultures. Meena embraces it, writing feminist criticism and condemning ethnic and racial oppression in the places where she has lived in India, Africa and the United States. (“The fight for.