Mantle of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting in Meena Alexander’s Fault Lines: A Memoir

Memory plays a key role in the unraveling of past experiences of Life Writings which are inthemselves great literary documents. Generally deemed as the faculty of the mind, memoryencodes, stores and retrieves the information. Memory by its very nature is in past tense andpoints towards absent things and this absence is turned into presence by making consciousattempts in memoirs. The present research paper will analyze the mantle of remembering andforgetting by taking into account both of the versions, 1993 version and revised version of2003 of Fault Lines. This process of retention and forgetting doubly delineates Alexander andin the wake of it, fragments both her ‘self’ and ‘writing’. It presents memory as a process offiltration itself and Alexander seems to make up memories by constantly inventing it as ameans to keep her narrative flowing. How memory presents only a patchy version of past,how the memory of a traumatic event is repressed and how it surfaces again, are some of thekey issues studied in this paper