Never felt safe anywhere: Jhumpa Lahiri on not belonging, otherness of languages and idea of home

For the Pulitzer Prize-winner who was born in the UK to Bengali parents, grew up in the US and now resides in Rome home could be a library, all tongues are foreign, and being an immigrant has remained a constant in her life.

The stories and characters of Jhumpa Lahiri have constantly longed for a place to belong, never fully at home, surviving through the struggles of displacement, but it has never been her quest to belong anywhere. At a press conference at the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre on Friday, the British-American author spoke at length on subjects that have remained central to her life and stories. For the Pulitzer Prize-winner – who was born in the UK to Bengali parents, grew up in the US and now resides in Rome – home could be a library, all tongues are foreign, and being an immigrant has remained a constant in her life. An immigrant all her life, Lahiri said the current global situation regarding immigration is ''terrible and frightening'' but not something that is new to her. ''The fact of being an immigrant has been a constant in my life. I've never not been that... What's going on right now (regarding immigration in the world) is alarming, it's terrible and frightening. It seems to be a moment of going backwards. But there's nothing new to me. I've never felt safe in any place in the world, fully,'' the ''Interpreter of Maladies'' author said. Lahiri, 58, said she never felt that her family had the full right to be anywhere in the world. ''I've always felt the eyes of people on us, on me, my parents, looking at us strangely, wondering, questioning what we were doing there. In the United States, our presence was politely and sometimes not so politely accepted. So even from a young age, I was aware that we were both welcomed but not fully embraced by the community we lived in,'' she said. The author's first book, ''Interpreter of Maladies'', received critical reception in 1999 and a number of distinguished literary awards, including PEN/Hemingway Award, The New Yorker's Best Debut, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In the collection of short stories, Lahiri explored themes that had been untouched or unspoken about until then by the Indian diaspora, including the struggle to express emotions, loneliness, strained marriages, and cultural displacement, themes that have appeared frequently in her later works. Growing up as an introverted child, Lahiri would often seek solace in books, libraries, and the love of her parents and friends, even as open conversations on emotions were virtually missing from their lives. Even when the children of migrant families were ''forced to socialise'', they wouldn't talk about the upset caused by a teacher who couldn't pronounce their names, or when people moved away when they opened their lunchboxes. ''These kinds of things that were clearly, like troubling us on the inside but we never talked it because I think to talk about it would make it real and to make it real would make it more painful so there was just a lot of denial and repression of all of these sort of troubling matters,'' the 58-year-old said. Lahiri, who spoke Bengali at home, admitted that the ''deep drive to conform'' made her conscious of the language and she would expect her parents to keep their voices down. ''I was never proud of it (Bengali) and that really pains me to admit but I can't say, 'oh, yeah, I was really proud'. I know I wasn't, I would say to my parents, 'can you just keep your voices down', because maybe my friends will think it's a little weird that you're speaking this other language,'' she said. Lahiri, who knows Bengali, English, French, Latin, Italian, and ''a little bit of Russian'', lays ''no claim over any languages'' as all of them have been foreign to her. ''I have always seen languages as foreign. I have no mother tongue. I don't call anything my language, I never have. I always felt on the outside of all languages,'' she said. The author also warned against the danger of certain powerful languages threatening minor languages and encouraged new writers to learn other languages as a ''radical way of crossing boundaries'' and ''resist the monolingual centre of gravity''. ''And if you happen to be raised in a monolingual reality, fight against it, learn other languages, cultivate other languages. Think about what it means to translate, to be translated,'' she said. Lahiri noted that one has to be very vigilant against the ''linguistic tsunami'' of English that is ''diminishing linguistic specificity'', while adding that language as ''a nationalistic project is very dangerous''. ''And we must be vigilant to not only be aware, but actively resist these projects of intertwining language and the nation state in the project of nationality,'' the ''The Namesake'' author said. Since moving to Rome, Italy, in 2012, Lahiri has embedded herself in the language – writing in it and translating works - and it has liberated her from the notion that everyone should belong somewhere. ''If you ask me what belonging means to me, I certainly don't need to belong to any place. Though I'm attached to certain places, absolutely. But I think this notion of the quest for belonging is not my quest. So I have no quest to belong to a place, to a language, to any kind of identity,'' she said. Since she moved to Italy, Lahiri has authored ''Dove mi Trovo'' and ''Racconti romani'' in Italian, later translated to English as ''Whereabouts'' and ''Roman Stories'', respectively. Currently, Lahiri is translating 8th century Roman poet Ovid's ''Metamorphoses'' in English and another work in Italian.

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