Surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington wrote with both hands, rummaged a foreign langauge to describe the feelings so foreign to her-- the traumas of the second World War. Parul Seghal's essay inspired me to consider the commitments of exophonic writers.
An exophonic writer works outside her mother tongue-- orphaned, somehow. Her first husband, Max Ernst, was sent to concentration camps.
Though the list of exophonic writers is long, reasons for exophonic writing vary by writer. For Nabokov, it was driven by trauma, dislocation, wandering. For Lahiri, it signified and enabled a rebirth. For Cioran, it served as an annihilation of the past. For Beckett, it weakened the affect and purified language.
I tried to address the instability of exophonic language in "The Story Line", a recent piece for Mutha Magazine:
My parents defected from Ceausescu’s Romania. The defectors never stop concocting huge, impossible dreams, what they would do if they had time and money.
Somehow, they make both. You grow on sailboats and ski slopes wearing hand-me-down gloves with adult turtlenecks tucked into four pairs of leggings. In the lift line, skiers gawk at your unsportsmanlike clothing. Some point and stare.
The defectors pretend not to notice. They speak in Romanian, their hands fisting around ski poles. “It’s not polite to point,” my mother whispers. Pointing is a way to get attention; to decide who is strange and who stands out. You notice most pointers were born in America. They are free to raise a finger, free to flock and coalesce into cliques. They turn into hordes of toothy mammals, choired crowds, feathered giggle.
The girls giggle in unison.
How many times, how many places, do the girls giggle in unison?
The girls: everything they feel exists in one common, public language. Your feelings, on the other hand, are hard, kerneled secrets.
In a sense, writing in Romanian is my ongoing "coliva". I bake draft after draft, knowing the cake need not rise.
