'There was a woman, a translator, who wanted to be another person': Jhumpa Lahiri and the exchange politics of linguistic exile

This paper offers an ethnographic consideration of Jhumpa Lahiri’s mother tongue, Bengali, and adopted language, English, as un-utterable, unbearable linguistic burdens that mark her migrant lifeworlds, and that define her compulsion to turn to a third one, Italian, in order to survive as a writer. While such a reading can be extrapolated into broader generalizations about lost homes, migration, and memory, the essay itself traces a closer parallel to my own worldly peregrinations, with Lahiri’s work as my constant companion and reference point for thought in the past 20 years. In doing so, I also attempt an utterly dissatisfactory map of home- and place-making that understands ‘the need to be detached not only from one’s past but, to a certain degree, from one’s present’ (Lahiri 2014, n.p.); that grapples with the migrant’s inability to belong, while refusing to let go of the worlds that reside in our ‘own’ words.