[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_15

In other words, Jhumpa Lahiri, 2015

Jumpa Lahiri begins this book with a lake vacation. The image of the lake fills the first pages, together with her fear of crossing it: every day, the author follows the perimeter of the water's surface by swimming without ever daring to go to the center, without trying to reach the other shore. Getting to the other side means moving over a dark, unknown mass of water, the bottom of which cannot be seen, but it also means finding yourself alone, far from a safe shore, without knowing whether your strength will be sufficient to reach your goal or to retreat; it means risking drowning.

The lake is the metaphor of the author's relationship with a foreign language, Italian. Learning a different language and living in a stranger context means finding yourself alone in dark and deep waters. But it also means thinking about one's identity; it means asking ourselves what we are part of, who we belong to, who we recognize ourselves in. The creation of the concept of "Nation" has made, and continues to make, millions of people stateless and orphans of belonging. Because those who do not recognize themselves in a single specific root have no home anywhere, it is a wall that cannot be avoided. And Lahiri reminds us: “Those who don’t belong to any specific place can’t return anywhere. Exile and return imply a point of origin, a homeland. I wander the world without a homeland and a true mother tongue, even at my desk. Ultimately, I realized it wasn’t a true exile: far from it. I am exiled even from the definition of exile”. And she also reminds us how unconscious racism continues to mark the furrow of difference because being racist does not just mean siding with a "race" but taking it for granted that the world is divided into "races." Lahiri writes: “In America, although I speak English like a native, although I’m considered an American writer, I meet the same wall but for different reasons. Every so often, because of my name and appearance, someone asks me why I chose to write in English rather than in my native language. Those who meet me for the first time ask me where I’m from. I have to justify my language, even though I know it perfectly. If I don’t speak, even many Americans think I'm a foreigner. [...] I can’t avoid the wall even in India, in Calcutta, in the city of my so-called mother tongue. Almost everyone thinks that I speak only English or scarcely understand Bengali because I was born and grew up outside India. Despite my appearance and Indian name, they speak to me in English. When I answered in Bengali, they expressed the same surprise as certain Italians and Americans. No one, anywhere, assumes that I speak the languages that are a part of me”.