- Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome back.
So let me introduce our distinguished keynote speaker.
Jhumpa Lahiri is a professor of creative writing
at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.
She received a Pulitzer Prize in 2000
for her debut story collection, Interpreter of Maladies.
Her followup novel, The Namesake, in 2003
was adapted for the screen in 2007.
Her book of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth--
which was being read by the woman next to me on the plane
on a return trip from Newark Airport, which was just
about the only part of that trip that was interesting to me.
Nothing against Newark.
That received the 2008 Frank O'Connor International Short
Story Award.
Finally, her book The Lowland, Random House 2013,
also won the 2015 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.
After reading her keynote, Jhumpa
will be accompanied in conversation
by Celeste Ng, who is the internationally best selling
author of the novels Everything I Never Told You,
and Little Fires Everywhere.
She is a Harvard graduate and also has
received her MFA from the University of Michigan.
And she has the coolest Twitter handle ever.
Jhumpa.
[APPLAUSE]
Oh, no, no.
They have to guess.
It's pronounced Ng.
But I should have let you do that.
I'm so sorry.
Jhumpa Lahiri.
[APPLAUSE]
- Thank you.
Good afternoon.
I am honored to be here.
And I want to thank everyone at Radcliffe for inviting me.
I feel like I've been in this room before.
Is that possible?
I think I might have been here when The Namesake came out.
And I believe I read here.
Anyway, I feel very comfortable.
That's a good thing.
I'm looking forward to my conversation with Celeste.
And as a point of departure, I'd like
to read a short story that was published a couple of months
ago in The New Yorker magazine.
It's called "The Boundary."
This is a story I wrote originally
in Italian three years ago when I was living in Rome.
And it was published in Italian, in the Italian version
of Granta magazine, which, sadly, is no longer in print.
Last fall in Princeton, I decided to translate it myself
into English.
And this is the result. The title of the story in Italian
is [ITALIAN],, which is the word for a boundary, a border.
And so I chose "The Boundary" as the English title.
Every Saturday a new family comes to stay.
Some arrive early in the morning from afar,
ready to begin their vacation.
Others don't turn up until sunset in bad moods, maybe
having lost their way.
It's easy to get lost in these hills.
The roads are poorly signposted.
Today, after they introduce themselves, I show them around.
My mother used to do the welcoming,
but she's spending the summers in a nearby town helping out
an elderly gentleman who's also on vacation.
So I have to do it.
As usual, there are four of them, mother, father,
two daughters.
They follow me, their eyes wide, happy to stretch their legs.
We stop for a moment on the shaded patio that looks out
over the lawn under a thatched roof that filters the light.
There are two armchairs and a sofa covered with white fabric,
lounge chairs for sunbathing, and a wooden table big enough
for 10 people.
I open the sliding glass door and show them inside.
The cozy living room with two comfortable sofas in front
of the fireplace, the well-stocked kitchen,
two bedrooms.
While the father unloads the car,
and the girls who are probably around seven and nine
disappear into their room, shutting the door behind them,
I tell the mother where to find extra towels and woolen
blankets in case it gets cold at night.
I show her where the mouse poison is hidden.
Kill the flies before going to bed, I suggest.
Otherwise they start buzzing at dawn and become a nuisance.
I explain how to get to the supermarket, how
to use the washing machine behind the house,
and where to hang the laundry, just
on the other side of my father's garden.
Guests are free to pick lettuce and tomatoes, I add.
There were lots of tomatoes this year, but most of them
spoiled in the July rain.
I pretend not to watch them, to be discreet.
I do the housework and water the garden.
But I can't help noticing how happy and excited they are.
I hear the girls' voices as they run across the lawn.
I learn their names.
Since the guests usually leave the sliding door open,
I overhear what the parents say to each other
as they settle into the house, as they unpack their suitcases
and decide what to have for lunch.
The cottage where my family lives
is a few yards away, behind a tall hedge
that forms a kind screen.
For years our house was just a room
that served as both kitchen and bedroom for the three of us.
Then, two years ago when I turned 13,
my mother started working for the elderly gentleman.
And after saving up enough money,
my parents asked the man who owns the property if they
could add a small room for me.
My father is the caretaker.
He looks after the big house, chops the wood,
works the fields and the vineyard.
He looks after the horses, which the owner loves with a passion.
The owner lives abroad, but he's not a foreigner like us.
He comes every now and then on his own.
He doesn't have a family.
During the days, he goes horseback riding.
In the evenings, he reads in front of the fireplace.
Then he goes away again.
Not many people rent his house other than in summer.
The winters here are biting, and in spring there's lots of rain.
In the mornings from September to June,
my father drives me to school where I feel out of place.
I don't mix easily with others.
I don't look like anyone else.
The girls in this family resemble each other.
You can tell right away that they're sisters.
They've already put on matching bathing suits
to go to the beach later on.
The beach is about 15 miles from here.
The mother looks like a girl, too.
She's small and thin.
She wears her long hair loose.
Her shoulders are delicate.
She walks barefoot on the grass, even though the father
tells her not to, saying--
and he's right-- that there might be porcupines,
hornets, snakes.
After a few hours, it's as if they've always lived here.
The things they brought for a week in the country
are scattered all over the place, books, magazines,
a laptop computer, dolls, hoodies,
colored pencils, pads of paper, flip-flops, sunscreen.
At lunch, I hear fork striking plates.
I notice each time one of them sets down a glass on the table.
I detect the calm thread of their conversation,
the sound and smell of the coffee pot,
smoke from a cigarette.
After lunch, the father asks one of the girls
to bring him his glasses.
For a long time he studies a roadmap.
He list small towns to visit nearby, archaeological sites,
ruins.
The mother isn't interested.
She says, this is her only week of the year
without appointments and obligations.
Later on, the father heads off to the sea with his daughters.
He asks me as they're leaving how long it takes to get there.
Which of the beaches is nicest?
He asks me about the weather forecast for the week,
and I tell him there is a heat wave coming.
The mother stays home.
She's put on her bathing suit anyway to get some sun.
She stretches out on one of the lounge chairs.
I assume she's going to take a nap.
But when I go to hang up the wash,
I see her writing something.
She writes by hand in a little notebook resting on her thighs.
Now and then, she lifts her head and looks intently
at the landscape that surrounds us.
She stares at the various greens of the lawn, the hills,
the woods in the distance, the glaring blue of the sky,
the yellow hay, the bleached fence,
and the low stone wall that marks the property line.
She studies everything I look at every day.
But I wonder what else she sees in it.
When the sun starts to go down, they
put on sweaters and long pants to shield themselves
from mosquitoes.
The father and the girls have wet hair from the hot showers
they took after the beach.
The girls tell their mother about their trip,
the burning sand, the slightly murky water,
the gentle, disappointing waves.
The whole family goes for a short walk.
They go to look at the horses, the donkeys,
a wild boar kept in a pen behind the stables.
They go to see the flock of sheep that
passes in front of the house every day around this time,
blocking for a few minutes the cars on the dusty road.
The father keeps taking pictures with his cell phone.
He shows the girls the small plum trees,
the fig trees, the olives.
He says, fruit picked straight from the tree
tastes different because it smells
of the sun, the countryside.
Parents open a bottle of wine on the patio.
They taste some cheese, the local honey.
They admire the blazing landscape
and marvel at the huge glowing clouds
the color of pomegranates in October.
Evening falls.
They hear frogs, crickets, the rustle of the wind.
In spite of the breeze, they decide
to eat outside to take advantage of the lingering light.
My father and I eat inside in silence.
He doesn't look up when he eats.
With my mother away, there is no conversation during dinner.
She is the one who talks at meals.
My mother can't stand this place.
Like my father, she comes from much farther away
than anyone who vacations here.
She hates living in this country,
in the middle of nowhere.
She says that the people here aren't nice,
that they're closed.
I don't miss her complaining.
I don't like listening to her, even though she's probably
right.
Sometimes when she complains too much,
my father sleeps in the car instead of in bed with her.
After dinner, the girls wander around the lawn
following fireflies.
They play with their flashlights.
The parents sit on the patio contemplating the starry sky,
the intense darkness.
The mother sips some hot water with lemon.
The father, a little grappa.
They say that being here is all they need, that even the air is
different, that it cleanses.
How lovely, they say, being together
like this, away from everyone.
First thing in the morning, I go to the chicken coop
to gather eggs.
They're warm and pale, filthy.
I put a few in a bowl and bring them
to the guests for breakfast.
Normally, there's no one around, and I just
leave them on the patio table.
But then I notice through the sliding door
that the girls are already awake.
I see bags of cookies on the sofa, crumbs,
a cereal box overturned on the coffee table.
The girls are trying to swat the flies that buzz around
the house in the morning.
The older one is holding the flyswatter.
The little sister, frustrated, complains that she's still
waiting for her turn.
She says she wants to swat them, too.
I put down the eggs and go back to our house.
Then I knock on their door and lend the girls our flyswatter.
That way they're both happy.
I don't repeat the fact that it's better to kill the flies
before you go to bed.
It's clear that they're having fun,
while the parents, in spite of the annoying
flies and the girls' racket, continue sleeping.
After two days, a predictable routine sets in.
In the late morning, the father goes to the cafe in town
to buy milk and the paper, to get a second coffee.
He pops over to the supermarket if need be.
When he gets back, he goes running in the hills
despite the humidity.
One time, he comes home rattled after crossing paths
with a sheepdog that blocked his way, even though, in the end,
nothing happened.
The mother does what I do.
She sweeps the floor, cooks, washes dishes.
At least once a day, she hangs up the laundry.
Our clothes mingle and dry on a shared line.
She tells her husband, clasping the laundry basket
in her arms, how happy this makes her.
Since they live in the city in a crowded apartment,
she can never hang their clothes out in the open like this.
After lunch, the father takes the girls to the beach,
and the mother stays home alone.
She stretches out and smokes a cigarette,
writing in her notebook with an air of concentration.
One day back from the beach, the girls
run around for hours trying to catch crickets
that jump through the grass.
They snatch them up.
They put a few in a jar with little pieces of tomato stolen
from their parents' salads.
They turn them into pets, even naming them.
The next day, the crickets die, suffocated
in the jar, and the girls cry.
They bury them under one of the plum trees
and put some wildflowers on top.
Another day, the father discovers
that one of the flip-flops he's left outside is missing.
I tell him that a fox probably took it.
There's been one prowling around.
I tell my father, who knows the habits and hideouts of all
the animals around here, and he manages
to find the shoe, along with a ball
and a shopping bag abandoned by the previous family.
I realize how much the guests like this rural, unchanging
landscape, how much they appreciate
every detail, how these things help them think, rest, dream.
When the girls pick blackberries staining
the pretty dresses they're wearing,
the mother doesn't get mad at them.
Instead, she laughs.
She asks the father to take a picture
and then throws the dresses in the wash.
At the same time, I wonder what they know about the loneliness
here.
What do they know about the days always the same
in our dilapidated cottage?
The nights when the wind blows so hard the earth
seems to shake, or when the sound of rain keeps me awake?
The months we live alone among the hills,
the horses, the insects, the birds that
pass over the fields?
Would they like the harsh quiet that rains here all winter?
On the last night, more cars arrive.
Friends of the parents have been invited along
with their children, who run around on the meadow.
A couple of people report that the traffic was
light coming in from the city.
The adults take a look around the house
and walk in the garden.
At sunset, the table on the patio is already set.
I hear everything as they eat.
The laughter and chatter are louder tonight.
The family relates all their mishaps
in the country, the tomato eating crickets,
the funeral under the plum tree, the sheepdog, the fox that
carried off the flip-flop.
The mother says that being in touch with nature like this
has been good for the girls.
At a certain point, a cake comes out with candles,
and I realize it's the father's birthday.
He's turning 45.
Everyone sings, and they slice the cake.
My father and I finish up some overripe grapes.
I'm about to clear the table when
I hear a knock at the door.
I see the girls, hesitant, out of breath.
They give me a plate with two slices of cake on it,
one for me and one for my father.
They dash off before I can say thanks.
We eat the cake while the guests talk about politics, trips,
life in the city.
Someone asks the mother where she got the cake.
It came from a bakery in their neighborhood,
she says, adding that one of the other guests brought it up.
She mentions the name of the bakery,
the piazza where it's situated.
My father lays down his fork and lowers his head.
His eyes are agitated when he looks at me.
He gets up abruptly and then steps out
to smoke a cigarette unobserved.
We used to live in the city, too.
My father sold flowers in that very piazza.
My mother used to help.
They spent their days next to each other
in a small but pleasant stand, arranging bouquets
that people took home to decorate their tables
and terraces.
New to this country, they learned
the names of the flowers.
Rose, sunflower, carnation, daisy.
They kept them, there stems submerged in rows of buckets.
One night, three men showed up.
My father was alone.
My mother, pregnant with me at the time,
was at home because he didn't want her to work at night.
It was late.
The other stores around the piazza were closed,
and my father was about to lower his grate.
One of the men asked him to open up again,
saying that he was about to go and see his girlfriend.
He wanted a nice bouquet.
My father agreed that he'd make him one,
even though the men were rude, a little drunk.
When my father held up the bouquet,
the man said that it was skimpy and asked
him to make it bigger.
My father added more flowers, an excessive number of them,
until the man was satisfied.
He wrapped paper around the bouquet,
then he bound it up with colored ribbon, tying a bow.
He told him the price.
The man pulled some money out of his wallet.
It wasn't enough.
And when my father refused to hand over the bouquet,
the man told him that he was an idiot, that he didn't even
know how to put together a nice bouquet for a beautiful girl.
Then together with the other, he started beating my father
until his mouth filled with blood,
until his front teeth were shattered.
My father yelled, but at that hour no one heard.
They said, go back to wherever you came from.
They took the bouquet and left him like that on the ground.
My father went to the emergency room.
He couldn't eat solid foods for a year.
After I was born, when he saw me for the first time,
he couldn't say a word.
Ever since, he's struggled to speak.
He garbles his words as if he were an old man.
He's ashamed to smile because of his missing teeth.
My mother and I understand him, but others don't.
They think since he is a foreigner, that he
doesn't speak the language.
Sometimes they even think he's mute.
When the pears and red apples that grow in the garden
are ripe, we cut them into thin slices, almost transparent,
so he can savor them.
One of his compatriots told him about this job
in this secluded place.
He wasn't familiar with the countryside.
He'd always lived in cities.
He can live and work here without opening his mouth.
He's not afraid of being attacked.
He prefers to live among the animals, cultivating the land.
He's become used to this untamed place that protects him.
When he talks to me as he drives me to school,
he always says the same thing, that he couldn't
make anything of his life.
All he wants me to do is study and finish school,
go to college, and then go far away from them.
The next day, late in the morning,
the father starts to load the car.
I see four people, tanned, even more closely knit.
They don't want to leave.
At breakfast, they say that they'd
like to come back next year.
Nearly all the guests say the same thing when they go.
A few faithfully return.
But for most of them, once is enough.
Before heading out, the mother shows
me the stuff in the fridge that they don't
want to take back to the city.
She tells me that she has grown quite fond of this house,
that she already misses it.
Maybe when she's feeling stressed
or overwhelmed by work, she'll think of this place.
The clean air, the hills, the clouds blazing at sunset.
I wish the family safe travels and say goodbye.
I stand there waiting until the car's out of sight.
Then I start to prepare the house for the new family that's
supposed to get here tomorrow.
I make the beds.
I tidy the room the girls turned upside down.
I sweep the flies they swatted.
They've forgotten-- or left on purpose--
a few things they don't need, things I hold onto.
Pictures the girls grew, shells they picked up
at the beach, the last drops of a perfumed shower gel,
shopping lists in the faint, small script
that the mother used on other sheets of paper
to write all about us.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
- Jhumpa, thank you so much for that beautiful story.
I think it touches on so many of the topics
that this conference is about and that we
talked about in some of the earlier panels.
But first, I want to ask you just some questions
about this story.
Can you tell us how you came to write this story,
if there was something that sort of sparked it in your mind,
or how you came to write it?
- I came to write it because I was living in Rome.
And one of the lovely things about my life in Rome
is that every day I end up speaking inevitably all three
of the languages that I speak.
I speak Italian when I go out of the house.
I speak English inside the house with my family.
And I speak Bengali with many, many people
from Bangladesh who live in Rome,
who work all over the place in Trastevere, which
is the neighborhood we live in.
They sell things in makeshift stalls on the streets.
Everything from shoes and suitcases,
to bed sheets and tablecloths.
They work in the markets.
They peel the vegetables.
The butcher shops.
In any case, they form part of--
the Bangladeshi community forms part of my day
to day life in almost every establishment that I frequent.
And I talk to them.
I ask them what they like, what they don't
like about living in Rome.
And from the very beginning, I heard
a lot of troubling impressions, anecdotes.
And this grew out of--
I mean, that moment at the end of the story, that violent act,
is based on something I heard one man tell me about.
He actually worked in the flower shop
I used to go to all the time to buy flowers.
This had happened to him in another neighborhood,
not in our neighborhood.
And it was something I heard quite early on in my life
there, and it stayed with me.
And then some years later, I was on vacation
with my family in a place called Capalbio,
which is about two hours north of Rome, right
over the border in Tuscany.
But not the sort of Tuscany people think of,
most people think of.
A more kind of Cape Cod-like Tuscany, if you will.
And we were there.
And we were renting a friend's house.
And I was very aware of the caretaker's daughter,
who was a young girl, very small child at the time.
She was very curious about my kids
and would pop out sometimes from their little house,
venture out to say hello.
And I spent most of the vacation thinking about her
and wondering what her life would be like in 10 years.
So the story was inspired by that.
- You mentioned that one of the stories
that worked its way into this piece you heard some years ago.
Of course, stories like that, unfortunately,
have happened all over the place and have
happened for a long time.
And I think we're starting to hear
more with more stories of violence against immigrants,
at least here in the US.
Especially now, but elsewhere as well as right
wing parties have started to assert themselves
all over the place.
When I told people that I was going
to get to speak with you today, and I said,
she's going to be reading this story that was in The New
Yorker, many people got very excited
because they had read the story.
And in talking with friends and other writers, many of them
assume that the story took place in Italy.
Because it mentions that it's translated from the Italian,
because you're known to live in Italy.
But in the story itself, the location
is sort of deliberately unspecified,
as is the home nation of the narrator and her family.
And the truth is that it could almost take place anywhere,
including even in the US.
And I'm curious about your decision
to not name the two central locations in the story, where
it takes place and then where the family itself is from.
It's such an interesting choice.
- Well, yeah, it is a choice.
And it's something I've been choosing to do or not
do for some years now.
I think all of my Italian writing
has been taking place in an invented space, if you will.
It was interesting because I asked my son, who's almost 16,
if he wanted to read the story.
Because he was sort of vaguely aware that it had come out.
I think he saw it, or heard me and my husband talking
about it, or something.
So I said, well, you know, if you want, you can read it.
It's pretty short.
[LAUGHTER]
And he said, sure, OK.
And he read it.
And I said, could you recognize where it took place?
And he said, Wellfleet, Cape Cod,
where they actually-- my kids and my husband are right now.
And I'm going to join them tomorrow.
And it is a place--
we used to go there much more often.
It's a place we love very much and a place
in which we feel a little bit like the family in that story.
And we have that kind of relationship with the place.
I think the story is very much about how people--
how a single place can be read in so many different ways
and experienced in different ways, depending on who you are
and the things we project on to places that aren't necessarily
ours.
But the reason I don't want to name the place, to specify
the place-- even though, yes, it was
inspired by this small town called Capalbio,
which is in Italy, which is in this part of the planet Earth.
And there are some-- some Italian friends
read it and say, ah, Capalbio.
And they know right away.
And others aren't so sure.
But I really feel very strongly right now
about leaving the specificity--
just to leave it entirely open in terms
of where the story is placed.
And I think this is probably my own desire
to liberate myself from a certain weight I feel in terms
of being connected to specific geographical and cultural
points of reference.
- And I think in doing that also, like you said,
it sort of allows other people to overlay their own sort
of experience in it.
Like your son seeing Wellfleet in there,
which is a place that I happen to know as well.
And for other people, too, I think
to sort of make their own meaning out of the story.
This is sort of the larger questions of the conference.
In an interview with The New Yorker about this story,
you mentioned that you do think of this as a political story.
And I think they had asked you, do you
see this as a political story or do
you see it as something else?
And you had a wonderful quote.
You said, all my work is about identity, about belonging.
And therefore, all of my work may be read politically.
And I love what you said about that idea of the point of view
shift, where--
I think a lot of times people will say
that something is political.
And I'm curious about what your thoughts are about what
political writing is.
Do you think that there is such a thing as writing
that isn't political?
So there's a big question.
- That is a big question.
I mean, I think certainly most of my work
can be looked at through that.
I mean, I'm not writing it with any specific intent, message,
anything like that.
But I think it would be naive to not think of that reality.
I remember when I was growing up, my father--
so my family and I moved to Cambridge in 1969.
And he would say now and then, well, it's
thanks to President Nixon that we're here.
And I remember growing up thinking,
why is my dad saying that?
Why is this even relevant?
And Nixon's bad.
Why do we have to talk about this?
But then I realized what he was getting at,
that it's all about laws, it's all about immigration laws.
And it's all about these political realities.
It's about governments making decisions
about how to negotiate their borders.
And so, yes, as a result of that law, and that moment,
and those policies, in that time, in that year,
my father got the clearance to come
with his wife and his daughter to the United States.
And there they remained.
But I think for someone who is actually
doing the border crossing, you never lose sight of that
no matter who's in charge at the moment,
even if it's Richard Nixon.
You sort of have that sense of-- that weird sense of gratitude
that the doors opened for you.
And it is political.
- Yeah, I think it's--
what you're saying reminds me that it's very difficult
to separate the context in which your work is being inspired
or is taking place from what the work itself is.
And I don't know that that's even necessarily a thing
that we want to do.
One of the things that I find myself struggling
with as a writer is, as you say, when people view
your work through this political lens, of trying to figure out
what I as a fiction writer--
I spend my day making up stories about people.
So as a friend of mine said, I'm spending my day
with imaginary people in imaginary places
doing imaginary stuff.
But at the same time, I hope that the work that I'm creating
and that you're creating speaks to the world that we're in.
And being in that strange border area
has been a thing that I'm learning
to negotiate as a writer sort of starting out in this.
And curious about what you think the role of the writer
is in the current sociopolitical climate?
Do we have a responsibility to directly and consciously try
and talk about those issues in our work or off the page?
Or is that really just part of the meaning
that critics and readers should be bringing to our work?
Is it sort of above our pay grade, so to speak?
- I write to feel free.
So I don't write for any purpose,
to answer to anything other than a desire on my part.
It's a very selfish occupation.
I will not lie about it.
If I'm talking to anybody, it's usually
to a group of dead writers who have guided me
and taught me how to live.
I feel that that is where my energy lies.
You produce the work.
It's born.
And it has its own life.
And it's received.
And there's really very little you can do about it.
It's either read, or it's ignored.
It's understood.
It's misunderstood.
It's maligned.
It's praised.
It's read in all sorts of ways.
- And probably will be read in all sorts of different ways
10 years from now, 50 years from now.
- Of course.
So I mean, I think it's foolish to try
to write to solve anything, to explain anything.
I think writing can, and does, communicate great truths
to people who read, and read carefully, and are searching
as readers.
And that is why literature speaks to me.
But it's a very personal relationship.
And my relationship to the writers I read
is unlike that relationship between another person
and those same writers.
And everyone-- we all have our different constellations.
So that's where I am as an artist.
And then there's another conversation
that happens that I'm not--
that I don't participate in, and I
have no interest in overseeing.
- In some ways, I think one of the paradoxes of being
a writer, and especially a fiction writer,
is that I think when I come to the page, I am not--
as you say, I'm not coming in with an agenda or message that
I want to write about.
I'm not thinking, now I'm going to write a book that is going
to teach people about this.
I'm writing in some way because there's something in the story
or in the characters that's intrigued me.
But then when those stories-- as you said,
they go out into the world, and they get interpreted,
misinterpreted, translated in some way--
we heard in some of the morning panels,
for any of you who were here--
we heard a little bit about the power of narrative
and the power of story.
And it's something that I wanted to sort of bring up
for our discussion.
Sarah Leah Whitson was talking.
She showed some videos which they were using in the Middle
East to try and work in Saudi Arabia
to end the guardianship system, in which men
are assigned to be the guardians of women in their lives.
And she talked about working with women in Saudi Arabia
to kind of figure out, what is the narrative of the story?
What is the story that we want to show in the video that
will resonate with the women that we're
trying to talk to and even the men that we're
trying to talk to.
And Kari Hong told us a little story at the end of her talk
in which she mentioned that her father said,
we're lucky to live in a country that we're allowed to disagree
with the government.
Because he knew what it had been like to live in a regime
that didn't allow that kind of freedom.
And this is not actually a question, I guess.
But I'm interested in talking about that position
that writers find themselves in where
we create these sort of texts.
And these narratives do have a lot of power
to go out beyond us.
And yet, those aren't-- that's not something we can control.
And I'm not even sure it is something
that we should control.
- Exactly.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, I think that's--
yes, I think you're rightly embellishing
what I was trying to put forth when I was talking earlier,
just this idea that there are different spheres, right?
Different spheres of activity.
And there's the writing.
There's the reading.
There's the perception.
There's the life of the book over time.
There's the relationship of the book with the world.
The world is constantly shifting.
The situation is constantly shifting.
So the book has greater or lesser resonance depending on--
- Or just different resonance, yeah.
- Depending on who's reading it, when they're reading it,
how they're reading it.
I mean, just from a purely personal point of view,
Anna Karenina meant one thing to me
when I read it presumptuously at 16.
It meant something very different
when I read it when I was breastfeeding
my newborn daughter.
And it will mean something very different
the next time I sit down to read it.
Because I'm not that same person.
It remains a point of reference, but you see it
in a totally different way.
And it speaks-- it's telling you completely different things.
- And of course, yeah, I've had a similar experience
with The Count of Monte Cristo as a favorite book of mine.
And of course, the text remains the same.
And so when I read it--
my sister was in college.
And she gave it to me.
And I was an adolescent, and I was really taken
with the adventure story at 12.
And then I read it again at 15, and I was very taken
with the romance in the book.
And I thought it was very romantic.
And then I got older, and I started to see it
as this sort of morality story.
And now I read it as this question of,
how much are you really allowed to play god?
How much can you do that?
And all of those things-- obviously,
those changes have happened in me, as you're saying.
It has this different resonance depending on the context
in which you read it.
I think that one thing that writers--
we writers can and do have to really consider
sort of which stories we tell.
And in the story that you read, "The Boundary,"
the mother who comes on vacation is also a writer of some kind.
We don't know exactly what she's doing when
she's writing in her notebook.
But we have the sense that she is maybe
going to tell her version of this trip
and her version of the story of the narrator and her father.
But of course, she doesn't know the things
that the narrator knows and the things that the narrator tells
us about what happened to the father.
And if this mother tells the story,
she's almost certainly going to leave out
some really important context to the story at the very least.
And it, for me, raised the questions
of who should tell the story?
Who's allowed to tell the stories?
And thinking about some of the panels
from this morning where questions were raised about,
well, if we are coming from the West,
and we are talking to other parts of the world,
is this sort of a narrative that we're imposing on them?
Or to what degree do we allow them to tell their own stories?
And it's something that I find myself
wrestling with in my writing.
What stories am I allowed to tell?
What stories am I going to be good at telling?
I'm curious what you think about all of that.
- Well, I think the writer should
have no identity whatsoever.
- Do you think that's possible?
- I'm trying.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm trying to get to that point.
But I think I've always been that way.
I think I've never had an identity.
I've never understood what identity was.
And whenever I started to understand what it was,
it terrified me.
And every time my life seems to take some sort of--
something more than a penciled-in shape,
I run away from it.
But I think this is crucial for the artist, for the writer--
especially the writer--
to always evade any kind of precise identity.
Because it is that vacillating, formless state in which you
can shape-shift into anything or anyone at any time in any place
that allows you to create, and to create characters,
and to create a world that isn't yours, and to think your way,
feel your way, understand your way
into other hearts, other souls.
And so that's how I felt as--
as a young girl, I felt that.
And I think because I wasn't a writer then,
because I was just a child, it was a little bit scary.
Because I think in some sense, we
want identity because identity is like a home.
It's like shelter.
It provides walls, and a roof, and a sense--
a semblance of security, which is what home
is, a semblance of security.
But I think that as I--
once I became a writer, that state, that state of being,
that stateless state of being, if you will,
became my instrument.
It's my only instrument.
And I think that is something that I very carefully cultivate
at this point.
Because I know that that is the only instrument
that allows me to work.
- It's interesting that you phrase it
as having no identity versus having multiple identities.
I'm trying to think about whether those two things are
flip sides of the same coin, or if there's
a difference between feeling that you are not
rooted anywhere or feeling that you have multiple roots.
I'm thinking of the conversation we had at lunch
where you mentioned you feel like you've
got a life in Italy, and you've got a life here,
and you've got many different lives in different places.
- I have many lives, but I don't have--
identity is a different thing.
Identity is a different thing that you feel or you don't.
Right?
So my mother feels Indian, right?
Even right at this moment in her home in Rhode Island.
She feels Indian.
And nothing will make her not feel that.
That's identity.
I don't have that.
I don't feel Indian.
I don't feel American.
I don't feel Italian.
I don't feel English.
I was just in London, and people say, well, you
must feel a little bit English.
You were born in London.
How can I feel English?
I mean, what does that mean?
I mean, maybe it's just my own inability
to connect to identity.
But I think I've--
because of the way I was raised and the world in which I
was raised, and the worlds in which I was raised,
I was always suspicious of it.
I was always suspicious of identity.
And now in my adult life, again, I
feel like I have to remain vigilant.
But maybe it's just a self-protective mechanism.
Because I can say this.
I can sit up here and say, well, I don't believe in identity.
But I think I also feel I've suffered so much in my life
for lacking an identity.
And it has been a source of anguish for me to lack,
to be able to-- to not be able to say, I'm this, or I'm that.
And it's that absence, that absence of identity
that I talk about a little bit in my last book
and in other words where I talk about language.
It's that vacuum, that black space,
that silence that was a terrifying reality.
So I think what I've constructed around that is my own--
I'm sure it's my own defense mechanism as well as something
I try to embrace as the key for my creativity.
It's both things.
- It's so fascinating.
I feel like I could talk to you about this for another half
an hour.
But I think we're meant to move on to the audience questions.
So are there question cards?
Thank you.
All right, this is where I'm going to try
to read your handwriting.
All right, so this is a question about the--
you mentioned that the title of your story in English,
it's "The Boundary," but in Italian, it's [ITALIAN]..
- [SPEAKING ITALIAN]
- And it says, it suggests--
it's not only boundary, but it also suggests confinement.
And this question is, can you discuss the many senses
of confinement in our cultures in terms of who's confined
and who gets to do that, and in what way that
maybe relates to the story?
- Well, boundaries are created to keep people confined
in some sense, to demarcate.
And so much of human civilization
has been about this reality, negotiating this reality,
fighting over this issue, these lines we draw.
But I mean, I think it's a rich metaphor.
I don't know.
I mean, I haven't really thought about it that much.
But I suppose, as you say, as you mentioned,
the mother character is the writer.
And she's sort of me.
I was that mother in some sense.
And I was also the little girl, of course.
I'm everybody in the story.
But I think, of course, each of us
is confined in our own reality.
I think that's the point.
And the writer writes to get out of one's reality.
At least that's why I started writing,
was to get out of my skin and my reality.
Partly because I was curious.
Partly because I didn't really like my reality.
Partly because it just felt exciting and different.
But I think in the end, we each have our reality, our thoughts,
our perceptions, our minds.
And this is the boundary.
We are individual boundaries of incredibly complex, unique,
individual boundaries.
And so much of life, and literature,
and our problems, our woes, are about the inability
to communicate openly and clearly,
the inability to negotiate those boundaries.
And I think my work has really been about that
from the very beginning, looking at it in all sorts
of variations on the theme.
- And that touches on one of the next questions.
It says, could you say more about what
you mean by saying that you write to be free?
And I think this is related to what
you've just been talking about.
This person asks, what does that mean to you
in terms of being free in your writing?
Is it just, as you said, the ways
that you can communicate with each other sort of clearly?
Or is it also about, in some ways,
being able to step outside of your own life,
your own experience?
What does that mean to you when you say
that you're writing to be free?
- It means I'm writing to feel free.
It means that--
- Sorry, whoever asked the question.
[LAUGHTER]
- I mean-- no, I don't mean to be--
I don't mean to dismiss the question.
It's a very complex question.
And I'm trying to write myself an answer.
I think one is in flight or not.
But I think I am someone who has been wary of expectations
handed to me.
And wanting to-- objecting to certain expectations.
- You mean expectations of what people
expected you would write about?
Or what you would say about them?
- Who I would be.
I mean, forget about writing.
Just as a human being.
Expectations on me for who I would be, how I would be,
how I would live my life, how I should live my life.
What I would do with my life.
I felt this keenly from a very young age.
And I think part of it was because I
was raised by displaced people who had
a very keen sense of identity.
And so that creates a very charged environment
in the family--
at least in my family--
in terms of how I was expected to be,
and what I was expected to be, and who
I was expected to be all of those things with, and et
cetera, et cetera.
So I felt incredibly under intense forms of control.
Not just-- I'm not-- this is not to say,
oh, my parents wanted all of these things.
It was more than my mother and father.
It was a sort of community.
It was a world within a world.
It was layers of expectations.
It was expectations when I would go to Calcutta with my parents.
It was expectations when I was in this country.
It was expectations of people outside of my family.
And ultimately they were the expectations
that I was bringing to the equation, the worst of them
all.
Because I wanted to somehow please absolutely everybody.
- In all of those disparate--
- In all of the disparate worlds and ways.
And it really is a recipe for intense unhappiness
and disaster.
- Yes.
[LAUGHTER]
- So I tried to find a way out of that.
And that's the freedom I seek.
I seek the freedom from that weight and that obligation.
The freedom to be.
The freedom to be happy and--
which is lightly said but painfully gained.
- This is a slightly lighter question.
Someone would like to know who are the dead writers
that you speak to--
[LAUGHTER]
--when you have that conversation
with the dead writers you mention?
- Well, it depends on the graves I'm
going to visit on any particular day.
I was reading Kafka on the plane today.
But in general, for the past several years
I've predominantly been reading Italian writers.
Most of them dead.
Not all.
And I've been translating a living author, perhaps
Italy's finest living author, Domenico Starnone.
But really, I mean, the constellations are vast,
as they are in real life in the real sky.
So there just-- I mean, I'm old enough to be able to say, well,
those were the writers--
I mean, I can sort of link every book to a different group
of writers, shall I say.
But this story, for example, I don't
know what it comes out of.
But certainly, I think probably the writer
Agota Kristof inspired this story, a Hungarian author who
moves to Switzerland and--
flees to Switzerland with her family,
and learns French, and writes in French.
Wrote in French.
She's no longer living.
And it was reading her, a great discovery when I was
beginning my Italian journey.
A great point of reference for me to read her
and to think about what she did and her example.
So this story was inspired by her.
- When you think of yourself as talking to those writers,
do you talk to them in your head?
Or do you see your work as, in some ways,
being your conversation with them?
- I don't know if it's anything as conscious as that.
I mean, I think reading for me is just a form of writing.
No, that came out wrong.
I think writing is a form of reading.
I think writing is a form of reading for me.
When I was young, when I was a little girl,
I learned how to read around six or seven.
And I couldn't read without copying
what I was reading in some strange form
almost simultaneously.
I don't know why I did that.
But that's what I did.
And that's how I started writing.
So that's remained a constant, in that if I read something
deeply enough--
which is how we read when we're just learning how to read,
right?
Because we don't know how to--
we're not used to it yet.
And it's such a revolution.
It must be.
I mean, it is.
It's such a revolution to be able to learn how to read.
My god, it's, like, the best thing ever.
- It's such a--
my son is seven.
And he taught himself to read quite early.
But it was this revelation to him,
like you said, that there was--
somebody somewhere else at some other point in time
had written down these words and had this idea.
And that now this idea was in his head
was this sort of mind-blowing idea to him.
That in some ways, he could have their--
he could get some semblance of their ideas.
Like you said, it's such a transformative thing.
- Yeah, I mean, I think, for me, the transformative experience
was more just the pure solace, the first solace of life
is reading.
And then I start to echo what I'm reading.
And so even now I feel that that's what I'm doing somehow.
I mean, in a less mechanical way.
Because when I was young, I would read.
And I would I would read something.
I would read Little House On the Prairie,
then I would write this weird version of the same story,
right?
[LAUGHTER]
- I did that also, actually.
My mother recently found sketchbooks
in which I had drawn and illustrated little stories.
There's little Mary.
And there's little Laura.
- Wagons, right.
- There's a lawn, blue and pink.
And yeah.
- But I think as one grows older--
and I mean, if you end up being a writer,
then that back and forth becomes much more complex and layered.
And then there are influences that you're--
either you're consciously channeling them,
or you're unconsciously channeling them.
You pick things up.
You're not aware.
You're not aware of all of the particles that
are moving around in the room in any given moment.
- Are there contemporary or--
not undead.
Non-dead, alive writers that you have been reading
over the past few years?
- Well, as I said, Domenico Starnone, whose two novels
I've recently translated.
One is called Trick in Italian--
in English, sorry.
And the other is Ties.
I recently very much admired the novel
by Neel Mukherjee, my friend, who's here with me
today, A State of Freedom.
We had a wonderful conversation about that novel
not long ago in Princeton.
But in general, I don't read very much contemporary fiction.
And at this point, I don't really read fiction in English
either.
So it's a lot of 19th century and 20th century
Italian authors at the moment who are feeding me.
- Along those lines, we have a couple questions
about translation.
Someone says, can you talk a little bit
about your experience of translating the story that you
read and your book.
In other words, you wrote in Italian and then someone
else translated it.
And this story you wrote and then translated yourself.
And following on that, someone wants
to know, so when you translate from Italian to English,
did you edit substantially?
Did you change it substantially?
What was that process like for you?
- To translate this story?
It was really weird.
It's a very weird thing to try to translate myself.
It's very disorienting.
I mean, it's a level of disorientation that is--
it's like the final frontier, in a way.
The other day with my family we walked out
on the breakwater at Provincetown,
that final little bit that I wrote about many years ago
in The Namesake, the novel I'm convinced
I presented in this room.
In any case.
And as I was walking this time with my family, my kids now
racing ahead of their old parents, my son
coming back saying, can you speed it up, guys?
We've reached the end.
Anyway.
But I was going slowly, partly because I was reflecting on--
I mean, it was in Provincetown 20 years ago
that I really felt born as a writer,
fully born in a kind of definitive way, in a way
that I never subsequently questioned.
Because until that experience--
I was 30 years old.
And everything, all of the sort of writing activity
before then, it was all in pencil.
I was ready to erase everything.
Not literally the words, so much as just the presumption.
And after those seven months in Provincetown,
something happened.
And I felt that it was ink and not pencil, that I
was ink and no longer a pencil.
In any case, I was walking out across the breakwater.
And I was thinking, well, 20 years ago,
I started writing seriously in English.
And then 15 years after that, I moved to Italy.
And I started writing in a new language.
And then a couple of years ago, I
started translating out of Italian the work
of somebody else into English.
And now I'm writing in Italian and translating myself
out of Italian.
And I thought, I think that is that final lighthouse
that you get to.
And then you just can't go anywhere else.
I think I've gotten to that point.
So translating myself is that.
It is quite-- it is arduous and bewildering for me.
I've just finished a short novel in Italian
that I'm thinking of translating.
And I mean, I'm sort of dreading it.
Because it's going to be very hard.
- Do you prefer, though, to translate it yourself
rather than to turn it over to someone else?
- I feel completely sort of torn up about it.
Because on the one hand, I don't want
anybody else to translate it.
And on the other hand, I don't really
want to translate it either.
[LAUGHTER]
But I have to.
I have to figure out something.
I think maybe once I get into it,
into the room with the Italian version, maybe it will be OK.
I mean, this story was sort of an experiment.
One day I was swimming in the pool,
and I thought, well, it's only 10 pages.
How hard can it be?
And it was hard.
It was hard.
But I think what made it easier was that I had a lot of time.
It was something I wrote so long ago now that it's almost like--
I mean, once I write something--
after I write something, and if enough time goes by,
I completely forget about it.
And it just-- it could be written by anybody.
- I imagine that would make it a little bit easier in some ways
to translate it.
Because there's some space.
- Yeah, so once it sort of hardens like that,
and I don't really connect--
I'm not connected to it anymore, it might be easier.
I mean, the problem with this novel
is that I just finished it up.
And it's still-- the spirit of it is still kind of hovering.
And I don't know if it's the right time
to immediately translate it back into English.
But then I feel this horrible expectation and people
saying, well, when is it going to be translated?
Because of course, nobody can read it
if I don't translate it.
I mean, nobody other than Italians.
And it's very interesting to be performing this experiment
and to be really living the reality of how colossally
dominant the English language is in our world,
and to just realize it, and to experience it as a writer,
to experience what it means to write a story in Italian,
in Granta Italia, which is no longer even in publication,
and to know that 10 people read it.
And that's only because I told 10 people in Rome, guess what?
I have this story.
And I made photocopies and shared it with them.
The way I used to--
when I used to live in Boston all those years ago,
and my very first short story was published
in the Harvard Review.
And I was so ecstatic.
And three people read it.
And three more people read it because I made photocopies
and gave them to them.
I'm back in that place as a writer in Italian.
And then it comes out in The New Yorker,
and it has a totally different life, a totally different set
of muscles and capacity to--
there's no basis of comparison.
It's absurd.
It's staggering.
It's mind-boggling.
- But it does sound like it's important to you,
too, that this story does reach this larger audience, that it--
- You know, I translated this story totally sort of randomly.
Literally, I was swimming in the pool one day in Princeton,
thinking, let me just see what it's like.
I wasn't really thinking about publishing the story in English
in that sense.
I mean, it just seemed like a story
I wrote, a kind of discrete piece of work.
And I'd forgotten about it.
And then I thought, oh, let me see what happens.
And then my agent said, what's going on back there?
And I said, well, I have this little thing.
I don't know.
And The New Yorker kindly published it.
But I wasn't thinking about it in that way.
I mean, I think that's another thing I'm
trying to liberate myself from.
I mean, maybe I'm just completely crazy at this point.
But just the whole machinery of publishing, editing.
I don't know.
I'm questioning everything.
- Well, and then I think all of those mechanisms
are very separate from the act of creation
and the artistic side of it.
This may be a difficult question for you to answer.
But you might be one of the few people who can answer it.
Because you can read in Italian and in English.
I'm curious if the responses were different,
if the story was read differently
in Italy than it has been read over here in The New Yorker.
Not just in terms of numbers, but in terms of meaning,
or import, or the meanings that people are putting onto it.
- I don't know.
I mean, I think the story is--
as you say, I mean, it could take place anywhere.
And it talks about a very, unfortunately, rather
widespread problem, phenomenon in our world
regarding intolerance, and migration, and attitudes
toward people who are different, and feeling out of place,
and belonging or not belonging.
And I mean, I think immigration is one thing
in the Italian context.
And it's a different thing in the context of the United
States or in the UK, for example.
They're different places with different histories,
different reality, so forth.
I mean, I think for the--
I think I am read differently by Italians in Italian.
And I'm read differently-- as opposed to people who know me,
the Jhumpa Lahiri who wrote in English
and was born as an English language writer.
I think for some of those readers,
this story comes as a bit of a, what happened to her?
So some people have said, well, but your other stories
were like this.
And they were talking about those kinds of things.
And they sounded more like that.
- Which goes back to that question
of expectations of what people expect you to be.
- So in English, there's a little bit more
of the before and after comparison conversation more.
Whereas I think in the Italian context,
Italians are more just sort of benevolently curious
about what I'm doing.
And they're equally incredulous, but in a more benevolent way.
Whereas I think in the American context,
I'm now in a phase where I'm aware that what I'm doing
is odd and not the expected.
And I have to tolerate much more of a sort of mixed reviews,
as it were.
I don't read my reviews.
But a mixed sense of people who just don't like this.
People don't like what I'm doing.
People are very intolerant.
People just want me to go back to the old thing
and the old ways.
Don't like this experimentation.
They say things to my face about it.
And it's interesting, because I think
it's all part of this quest to evade the idea of identity,
even a writerly identity, which can be quite problematic.
Which I think is problematic.
Again, I think the artist has to shun identity at all costs.
- Well, it's fascinating to read this story
and see your new direction.
Thank you so much, Jhumpa.
- Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
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