Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…I think anybody who is fortunate enough to have more than one language recognizes that. Some people go so far as to say, “If you know more than one language, you have more than one soul.” That’s a very thoughtful way of thinking about it. But I think language represents a very specific but vast universe, and each language represents that. Even before I learned Italian, I grew up with two languages side by side. And maybe I didn’t know them with the same level of proficiency, but they were both incredibly strong influences on who I was. So I always was divided in that sense, so I think that’s true. For the Italian project, as I was saying, this new point of view that comes from a new language, and in addition, the sense of freedom that a learned language might provide you to set to the side certain baggage that the long distance you traverse in another language might be holding you back from saying what you really need to say. For example, I would never have written In Other Words in English. I would never have written The Clothing of Books essay in English. So this is why the Italian is valuable to me. Hi Jhumpa. One thing I found really interesting about The Namesake was how you describe Gogol as olive-toned and being able to pass as Mediterranean sometimes. I think that’s really interesting, especially given the obvious tension between his Indian identity and assimilating into American culture. Was this a conscious decision to make him able to pass as white, and if so, can you speak to how this relates to your own experiences of colorism in passing? Well, I wasn’t really thinking about those things. I’m now recalling, maybe, there’s a moment in the book where someone says to him, “Oh, you could be Spanish,” or something, but I think that’s more about projecting. Not about who he is but maybe how we project, how we like to project sameness onto other people to make them more comfortable to us and to dilute the sense of difference. Maybe that’s what it’s really about. To go back to this book-covers piece, there’s a certain part of the essay in which I talk about the intolerance of my foreign publishers for the various book covers. I remember showing one of my publishers, I’m not going to specify anybody here, but I’ll just say this: I was in Rome and the Italian cover of In Other Words — “In altre parole” — had come out. One of my other publishers was visiting and I showed it to this person, and I remember the expression, and it was like, “. . . Interesting.” [laughter] And I think that is really what is at the heart of the matter. It’s just that refusal to recognize ourselves in the other. So if you have someone who has features that can be perceived as this or perceived as that . . . depending on where I go in the world I’m mistaken for lots of things. If I’m in Latin America, if I’m in India, if I’m in some other places. And sometimes I’m immediately identified as the other, but I think it’s more based on the context and not on the person. But I wasn’t really thinking very deeply about it, to be honest with you. I think it was just one of those small details about other people’s desire to render the same people who are actually different.…

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