Minae Mizumura was born speaking Japanese, adopted English upon moving to America, studied French diligently at the Sorbonne and Yale, then in adulthood, returned to Japan to become a novelist in her native tongue. Jhumpa Lahiri was born speaking Bengali, quickly gained fluency and rose to literary prominence in English, then in the mid-nineties, fell in love with the Italian language, and began a prolific transfiguration of translating and writing Italian texts. In this following essay, Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan discusses these two accomplished writers in the varying, intriguing ways they’ve travelled through the realm of language, and how the possibilities of exile provide for a rediscovery of selfhood.
The art of self-introduction is a practice in brevity and precision. When I lived in China, I was Xiao Yue—yue as in moon. When my family moved to Canada, I became but you can call me Shelly. Later, when I carved a home-like enclave for myself in Japan, I learned the concise method of mental hyphenation: Shelly-Chinese-Canadian. Such is the way I moved through the world, always in dialogue with its perceptions. The self is not a distinct article of qualities, but a myriad web of associations—one spends a life following its appendix.
When an individual’s place in the world is rendered fluid by border-crossings and trans-oceanic migrations, it serves to learn that identity is not an indefatigable statement of presence, but a tenuous and mutable clay. Names, meant to be cemented by the fact of birth, become vulnerable to the phonetic insistences of other tongues. Language, the intact system by which to categorise the world, becomes scattered and dismembered with interruptions, contrarian rules, and adversarial vocabularies. One learns to see the multiplicities innate in all things—the layers of presence dispersed across the world, evoked by the differences in seeing. What you call that I call mine.
“‘My name is Minae’: how many times did I say this and then feel my mind go blank?” In Minae Mizumura’s novelised autobiography, An I-Novel, she peruses the same delicate network of memories, beliefs, and influences to reach herself. The three-hundred-some pages are held within the bookends of one day and night, perched on the structural lattice of phone calls with her sister, Nanae. The two sisters behold each other in both the comfort of familial intimacy and the strangeness of difference, made bolder by the contrast of similarity. Nanae, accustomed to American patterns, has settled into a life—however precarious—defined by an apartness from Japan, a homeland resigned to being occasionally ached for and remembered. Minae, however, spends the duration of this long, diaphanous day gathering pockets of assurances and assertions so that she may get up the courage to tell her sister about her decision to return to Japan—and their first language—to become a novelist.
The pull that Minae feels towards her birth country has everything to do with a knowledge that she has the power to excavate something profound and secret in the earth of Japanese language, a richness that the stone facade of English does not betray—“. . . the act of writing in Japanese transformed me to someone with knowledge of a rarefied world conveyed through the mix of different writing systems, knowledge inaccessible through English.” The lilting elegance of hiragana enchants her—writing its sweeping shapes embroiders her into the brocade of The Tale of Genji, calling towards a graceful world of balance, beauty, and softness. Even the repetitive, metronomic nature of learning kanji beholds an element of magic, displacing her into the transcendent history of the characters: “I felt like a monk in a temple, his body freezing in the bitter cold of winter, copying a sutra by candlelight.” Language—even beyond its purposes of notation and definition—is a gateway, a stage upon which the fantasies of self may spiral in its complex, infinite choreography.
What Mizumura speaks of when calling upon the experiences of young Minae is something that many Asian-Americans today are also investigating—the process of negotiating an authentic self between the automating processes of assimilation and the unmistakable partitions of cultural belonging. Rejecting the assignment of “model minority” to interrogate the politics of self-negation, cultural estrangement, and not-quite belonging, the Asian diaspora is seeking to rebuild what has been degraded by decades of sidelining, marginalisation, and belittlement. To wear again proudly the names that were ostracised for their unpronounceable strangeness; to reclaim cuisines, fashions, artworks; to sink back into the language that raised them, that—whether kept or neglected—still promises to tell them something about themselves.
Language is how the world is given to us. It places the world in a schematic, explaining its housed objects, their relationships to one another, and how we stand in the middle of it as thinking beings. When one is set apart from this essential function of language—when language is a cold, frugal stranger—the solid foundations that keep us in the centre dissolve, and we are placed instead in the outer realms. We fail to identify our place. Some will become enamoured, even enlightened by this segregation; Pico Iyer, having lived in Japan for decades, enthralls himself with the music of not-knowing. Others, like Mizumura, are radically unmoored, disturbed by the barriers that must be trespassed to return to the state of accessible knowledge; “Not for one minute did I ever feel roused to improve my standing in the world of English.” In a somewhat jarring rejection of the American language, she instead studies French.
The finding of a home inside the topographies of language is something that seems quite writerly, but is generally quintessential to the immigrant experience. With its mirroring capacities, we seek within language the stable perceptions of identification; we are looking for the words to pronounce ourselves. Away from the anecdotal quips of introduction, which serve to settle our standing in another’s eyes, we search for the full efflorescence of what would describe us, in the same way we would describe ourselves in our own language. This is where so often the designations of Japanese—or Chinese—or Asian-American—simply fail. In her writings, Mizumura exudes a familiar disappointment that many in America were easily satisfied with such an introduction; the smallness of these words—how they speak to a sequestered, briefly noted state of being—is wearying. The passionate devotion to one’s native language is easily laid bare, this way; why wouldn’t one want to live inside a language that understood a single, ethnic adjective to be inadequate? Why wouldn’t you choose to inhabit a vast nation of words, one that was better prepared to see you as you were?
Minae Mizumura became the novelist that the young woman of An I-Novel agonised over being. Shishōsetsu from left to right—its original title, was published in 1995, churning up a great deal of publicity for not only its horizontal layout (contrary to the vertical printing of Japanese novels) but also its abundant inclusion of English words—printed not in the foreign-adoptive katakana script, but in English. Nanae and Minae, typical of first-generation immigrants, speak in a casual cocktail of Japanese and English, and the manuscript reflects that dynamic juxtaposition with faithful typographic rendering. There, Mizumura seems to say with this, these words have their space in their language. That words are knowing inhabitants of their own context, and are able to resound in their full potentialities there. This is of course dampened in the English translation, which is nevertheless ingeniously undertaken by Juliet Winters Carpenter, who manages to elicit a semblance of the original through the clever alternation of typefaces.
Yet, after the great return of Mizumura to Japan, it must be said that home is not always a place by which to come from, but also a place one arrives in discovery. In 2015, Jhumpa Lahiri, renowned in the English language, published her first book in Italian—In altre parole, later translated by Ann Goldstein and released as In Other Words. Within this text, Lahiri travels along her cartography of language, from the nurturing Bengali, to the intrigue of English, then finally to the utter love and devotion for Italian, a language that had seemingly been already “living inside” her. In a diaristic, all-bearing style, she lays forth the senses that have led her to seemingly abandon the gorgeous harvest of her English-language career, to pursue instead the romances of a language made ecstatic to her by way of its music, its invocations, and its poetry.
In the nexus of directions between oneself and the world, a writer looks inward to look outward—as Joy Harjo said, “I am the voice of the poet or what is moving through time, space, and event . . .” Or they look outward to look inward—as Curtis White said, “The work of art . . . is where the artist think you should want to live, because the world it suggests is more intelligent, or more ruthlessly true, or more beautiful, or all of the above.” In choosing to write in Italian, Lahiri describes an almost involuntary, sublime urge to immerse herself in the language; the foreign tongue gives her the latitude to say all the things that she was impeded from saying in honest, emancipated impulsion. Writing in Italian lends a new brutality of errors to her previously gleaming prose, guided only by the impulse to go on, as if the words were showing her themselves, as if only by pulling them through her mind, and onto the page, can she understand the world that she lives in.
In her self-initiated linguistic exile, Lahiri gives to the Lacanian idea that language stems from the Other—that it is at once our glory of compassion and empathy, and also our admittance of separation. The pervasion of this linguistic nomadism in Lahiri’s life is a purveyor of distances and strangeness, rendering her as “exiled even from the definition of exile.” To be exiled, after all, requires the permanent dream of a homeland. She recounts her anxiety of dissolution: “Because of my divided identity, or perhaps by disposition, I consider myself an incomplete person, in some way deficient. Maybe there is a linguistic reason—the lack of a language to identify with… I was suspended rather than rooted. I had two sides, neither well defined.”
The possibilities of writing about oneself—experiences, memories, and categorisations—in the language that they were not lived in offers a certain liberation from the tenets of their realities. Thoughts—let alone dialogues—do not have to submit to the absolute regulations of faithful reincarnation. Ideas sustain metamorphoses and multi-layered states of becoming, passing through the layers of definitive language to arrive, at one’s hand, anew. In the same way that the estrangement of poetry creates passages and celestial paths of wonder, the defamiliarisation of language can speak to a greater, more affecting mysticism—the static space as in not-quite recollections, the murmuring inexplicability of interpretation. The freedom afforded by fluency is of a different world than this freedom—a reckless revolution of discovery, of meeting oneself again as a stranger.
The affinity in the way that Lahiri takes to Italian and the way Mizumura takes to Japanese is a meeting in the landscape of language—one is born, and one is made from scratch, but both understand the architectural illuminations of words, revealed in the epiphanic aftermath of their true, unambiguous competency of telling. Mallarmé once described language as an imagined country—of which the poet must traverse and dissect so that it does not simply seek to describe the mere physical presence of worldly things, but instead take its righteous position between the creative mind and the empty page. The enactment of such a language would be the only way of portraying the transmuting immensities of the self, as well as the only justice that can be brought, in words, to the various natures of the world—always in the process of unfolding.
Xiao Yue Shan is a poet and editor. shellyshan.com
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