Exophonic Writers

What do you call an author who writes in a language that isn’t their mother tongue?

Believe it or not, it does actually have an official name – an exophonic writer.

Exophonic writers are an eccentric bunch, for it does take a peculiar mind to choose to express yourself in a language that isn’t really yours. It is generally agreed there are two types of ‘exophones’: those who acquired the second language early in life and, in most cases, are bilingual, and those who learnt it later in life and are definitely non-native speakers.

What drives them all to become exophonic? The reasons can be manifold: political, historical, socio-economical. Some abandon their original language because of a personal trauma, a geographical dislocation, a war. Some do it in search of a larger audience. For some it’s a purely creative decision, dictated by a natural affinity for another language.

It’s not a new phenomenon: Voltaire wrote letters in English and, during his stay in England, went as far as to change his first name from Francois to Francis. Milan Kundera chose French over his native Czech. Chinua Achebe, a native speaker of Igbo, wrote primarily in English. Nabokov was trilingual from an early age and, to his father’s disappointment, could read and write in English before he could in Russian.

He wrote his first nine novels in Russian, but achieved fame with his books written in English. Jack Kerouac’s mother tongue was French; he started learning English when he was six and didn’t speak it fluently until in his late teens. And yet his most famous works are in English and it was only towards the end of his life that he admitted he wanted to speak French again.

Samuel Beckett abandoned English because it felt ‘too cluttered’ for him and chose to write in French to be ‘mal armé,’ poorly armed. ‘More and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things behind it,’ he wrote in 1937, ‘Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask.’ For my compatriot, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, otherwise known as Joseph Conrad, English wasn’t even his second language (his French was better), it was his third. And yet he persisted in arduously crafting his novels in English, even though he compared the process to ‘throwing mud at the wall’.

For Yiyin Li, who was born and grew up in China, and now lives in the US, her decision to write in English was deeply personal. It helped her to erase her unhappy past and create a new internal world that exists only in English. She calls English her ‘private language’, as opposed to Mandarin Chinese that has become a purely functional ‘public language’.  ‘It is hard to feel in an adopted language, yet it is impossible in my native language’. But she is aware that a complete abandonment of her native tongue can be ‘a kind of suicide’.

Yuko Otomo, a Japanese native who writes in English, said that writing in an adopted language is like ‘digesting things with a different DNA filter’. She started writing poems in English when she moved to New York, aged twenty nine, quite late to make such a bold literary switch. ‘It felt like being thrown into a black hole,’ she said about the transition. ‘Like transplanting a tree into a different soil: if the tree is young, it will adjust better. In my case, the tree was already fully grown. So it was not easy. But my desire to share my poetic world with others was stronger than my fear or hesitation.’ She loves English because it’s simpler, more logical, and less hierarchical than Japanese. ‘I am elated to address a professor and a dog with the same pronoun “you.”’

Having learnt English in my teens the way most of the non-English-speaking world does, through school, movies, songs and holiday trips abroad, I still get a kick out of expressing myself in a language that isn’t my mother tongue. What started as an aspiration, a challenge, has become a way of life. Somewhere along the way I realised that the switch from Polish into English had changed me. I’ve began to think, and write, differently.

I’ve become someone else, more confident and, in a way, more honest in expressing myself. Jhumpa Lahiri, an American author of Indian origin, who now writes exclusively in Italian, has said that the decision has allowed her to become ‘a tougher, freer writer, who, taking root again, grows in a different way.’ I agree with her: changing creative language is not a rebirth, it’s a metamorphosis. It doesn’t make you forget your past, it forces you to look into the future. It makes you more resilient and inventive.

And here we are today, a bunch of ‘exophones’ – Khaled Hosseini, Eugen Chirovici, Yasmina Khandra, Elif Shafak, Nadeem Aslam, Yoko Tawada, Yiyun Li, Xiaolu Guo, Aleksandar Hemon, to list just a few – who all keep throwing mud at the wall. It’s a tough job: you know mud, some of it sticks to the wall and blends in nicely like the best adobe plaster, and some of it falls off to become an inconsequential slush pile. But when it does stick, creating new astonishing patterns, you know you have the best job in the world.

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Aga Lesiewicz is a Polish-born British writer. She lives in London and writes in English. Her psychological thrillers, Rebound and Exposure, have been published by Pan Macmillan, and translated into French and Polish.

Follow her on Twitter @Aga_Lesiewicz

 

About EXPOSURE

You know that feeling. Your life’s on track and all is going well. And then something monumental occurs that turns everything on its head. It happens to everyone but, for Kristin Ryder, it was much, much worse . . .

When up-and-coming photographer Kristin begins to receive anonymous emails, her life in a trendy loft in London’s Hoxton with Anton, her ultra-cool, street-artist boyfriend, suddenly begins to feel unsafe. The emails come with sinister attachments that suggest the sender has an intimate knowledge of Kristin’s past, and soon her life spirals out of control.

Who can she trust? And will she be able to discover the sender’s identity before it’s too late?

Breathtaking and shocking, Exposure by Aga Lesiewicz will grip you until the last snap of the camera shutter.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing, Women Writers