Home and Exile: A Postcolonial Study of Meena Alexander’s Fault Lines

Meena Alexander’s Fault Lines (1993) is a seminal work of autobiographical literature that embodies the complexities of home, exile, and identity within a postcolonial framework. This research paper examines Fault Lines as a narrative that captures the fractured self of a postcolonial subject shaped by geographical dislocations, cultural hybridity, and gendered experiences of trauma. Through a postcolonial lens, the study explores how the concepts of home and exile are interwoven in the narrative, with particular emphasis on memory, language, identity, and the politics of place. Alexander’s search for home in Fault Lines is not a quest for geographical stability but an effort to reimagine belonging in a diasporic world. Her memoir reveals the impossibility of a singular, rooted identity and instead offers a fluid, transnational self shaped by memory and resistance.