After only a couple of years of fiction writing in English, I’ve faced this question enough times that I thought I should give it an answer, for myself and for others.
I grew up in Italy, in the Tuscan countryside. When I was little, the oil that seasoned all of my meals came from the olive trees in my garden. Once a year my extended family would gather and collect the olives from the trees and deliver them to our closest frantoio, where they would get transformed into our yearly supply of oil.
In the summer, I would go to the beach so often that the inside of my parents’ car was perpetually covered in sand. My favourite thing was to stand on the bagnasciuga and feel the waves wet my feet and then retract, over and over again.
In this peaceful, isolated, and culturally homogeneous setting, I quickly became a voracious reader. I was passionate about stories and spent numerous afternoons with my nose buried deep in a book. In primary school, I decided I would be a writer, and dedicated myself to writing and illustrating a series of tiny books made with torn A4 pages, scissors, and glue. The series was called: “Greta the Stripeless Tiger”.
At fourteen, I got so passionate about The Divine Comedy that I learned the entire first chapter by heart. At that age I also started developing a passion for languages, which led me to attend a linguistic high school, where I would learn three foreign languages over the next five years: English, French, and Spanish.
First Love and Elopement
At fifteen I became completely obsessed with languages in general and with the English language in particular. Imbued with the extremist mindset of the very young, I decided I would spend hours practicing my pronunciation every day, and read books, listen to music and watch movies exclusively in English. My infatuation with the English language was not dissimilar from the blind devotion of one’s first love: the fact that no one around me understood or approved of it only made me want it more.
There was so much to enjoy about learning languages: the gradual transformation of nonsensical noise into meaning, the mechanical nature of grammar, the validation I got in the form of good grades. Still, I believe that what truly kept me hooked on languages was the promise of a completely different way of thinking, of gaining access to a different set of tools to understand reality.
I went on a few exchanges during my high school years to consolidate my language skills. The more time I spent abroad, the more I found my childhood world small and suffocating. I decided I would leave my Italian life behind and go somewhere new, where I could start things over, having undergone a brain reset by re-naming every concept and object in the world. My acquired tongues were all appealingly disconnected from the reality I had grown up in. They were not the language of my parents, my grandparents, or my ancestors. I had chosen them, they were mine.
At eighteen, I decided I’d move to Scotland for university. I had never been there, but I knew the language, and EU citizens didn’t have to pay any fees to attend University there in those pre-Brexit times. I hoped this would be enough to convince my parents to let me go. As it turned out, it wasn’t. Hidden in my bedroom, I sent out applications to five Scottish universities without telling them. Then I graduated with one of the highest grades in my school and guilted them into allowing me to attend Glasgow University. After a few weeks of understandable arguments and skepticism, they begrudgingly supported me the whole way through, regularly visiting me in my new Glaswegian home.
Back to Italy: Daily Bilingualism
After five years in Scotland and two in Ireland, I found space in my life for compromise and returned to Italy. Now I speak both Italian and English daily: the former with my family and local friends, and the latter with my American partner, whom I live with, as well as with my friends from abroad. My passion for languages has stayed alive; despite losing some fluency in French and Spanish for lack of practice, I have learned a little Portuguese. I am still a voracious reader, and the books I consume are mainly in Italian and English, although I occasionally still engage in smaller volumes written in French or Spanish.
Moving back to my hometown after spending the better part of a decade abroad has made me feel impossibly foreign in the places of my childhood, and my daily bilingualism has left me with a great deal of confusion regarding my linguistic identity. When people ask me why I write in my second language, I don’t know how to answer. The question implies a hiererarchical mindset that I don’t subscribe to, as if there was a language that belongs to me more, my first, and then one that is a little bit less mine, my second. Or perhaps, one that I know better, my first, and one that I don’t know as well, my second. To me, the only reading of these labels that makes sense is a chronological one: Italian is the language I learned first; English is the one I learned second. But then, if I learned French and Spanish simultaneously with English, which one of them is my third language, my fourth?
Here is how my bilingualism works: when engaging in grownup activities, such as writing a CV, contacting my doctor, writing an academic essay or formal email, English constitutes a much easier option for me. Until now, I have never had to do adult life in Italian (I’m twenty-six years old). I find myself googling how to end a formal email, or how to write a CV in Italian, sometimes even translating technical terms from English to Italian. When it comes to the experiences of my childhood, however it’s easier for me to find the words in Italian. When I think of the part of the beach that the sea wets and then leaves, wets and then leaves, the word bagnasciuga is the only one that comes to my mind. When writing about the olive oil of my childhood, I didn’t translate the term frantoio because that was the way it spontaneously came to my mind, and I have never encountered its English equivalent before.
With this in mind, why do I write in my second language? Because it comes more easily to me. Because it is a tool I have acquired willingly and methodically, through immense effort, a tool that makes my thoughts easier to organise. Because it belongs to me as much as my first. Because languages belong to all those who speak them, not only to those who were born into them. One might feel most comfortable in their second, third, or even fourth language for the most disparate reasons; linguistic identity can be just as complex as cultural identity. I will take this a step further: languages belong to all those who speak them, would like to speak them, like the sound of them, are struggling to learn them, and are forced to learn them. Languages belong to everyone.
Joining the Exophonic Community
Although I am a firm believer that I have every right to write in my second language, that doesn’t mean I have never felt insecure about my choice. At times, I fear that I will never be as eloquent as a native speaker, and I often used to feel alone in my choice to write in a tongue other than my native one. However, I soon saw that the path I had chosen was more crowded than I had initially thought. One of my closest friends was also writing in her second language, and she introduced me to the courses organized by thi wurd, where I met other writers who chose to write in English as a second language, as well as natives that made me feel deeply appreciated and welcome in the group.
When I realised that the phenomenon of non-native writing is quite widespread, I decided to investigate the whole thing further. I remembered from my school days that Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) wrote Heart of Darkness (1899) in his third language, English, his first language being Polish and his second French. Other languages he knew included Russian, German, Latin, Italian, Spanish, and Malay, at various levels of proficiency.
Further research revealed that he learned English purely through books. This resulted in him mastering its grammar and syntax perfectly but retaining a foreign accent so strong that people had trouble understanding him when he spoke as he didn’t know the correct pronunciation of many common words. This was a particularly touching detail for me since I retain an Italian accent in English, and in the past, I often worried it might make my claim to the English language less legitimate.
Why did Conrad choose to write in his third language, then? Literary critic and historian Zdzsław Najder argues that approaching personally sensitive problems is more easily done in an acquired tongue (1). Conrad himself claimed that, had he not written in English, he would not have written at all (2).
As I read more about Conrad, I came across the term exophony, which was coined in 2007 by linguists Prof. Dr. Susan Arndt, Dr. Dirk Naguschewski, and Prof. Dr. Robert Stockhammer. It refers to the practice of writing in a language other than one’s mother tongue. Although the coinage of the word is fairly recent, exophonic writers have existed since ancient times; for instance, in II century A.D., Lucian of Samosata penned A True Story in Attic Greek despite his first language being Syriac. Historians believe that he did so to ensure that his work would reach a wider public. Similarly, Thomas More wrote Utopia in Latin in the XIV century A.D., despite his first language being English. Many European authors also chose to write in Latin in Medieval times, even though it was not the language that they spoke in their daily lives, to make their work accessible to the international intellectual community.
The discovery of the existence of exophony filled me with euphoria; not only was I not alone, but the path I had chosen had a name, a definition, and a long list of notable exponents who had chosen to walk it throughout human history. I had to find out more. Who else was an exophonic writer?
On the Shoulders of Giants
As it turns out, Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) also wrote many of his works in his second language, French, including his most famous play, En Attendant Godot (1952), translated to English as Waiting for Godot. Like Conrad, Beckett was also multilingual, having learned French, Italian, and some German during his life. However, he had a stronger connection with the French language than with his other ones, having spent the largest portion of his life in France, where he moved at the age of 22.
When questioned about his decision to write in French, Beckett replied that he found it easier to “write without style” in his second language and that it was a way for him to “impoverish [himself] even further.” Michael Edwards argues that Beckett chose to write in French to disengage himself from history and memory, and to point out the danger of familiarity; he goes on to argue, “if one is less oneself in a foreign language, […] one can also become more genuinely someone, since one speaks with another voice and with a language that is new.”
Another notable exponent of the exophonic movement is Milan Kundera (1929-2023). Despite the fact that his French works were never as popular as the ones he wrote in his native Czech language, Kundera regarded himself as a French writer, and he even argued that his works should be categorized as French literature.
Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia and moved to France in 1975, at the age of 46, to escape the Communist regime in his home country. In France, he faced prejudices and was often discredited as a literary and linguistic migrant. Still, he incorporated his struggles in his works, some of which presented a plurilingual set of characters.
Like Beckett’s, Kundera’s French is often impure and chaotic, for it is primarily a language of exile. Both writers seem to believe that language written by a non-native is inevitably different from the same one written by a native. However, like many other exophonic writers, they both embrace this, making strangeness of expression and voluntary twists in meaning a crucial part of their literary message.
In her beautiful New Yorker piece titled “Teach Yourself Italian”, Jhumpa Lahiri (1967) talks about how, as an adult, she developed a deep passion for the Italian language. Having learned it over a few years in the U.S., she moved to Italy with her family.
I beamed when I discovered that, in preparation for the move, she had decided to read in Italian exclusively, which marked the beginning of her “linguistic pilgrimage.” Her devotion to the Italian language reminded me of my own devotion to English, back when my own linguistic pilgrimage began.
After her move to Italy, Lahiri only wrote in her diary in Italian because she claims that, when she took the pen in her hand, she no longer heard English in her brain. Despite the difficulties faced in her linguistic endeavour, she knew that the person writing in this new, approximate language was the most genuine and vulnerable part of herself.
Still, like may exophonic writers, Lahiri is often faced with negative reactions when she tells people that she’s writing in a new language. In her case, people are often confused by the choice of writing in a language that is much less widely read on a global scale than English, which they regard as an unnecessary commercial risk. However, non-English writers who choose to write in English in order to have a larger readership are not free from people’s criticism either, which leads me to think that people’s skepticism towards exophony is not exclusively rooted in financial concern.
The ranks of the exophonic movement are quite crowded, with other notable exophonic writers including Jack Kerouac, John Milton, Oscar Wilde, Ágota Kristóf, Eva Hoffman, Vladimir Nabokov, and Yann Martel. This notwithstanding, exophony has only recently acquired the status of a recognised literary genre. Its official integration in academic studies, for example, is showcased by the University of Warwick’s English and Comparative Literature department, which offers a course titled “Exophony or Writing Beyond the Mother Tongue.”
The recognition of exophony as its own branch of literature contributes to giving dignity and meaning to the whole movement, while also providing a valuable framework for all new writers who would like to try their hand at writing in their non-native tongue. Despite that, the movement is so recent that even those who engage in exophonic writing, such as myself, can be unaware of its existence!
Exophonic writers are often caught in a double bind, where they are either discredited for writing in a language that is “not theirs”, or they are faced with reactions of patronizing amazement at their linguistic achievements. I believe it is important to look at exophonic writing as a tool that can provide us with new, enriching perspectives, keeping in mind the specific linguistic path that the author has embarked on to create their works.
All my writing is produced just as much by childhood me, splashing water all around her as she ran along the Tyrrhenian bagnasciuga, as it is by nineteen-year-old me, delighting in the endless possibilities of her new home as she strolled along the streets of Glasgow. It is also created by twenty-four-year-old me, teaching English as a second language in Dublin, and by twenty-six-year-old me, finding her footing in an Italian city as a grown-up woman along with her American husband. When I write in English, I feel comfortable allowing every part of myself to speak in its most authentic voice; what more does one need to call a language theirs?
Endnotes
Najder, Zdislaw. 1984. Joseph Conrad: A chronicle. (Transl. by Galina Carroll‑ Najder). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Conrad, J. 1912, A personal record, Floating Press, Auckland, New Zealand.
Credits
Photographs of the Terrazza Mascagni of Livorno, taken by Viola Ragonese.