The inevitable trauma of learning a language

We wanted to believe our speech was passive, unconscious even. But could it ever be?

Nothing makes me more anxious in Italian than having to order food, but the prosciutto here was worth it.

The first man I truly loved had a very particular way of speaking, punctuating his words with a casual slang that did not immediately belie his deeply intellectual nature.

From the moment I met him, I was both charmed and repelled by this contrast. With time, I too began to borrow his verbal habits, saying “Word” to close a text conversation or “Nailed it” in a slightly flippant tone. I peppered my own speech with these mannerisms, wanting, perhaps subconsciously, to increase the connection between the two of us.

When the relationship inevitably ended, long after the potency of the immediate memories had faded, his language still managed to take root in my own. Here I was, standing in line, waiting for coffee in Starbucks, and my careless tossing-off of “Word” to the barista could quickly send me on a journey through a painful past. It seemed unfair, that even my own speech could betray me.

Yet I inadvertently thought I had found a solution to this dilemma when I moved to Rome at 27. Here, I could speak Italian, a language free of any traumatic associations. I was finally being handed a completely clean slate. I had not been raised in this culture, and my word choice did not bring with it memories of arguments, of ruptures, of alienation or insecurity. There was no reason to wince at “farcela” or “andarsene”—they carried with them no emotional valence. They were simply clinical, existing only as concepts to be learned.

Perhaps unwittingly, I was also seeking a kind of creative liberation. In that, I was not alone—I was certainly not the first writer to abandon my first language in favor of another, in favor, even, of Italian. Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri has become, for better or worse, a sort of expert on linguistic expatriates in Italy. The abbreviated narrative on Lahiri is as follows: after a long-standing interest in the Italian language and immense, well-deserved literary success in English (she won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in her early thirties), she moved to Rome with her family in 2012, where she dedicated herself fully to reading, speaking and writing in Italian. In a 2016 interview, she said she did not know if she would return to writing in English.

There are many valid critiques to be leveled at Lahiri, from the way she often tries to define the immigrant experience in Italy without recognizing her immense privilege to her self-portrayal as one of the few writers to choose to write in a non-native language. (We might argue, for example, that the vast majority of non-native-English-speaking writers and artists are often forced to do this in some way to appeal to a more commercial audience.) Lahiri has instead depicted her language journey as a love affair, at times reminiscent of “Romeo and Juliet,” star-crossed lovers so destined to meet that their path exists separate from any social or geopolitical context.

In a 2021 interview with The Guardian, Lahiri discusses the tension between Bengali, her parents’ native language that she grew up speaking but in which she never learned to read and write, and English, the language in which she was educated in her youth in Rhode Island.

“I love it still,” she told journalist Lisa Allardice of English. “But at the same time, emotionally, it represented this sort of impossible challenge. My relationship with English was always very much part of the desire as a child to be fully part of that world.”

Italian, on the other hand, was free of these youthful and often painful connections. There was, per Lahiri, “not even a question of really belonging in Italian,” and the tension between Bengali and English had inadvertently been resolved.

She later told The Paris Review’s Francesco Pacifico, in an interview he notes was conducted in Italian “at Lahiri’s request,” that:

Italy’s great gift to me is the voice that tells me that I don’t have to follow the rules, that I can be who I want and write what I want on my own terms. It’s only when I’m writing in Italian that I manage to turn off all those other, judgmental voices, except perhaps my own.

I could love this idea if I could believe it, but I think the minute we start to really inhabit a language is the minute that it loses any kind of neutrality. It is perhaps true that a non-native language may be free of certain prisons—only to constrain us with others. Language learning, in my mind, was simply a version of the old adage: Wherever you go, there you are. Yes, maybe you expressed yourself differently, limited in some ways by your capacity or your linguistic context, but ultimately, there was still an Essential Self that came through.

In my first months in this country, my Italian class was always a source of excitement, a setting that brought with it limitless opportunities to expand my knowledge, to communicate differently, to convey something more deeply. But as the language went from an abstract to a lived reality, the lesson itself could be a haunting reminder of conversations and people I no longer wanted to remember.

I longed for a world in which Italian could be a completely clean language, in which its very use had never and could never cause me pain. The problem with that world was that it didn’t exist.

***

Still, Italian did offer something that in English always seemed to elude me: a kind of emotional distance. A knife wound in an argument didn’t cut quite so deep, because I found myself also puzzling over the linguistic choices.

“Sorry, sorry,” a part of me wanted to say to my interlocutor, “that was, frankly, brutal, but why, exactly, did you choose to use congiuntivo imperfetto instead of trapassato?’”

Each conversation was a linguistic and anthropological minefield. In this way, I could divest myself just a little bit from the emotional ramifications, preferring instead to view the person in front of me as a subject of study, tightening the belt of my metaphorical trench-coat and holding my magnifying glass up to the light.

Occasionally, this distance occurred naturally—from a lack of literal understanding. Early on in my Italian relationships, I still found myself mentally cataloguing every word, the way I might when conducting an interview. I wasn’t able to listen in a truly passive way, and so, I often missed any perceived slights or underlying tones.

Once, my best friend and I were at a lovely beach town outside of Rome with my dear Italian friend on a windy March day, twirling our spaghetti al pomodoro with our forks and facing the seaside vista. At one point, my Italian friend, whom I had met in a bookstore in this very beach town, noted that there were levels of friendship: conoscenza, frequentazione, amicizia. The first was a sort of knowing someone on a surface level, the second someone you spent time with but not closely, and the third was the pinnacle of a platonic relationship.

With my American sensibilities, in which a “friendship” could be defined in as little as 30 minutes in your first days in college, I had assumed, after countless outings together, that we were quite clearly friends. But tucked into this entire discourse was her response that we had not yet reached that level.

I say tucked, because I didn’t even notice the comment until my best friend and I had taken leave from lunch, taking selfies on the boardwalk with our hair blowing in the wind.

“You’re not upset by what she said?” She asked me. I hadn’t even heard it. Thus, whatever emotional shock I might have suffered in the moment was now softened by the very linguistic delay.

As my Italian improved, I lost some of this literal delay—I could understand, with some ease, most things as they were being said—but the effect of the words was still processed in the same way. My best friend and I had met each other in Italian class, and so, despite her flawless English, we had decided to start our friendship in Italian. Each time I nestled into the warmth of her Prati apartment, I would recount the latest update in my personal life and watch as her face fell with inevitable disappointment. She didn’t even have to say what I knew she was thinking: “You did what? Again? Why?!”

But her chastising talks never managed to truly pierce me, not because they weren’t incisive, but because they were always administered in Italian. Being reminded of my various missteps in Italian simply didn’t hurt as much, because it wasn’t my language and it registered with a lighter touch. It was the difference between the prick of a safety-pin and a blood draw—the needle simply never went past the surface.

In this way, I understood what Lahiri meant about Italian clarifying my own voice—I, too, liked myself better in my second language. Maybe it was simply the internalized pat-on-the-back that came from speaking a language that wasn’t my own. Maybe it was because, in a second language, I allowed myself to make mistakes and to be curious about others’ choices, linguistic or otherwise.

Unlike Lahiri, I didn’t think that the answer ended in a sort of motivational speech: choose your language and free your mind. “It’s only when I’m writing in Italian that I manage to turn off all those other, judgmental voices, except perhaps my own,” she had said. In a sense, this was also my experience, not because Italian offered me complete and utter freedom, but because the sheer act of language formation meant that I had less time and mental space to fixate on my general series of intrusive thoughts. You know, what I was doing wrong today, the next mistake I might possibly make, how I was different or worse or strange or simply not enough. Those voices, in my case, didn’t disappear, but they were just slightly crowded out by the more neutral, utilitarian voice that said: Now, if you use condizionale passato here, what should follow in the next clause? This was a task, a necessity—something I could handle. A sentence had to be shaped.

In English, language formation was no longer a conscious step. But it was the very consciousness of Italian that helped me to step out of the mental prison made of my own neuroses and into the physical world.