In my first-year writing for multilingual students class today, we were talking about Jhumpa Lahiri's 2015 article, "Teach Yourself Italian," and about how her passion for Italian led her to decide to move to Italy and, in preparation, to "pledge to read only in Italian." The section of her article about that decision is called "The Renunciation." Lahiri writes,
I consider it an official renunciation. I’m about to become a linguistic pilgrim to Rome. I believe I have to leave behind something familiar, essential.
We talked about the idea of renouncing our native language (in the students' case, to speak only in English). The students weren't very keen to renounce their native languages in order to speak only English. One mentioned that there is pressure from friends and classmates from their home country to speak their common language. Another suggested that because it's more difficult to speak English, to speak only English would result in a great loss of confidence. Also, their native languages are tied to their sense of who they are.
Lahiri's description of what it's like to read in Italian reminds me of what it's sometimes like when I read in Chinese:
I read slowly, painstakingly. With difficulty. Every page seems to have a light covering of mist. The obstacles stimulate me. Every new construction seems a marvel, every unknown word a jewel.
There's both pleasure and pressure in this depiction of reading in another language. You run into obstacles in the form of unfamiliar vocabulary or syntax, but getting past those obstacles seems to launch you forward (toward new obstacles!). If you take the time to work through those obstacles instead of bypassing them (as I admit I sometimes do), you have a feeling of accomplishment, and maybe you learn something new. As Lahiri puts it,
After I finish a book, I’m thrilled. It seems like a feat. I find the process demanding yet satisfying, almost miraculous. I can’t take for granted my ability to accomplish it. I read as I did when I was a girl. Thus, as an adult, as a writer, I rediscover the pleasure of reading.
As we were discussing Lahiri's experience, I asked the students if any of them read in English for pleasure. Some of them shook their heads, others laughed. My guess is that their reading in English is mostly (as a former Tunghai colleague put it) "for pressure" rather than for pleasure. I can understand this feeling. Most of the time when I read in Chinese, it's in order to write something (like that blog post on bookstores in colonial Taiwan), so there's some degree of pressure.
But I wonder if we should (re)define the notion of "reading for pleasure"; after all, Lahiri's depiction of her experience reading in Italian shows that it's a lot of work to read in a language that you're not as strong in. Despite that, she treats the work of reading as pleasurable even if it is demanding (or perhaps because it is demanding).
4 comments:
One wonders how long she has been reading exclusively in Italian and if she has any obligations that would necessitate clear understanding of what she reads. Is she a student with no economic concerns? What level of Italian did she reach before making her commitment? She also has the security of her (global) English ability to fall back on making her commitment less risky than it would be for some.
She's a famous author in English (won the National Humanities Medal in 2014 and the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), so I suppose she could afford to go to Italy to live and "retool." Now she writes in Italian. (In fact, that essay "Teach Yourself Italian" was written in Italian and translated--by someone else!--into English for the New Yorker.)
It sounds like she is privileged in several ways. Good for her, but then one might question the suitability of her advice for the vast majority of regular folks. Like the person who’s child gets a perfect SAT score. Does that make them an expert with advice that is generally applicable?
I think she'd disagree with the idea that her essay was meant to give advice. It's her own personal narrative about her decision to learn Italian, to escape her ambivalent feelings about English (the language in which she has found so much success) and Bengali (her mother tongue--or rather, her mother's tongue). That said, it is a privileged experience. She probably wouldn't have been able to move her family to Italy if she weren't such a successful writer in English. (On the other hand, that success itself took work--another story, perhaps.)
This semester, students are also reading Malcolm X's "Literacy Behind Bars" (part of his autobiography, where he writes about learning to read in prison), Gloria Anzaldua's "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" (where she writes about identity and the languages she speaks), and Suresh Canagarajah's "The Fortunate Traveler" (where he writes as a Sri Lankan professor about academic writing and identity). We'll try to put these literacy narratives in dialogue with each other. Lahiri gives a particular perspective on her own experience that we can put in conversation with the others.
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