Meena Alexander, using rhetoric, creates a paradox with stark contrast to underline her ambivalence towards her identity. Conflicted between her present identity and her old identity she has left in India, Alexander portrays each with different and opposing rhetorical devices. She begins with extended metaphors to illustrate her conflictions, comparing her new identity to that of glass; using such words as splintered, shards, and fractured to connotate glass and all of its frailty. She sees herself as many distinct shards, “a mass of faults, a fault mass?”, rather than as a complete and unified person. Yet, when she reflects back on her identity in India, she presents a stark contrast not only in her diction, but in her self identification. Using a contrasting extended metaphor, she compares herself to a flower to accentuate her confliction. As she envisions her life had in India she writes, “I have imagined being a dutiful wife, my life perfect as a bud opening in the cool monsoon winds...to be a bud on a tree, blooming in due season, the tree trunk.” A flower is the opposite of the glass aforementioned; it is strong in its root not fragile, it is beautiful not plain, it is whole not shattered, alive not inanimate. Through the stark juxtaposition she illustrates her divided identity.
