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Jhumpa Lahiri and the Grammar of a Multi-Layered Identity

ABSTRACT Recipient of the most prestigious awards, including the 2000’s Pulitzer Prize for the collection of short stories Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri chose to leave the US, moving with her family to Rome. This voluntary exile has led to another, just as voluntary, namely a linguistic exile. In 2015 Jhumpa Lahiri in fact published her first book written entirely in Italian, In Altre Parole. This paper demonstrates how the choice to abandon the English language has represented, for this US writer of Bengali descent, the unavoidable culmination of an identitarian journey. A deep and complex journey that has gone inescapably through language and fiction, if it is true to say that language is for her the only means to express the inner speech, while fiction represents the foreign land of her choosing, the place where she strives to convey and preserve the meaningful. The linguistic exile therefore does not constitute a kind of alienation, nor an estrangement. Rather it becomes a sort of existential state, a form of multi-layered identity.