Bibliography
Cheung, King-Kok. Introduction. Seventeen Syllables
and Other Stories. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1998.
Cheung, King-Kok, and Stan Yogi. Asian American
Literature: An Annotated Bibliography. New York:
Modern Language Association, 1988.
Yamamoto [DeSoto], Hisaye. Seventeen Syllables
and Other Stories. Latham, N.Y.: Kitchen Table—
Women of Color Press, 1988.
Anne N. Thalheimer
Shock of Arrival, The
Meena Alexander (1996)
The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial
Experience is a collection of prose and poetry that
rise out of various moments in the author’s life.
MEENA ALEXANDER takes her readers on a journey
through her childhood in India to her life as an
immigrant in America, highlighting the “shock
of arrival” that accompanied such a journey. As a
way of illustrating the experiences that influenced
her life and writing, she depicts physical, mental,
and emotional tearing that she went through as
she moved from one continent to the other. Ac-
cording to Alexander, postcolonial experiences are
much different and more painful for women, who
are considered the carriers of culture and values.
She writes that “the shock of arrival is multifold—
what was borne in the mind is jarred, tossed into
new shapes, an exciting exfoliation of sense.” Alex-
ander records how she lost her language, Malay-
alam, while she picked up other languages as she
migrated from one place to another.
The book is divided into several sections: “Over-
ture,” “Piecemeal Shelters,” “Translating Violence,”
“Making Up Memory,” “Skin with Fire Inside: In-
dian Women Writers,” and “Coda.” Each section
comprises prose as well as poetry. Mostly inde-
pendent from one another, the sections deal with
the themes of diaspora, culture, identity, hybridity,
language, dislocation, and relocation. In “Piece-
meal Shelters,” she writes about her act of writing,
which is “more or less governed by the strictures
of colonialism”: She notes that even in the era of
decolonization, her memory is marked by the im-
pact of colonialism. In “Making Up Memory,” she
illustrates her experiences as a woman of color in
America; in the section titled “Skin with Fire Inside,”
she recalls Indian women writers such as Sarojini
Naidu, Nalapat Balamaniamma, and Lalithambika
Antherjanam. Alexander speaks at length about the
idea of “home” and the sense of homelessness that
she feels in America. She battles emotionally and
psychologically to settle in a new home where she
has to deal with racism and alienation. The com-
bination of fictional and nonfictional works in the
book brilliantly depicts the challenges faced by an
immigrant. In her words, the sections “braid to-
gether difficult truths of body and language.”
The Shock of Arrival has been received with
great enthusiasm in postcolonial literary circles. It
has received accolades from writers such as Homi
Bhabha, Adrienne Rich, and Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak.Bibliography
Alexander, Meena. The Shock of Arrival: Reflections of
Postcolonial Experience. Boston: South End Press,
1996.
Malieckal, Bindu. Review of The Shock of Arrival:
Reflections of Postcolonial Experience. MELUS 24
(1990): 192.
Shankar, Lavina Dhingra. “Postcolonial Diasporics
‘Writing in Search of a Homeland’: Meena Alex-
ander’s Manhattan Music, Fault Lines, and The
Shock of Arrival.” Literature Interpretation Theory
12, no. 2 (2001): 285–312.
Asma SayedSidhwa, Bapsi (1938– )
Set in both Pakistan, her native country, and the
United States, her adopted country, Bapsi Sidhwa’s
novels and stories explore the cultural constraints
that make it difficult for South Asian women to lead
satisfying lives. More specifically, Sidhwa focuses on
the Parsi minority, the contemporary adherents to
the Zoroastrian faith. In effect, she emphasizes the
experiences of a largely disenfranchised segment of
an already marginalized community.Sidhwa, Bapsi 267