Quote by Meena Alexander: “My mother tongue is the house I carry on my back.”

Language is shelter — it is the place you return to inside yourself when everything external is unfamiliar. For someone who has moved across countries and cultures, the mother tongue is not left behind but carried, like a portable home that goes everywhere you go. It is memory, comfort, and identity in one.

Alexander published Illiterate Heart in 2002, in the aftermath of 9/11, when South Asian and Arab Americans faced new waves of discrimination and questions of belonging became urgent and painful. Her poetry continued to explore the experience of being at home in no single place or language.

Indian-American poet and memoirist, born in Allahabad in 1951 and raised between India, Sudan, and the United States. Her memoir Fault Lines and collections such as Illiterate Heart explore displacement, colonial history, and female selfhood with lyrical depth; she taught at Hunter College for many years.