I Write therefore I Am (Not): Reclaiming Negative Identities in Multilingual Literature (Expanded Findings)

Many contemporary multilingual authors face the challenge of positioning themselves in relation to purportedly monolingual cultural spaces. As argued by Yasemin Yildiz, this is due to the currency of Romantic notions of language, nationality, and literary creativity giving rise to a dynamic tension between monolingual and multilingual practices. Therefore, these writers often live and work in the state of asymptotic self-translation described by Mary Besemeres. A common way of experiencing and representing such as a state is by explicitly resisting notions of linguistic belonging and national literary identity. How do multilingual writers define their authorial identity in contexts where the notion of authorship is dependent on monolingual norms? How is resistance to monolingual imperatives channelled into new ways of relating to language? And how does the tension between mono- and multilingualism manifests itself in the literary representation of multilingual authorship? This paper focusses on the case of Jhumpa Lahiri and her use of negative constructions to (re)define her authorial persona and literary practice in Italian. Taking a cue from Riika Ala-Risku’s insight on the role of metalanguage in literary multilingualism, a close reading of metalinguistic passages from Lahiri’s multilingual works traces her evolution against the grain – from Pulitzer Prize winner writing in a global lingua franca to exophonic author in a national language that she is still learning – pointing the way to alternative ways of shaping the relationship between authors and their literary language(s).