Response to Ap-Style Prompt on Meena Alexander’s “Fault Lines” Essay Example

that Alexander presents of "mango trees fruit[ing] in the rough asphalt of upper Broadway" accurately illustrates her conflict.

The blossoming tree represents the life that would have been here in India and the asphalt of upper Broadway her present home. The almost impossibility of this event - a tropical tree flourishing in the middle of New York - emphasizes Alexander's knowledge that her old life and actual life can never be reconciled. The image of "selves jammed into my skin, multiple beings locked into the journeys of one body" further illustrate her conflicting feelings . She has various "selves," all of who want different things from life. Unfortunately, she has only one life to live and must decide among her onflicting emotions and choose the path that she will take. The words "jammed into my skin" also show how painful the subject is for Alexander. Alexander's use of rhetorical questions and parallel structure also enhance her story "And what ... " in lines 19 and again in 26 introduce parallel paragraphs, the first explains her geographic uprooting, with a list of hometowns, and the second shows her cultural fracturing, with a list of languages she knows. "Odd shards" of these cultures survive in her mind but she cannot unify them into a pleasing whole.

Rhetorical questions like "What could I ever be but a mass of faults, a fault mass? " She that Alexander is uncertain about the decisions she has made and the ones that she must make in the future. She has "trembling hands" that cannot guide her to happiness. Alexander's account of her self examination ends without resolve - she

allows her mind to "slip ... back into the darkness, [to] the shelter of memory. " She is unable to resolve her problem and is not strong enough to confront it for very long. Thus ends the personal struggle of a woman torn between past and present, haunted by many selves.