Jhumpa Lahiri and the Grammar of a Multi-Layered Identity

ABSTRACT

Recipient of the most prestigious awards, including the 2000’s Pulitzer Prize for the collection of short stories Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri chose to leave the US, moving with her family to Rome. This voluntary exile has led to another, just as voluntary, namely a linguistic exile. In 2015 Jhumpa Lahiri in fact published her first book written entirely in Italian, In Altre Parole. This paper demonstrates how the choice to abandon the English language has represented, for this US writer of Bengali descent, the unavoidable culmination of an identitarian journey. A deep and complex journey that has gone inescapably through language and fiction, if it is true to say that language is for her the only means to express the inner speech, while fiction represents the foreign land of her choosing, the place where she strives to convey and preserve the meaningful. The linguistic exile therefore does not constitute a kind of alienation, nor an estrangement. Rather it becomes a sort of existential state, a form of multi-layered identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity
• hybridity
• migrant Italian literature
• postcolonial literature
• travel writing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Silvia Lutzoni is a researcher of Literary Criticism and Comparative Literature Literary in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Sassari, Italy. She focuses on colonial and postcolonial literatures, literary criticism and travel writing. She has worked extensively on Edward Said, studying the reception of his books in the Arab world and, in particular, the response to his concept of Orientalism within contemporary Arab literature. Among her books are: La critica come critica della vita (Donzelli 2015), Una Sardegna tutta per sé (Settecittà 2012), L'oriente allo specchio (Settecittà 2012).

ORCID

Silvia Lutzoni http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3137-4059

Notes

1. I am referring especially to Yaeger (2007). This obituary seemed willing to pronounce the dissolution of postcolonial theory both in its Anglophone and in its French characterisation.