By Jhumpa Lahiri
This article was originally published in the December 7, 2015 issue of The New Yorker:
My relationship with Italian takes place in exile, in a state of separation.
Every language belongs to a specific place. It can migrate, it can spread. But usually it’s tied to a geographical territory, a country. Italian belongs mainly to Italy, and I live on another continent, where one does not readily encounter it.
I think of Ovid, exiled from Rome to a remote place. To a linguistic outpost, surrounded by alien sounds.
I think of my mother, who writes poems in Bengali, in America. Almost fifty years after moving there, she can’t find a book written in her language.
In a sense I’m used to a kind of linguistic exile. My mother tongue, Bengali, is foreign in America. When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.
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“To be a foreigner is to be perpetually detached, but it is also to be continually surprised.”
Pico Iyer, acclaimed essayist and travel writer, takes on the theme of “the foreigner” in a recent essay in a Lapham’s Quarterly special issue on Foreigners, reflecting on his own migrant experience and inviting us to explore the concept of the foreigner as a cultural and historical artifact in a world where diversity is rapidly eclipsing notions of the ‘other’: “…the very notion of the foreign has been shifting in our age of constant movement, with more than fifty million refugees; every other Torontonian you meet today is what used to be called a foreigner, and the number of people living in lands they were not born to will surpass 300 million in the next generation. Soon there’ll be more foreigners on earth than there are Americans.”
Read the full article: The Foreign Spell by Pico Iyer in Lapham’s Quarterly (winter 2015)
See Pico Iyer’s TedTalk: Where is Home? (June 2013)
GDX Lecture by Pico Iyer
May 7, 2015
Pico Iyer joins us in Toronto for the Inaugural Annual Lecture of the Global Diversity Exchange (GDX) at Ryerson University. GDX is excited to announce speaker Pico Iyer, travel writer, author, philosopher, and global citizen. Mr. Iyer, author of the acclaimed The Global Soul and The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, will begin an annual tradition of exploring big ideas on diversity, prosperity and migration that matter to a world on the move.