Linguistic Identity, The Boundary Of Belonging Told Through Books

-Essay-

TURIN — In recent years, we have learned to question the solidity of the distinction between novel and essay. That is due in part to the popularity of autofiction, a genre that has lately seen great masters in Walter Siti, Annie Ernaux and Jon Fosse. This transformation was particularly evident in the last Strega Prize (the most prestigious Italian literary award), where none of the five finalists were purely fiction.

But this is a new phenomenon: less than two decades ago, at the release of Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah, there was a very heated debate about which side of the border between reality and fiction to place it on. Since then, that boundary has become more blurred. Yet other boundaries have not.

The distinction between Italian and and foreign literature, for example, turns out to be very rigid. We demand to be able to say, of each novel, to which of the two fields it belongs. We demand this for bureaucratic reasons (on what shelf a book should be placed, what awards it can compete for), but not only. Reading a story, thinking of it as ours or as someone else’s, influences how we view it.

In an age of constant cultural exchange and planetary migration, the meaningfulness of this divide is increasingly difficult to sustain: yet it endures. In 2024, it is easier for writers to change passports than to change shelves.

Linguistic boundaries

I have experienced this personally. I lived in Berlin for 14 years. I spoke the language. I had read its classics and contemporary authors (some of them I hung out with). I wrote a novel about Berlin in 2022, Le perfezioni (The Perfections), which came out in German.

Yet it was read as a foreign book, categorizing me as the prophet not respected in his own home or the guest who plays the know-it-all in someone else’s house. Indeed, my protagonists — whose nationalities I do not specify precisely to sabotage stereotypes — were read as Italians. What I had to say about Berlin did not belong to the discourse about the city vividly alive in the German novel. My book was something else: half enemy spoiler, half curious creature.

Today, this experience is increasingly common. No one knows it better, perhaps, than the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who has written four books in English and four in Italian. Yet she says she feels seen as “neither flesh nor fish.”

“Linguistic identity is the boundary par excellence.”

Reduced in the U.S. to her family’s Bengali origins, Lahiri finds herself in Italy with her 2022 book Racconti romani (Roman Tales), written in Italian after living more than a decade in Rome, invariably considered foreign literature.

“In today’s world we accept that you can change every aspect of your identity, including your body,” she tells me, “but linguistic identity is the boundary par excellence. No matter how well you may master the language, know the literary tradition, live in a city for decades, someone will be made uncomfortable by your change, will always regard your perspective and voice as different.”

This happens anywhere: the same short stories, translated by Lahiri herself, are also considered foreign in English; this also happened to Francesco Pacifico, who translated into English his 2021 novel Class — which is set almost entirely in New York.

Another example is Espérance Hakuzwimana, author of the 2022 Tutta intera (In One Piece), who was born in Rwanda and raised by an adoptive family in Italy. She writes in Italian, but because she chose to publish without her Italian last name (Ripanti), she often finds her novels categorized as foreign literature.

A literary problem

For Lahiri, these are not personal issues of acceptance or integration — although the “ever-failing search for belonging” stings on a personal level: this a literary problem.

The categories we use to think about literature no longer correspond to what literature does and the lives of those who produce it. The stories that tell the world today cross languages and blur boundaries in ways that make it difficult and probably futile to frame them in a national discourse.

A particularly brilliant example of this is 2024’s Tangerinn, the fine debut novel by Emanuela Anechoum. The author is Italian-Moroccan, as is the protagonist Mina. The book closes with a glossary of Arabic terms. The story starts in a cosmopolitan London of influencers and exclusive bars; it dwells for vast stretches on life in Casablanca in the 1900s and on that, today, in a small town in southern Italy that welcomes migrant landings on a daily basis; it closes, again, between London and Tangier.

Stories about mobility and migration do not end up on any single bookshelf; they belong to everyone and no one.

Tangerinn is a story about expats (i.e., rich and tendentially white migrants) and refugees (i.e., poor and tendentially non-white expats) questioning the distinction between the two. It tells the European dream of a Moroccan boy in the 1970s, and the London dream of his Italian-born daughter. The obvious difference between their experiences is shot through with the same sense of irreducibility to a single national category.

Even Tangerinn is sometimes misclassified as foreign literature, perhaps because of the title, perhaps because of a stereotypical association with the author’s last name. But there is a sense in which — as in the case of Lahiri’s short stories, Pacifico’s novel, and mine — this confusion shows that it is the classification itself that no longer makes sense.

Two central themes of Anechoum’s book — European mobility and the intensification of migratory flows, with the consequent tragic closure of ports — are among today’s most important issues. But their very nature makes them supranational. The stories about them do not end up on any single shelf; they belong to everyone and no one.

This is exactly what happens to the protagonist of Tangerinn: Mina belongs in different senses to London, Italy and even Morocco, where she has never lived. But she does not feel at home in any of them. “I’m not entirely comfortable here,” she says after returning from England to her home village — but she could say that anywhere. “Maybe,” she is told, “this discomfort can teach you something.”