Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity (review)

The conditions giving rise to a speaker's regular use of more than one language vary greatly. The reasons may be political. In Africa, Asia, and the Americas, colonialism left the legacy of English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. More recently, political repression by fascist regimes has sent citizens of different nations in search not only of another homeland, but also of a new language, sometimes to replace, at other times to complement, their mother tongue. Numerous other factors, increasingly common in today's global world, might also result in bi- or trilingualism, such as parents of different nationalities or periods of residence abroad.

During the early part of the twentieth century, anthropologically-based linguistic research stressed the importance of language influencing thought, in that speakers of different languages also inhabit different conceptual worlds, as suggested by B. L. Whorf. More recently, prototype theory has pointed to the link between language and the conceptualization of the world, and how the prototypes provided by different cultures and societies are reflected in early acquired patterns of categorization. Thus, accessibility to another linguistic window to the world, and with it a difference in its conceptualization, is likely to be a factor affecting the creative working process of bilingual writers. In the present volume, a range of writers reflect on the interaction between the languages at their disposal, resulting from colonialism, exile, or other individually-determined factors.

Bi- or trilingualism in the aftermath of colonialism is the subject of several contributions. In "Various Lives," Anita Desai, who grew up in Delhi at the crossroads of Indian and British culture, remembers how she would speak Hindi with her siblings, and at night turn to the English literary canon or spend the evening listening to her mother sing German lullabies. As an adult returning from the United States to India, loss of time and experience leaves her with no voice of her own to record what is now new territory. She regains it in Baumgartner, a fictional German émigré who, like her mother, escapes from the Holocaust to India where he is forced to build a new language. In "The Im/Possiblity of Life-Writing in Two Languages," Shirley Geok-lin Lim describes speaking English and her mother's "Malay-tongued" language while growing up (43). However, her mother's departure from the family also means the loss of her language. Conversations stop abruptly as she enters the room, depriving her of access to Hokkien, the language in which her mother's story was whisperingly narrated. Not surprisingly, her choice of language for her "life-writing" is American English, the language of her adopted homeland.

For two contributors, the linguistic power struggle which resulted from the French-Algerian conflict has been the divisive force defining their work. Born in Algeria as the daughter of a Frenchman, Assia Djebar attempts to resuscitate her dead Arabo-Berber past through the use of the French language in "Writing in the Language of the Other." She now describes herself as a woman writing in a language in which she nevertheless feels herself remain "a migrant" (27). In "Arabic: the Silenced Father Tongue," Leïla Sebbar describes the circumstances leading to her not speaking Arabic, the language of her father: her Dordogne-born mother turned her house into "a little France." While French remains her written language, the subject of her writing is the colonized land of her father, thus assuring that his voice and the language of his forbearers will not remain silent. Arabic is also the language lost in "The Drowned Library (Reflections on Found, Lost and Translated Books and Language)," a title that symbolically refers to the author's water-damaged Arabic books. Born in northern Palestine, Anton Shammas moved to Haifa and Jerusalem, where he left for the United States. There, Shammas describes himself as "a translator and linguistic refugee, a fugitive from three languages" (123).

The case of bilingualism that arises from enforced exile is aptly illustrated...