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Crossing Language

This season, we're thinking about crossing, not only the physical crossing of national borders, but various forms of encounter and exchange that happen because of those migrations. Several episodes this season will look closely at crossing in the context of Italy, exploring how language and culture cross borders, how the focus on historical migrations helps us understand the present, and more. For these episodes, host Eleanor Paynter partners with colleague and guest host Elena Bellina, adjunct professor of Italian at New York University. 

Today's conversation is with multilingual writers Ubah Cristina Ali Farah and Amara Lakhous, whose work has been shaped by their own crossings. 

Guests

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah

Cristina Ali Farah

Links

"How Somali Women Are Breaking Tradition to Write Novels" in BBC News

"Reimagining Italy through Black Women's Eyes"

Commander of the River by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah

"Bambi" by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah

Le Stazioni della Luna by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah

La danza dell'orice (Words for Portraits) by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah

Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet by Amara Lakhous

The Night Bird by Amara Lakhous

Interview of Amara Lakhous in Full Stop

Transcript

Amara Lakhous  00:00

Languages are our freedom. And instead, nations are borders. Each time you find the border, that means there is exclusion and inclusion. Every time. If you have a border, that means that they can stay inside the others should be outside.

Eleanor Paynter  00:29

Welcome to Migrations: A World on the Move, a series brought to you by Cornell University's Migrations initiative. I'm Eleanor Paynter, ACLS fellow and Migrations fellow and your host for this podcast that seeks to understand our world through the interconnected movements that shape it. This season, we're thinking about crossing – not only the physical crossing of national borders, but also the various forms of encounter and exchange that happened because of those migrations. What do we learn about migration by looking at how language and culture across borders? How does the focus on historical migrations help us understand the present? Our focus on crossing will take us across many kinds of borders and spaces where migrants are shaping communities and building lives. And several episodes this season will focus on crossings specifically in the Italian context. For these episodes, I'm thrilled to be joined by Dr. Elena Bellina as cohost.

Elena Bellina  01:21

And hi, I'm Elena Bellina, adjunct professor of Italian at New York University. And I'm very happy and thrilled to be here with Eleanor Paynter to start these conversations about crossing. Eleanor and I started to collaborate during the pandemic on Zoom at conferences and events that we put together. So, our collaboration predates this year.

Eleanor Paynter  01:45

But it's still, I guess, amusing to me that we've finally met in person for this podcast after all this time, in this very small town in the center of Italy at the National Diary Archives(which we'll hear more about in an upcoming episode) So, finally getting to work together in person after so much time on Zoom, and getting to see these spaces together, too. Yeah.  It was really through conversations with Elena that we started thinking about crossing as a theme that might carry forward a season of episodes about how different kinds of border crossing, the crossing of different kinds of borders, shape people's lives and help us understand migration and belonging in new ways. And so, we have several episodes coming this season that think about crossing in language, as we're doing today, and also thinking about the crossing of memory and time and space in different ways, again, in the context of a diverse and changing Italy. And you and I also both cross languages in our own work. And that's something that has shaped our research and our teaching and is also really, of course, relevant to today's episode, which is about the relationship between language and borders and movement.

Elena Bellina  03:04

And we met in Italy, not in the U.S. or in New York, since we're both based in New York State, which was very interesting. So, crossing. We crossed many borders, too.

Eleanor Paynter  03:15

And it's interesting to look back on that and think about this conversation that we've now had with Amara Lakhous and Ubah Cristina Ali Farah who are talking about migration and movement as this creative source and the life and lives that they've had as a result of their movement across borders and their engagement with different languages.

Elena Bellina  03:38

And it was interesting to meet and hear more about their stories as an Algerian-Italian American for Amara Lakhous or Somali, Italian and now Belgian, for Ubah Cristina Ali Farah. So how they move through these different cultures and languages and continents, while using not their own language, their native languages, but Italian or other languages.

Eleanor Paynter  04:04

And Ubah Cristina Ali Farah is a writer whose work crosses multiple genres. She's a poet, a novelist, a playwright, librettist and an oral performer and she works extensively also with oral histories. She's Somali-Italian, was born in Italy and spent her childhood in Mogadishu until she had to flee the civil war there in 1991. And she's lived in multiple places since, including returning to Italy, which is where she met Amara Lakhous. Her work includes multiple novels and short stories that have also been translated into English. For example, Madre Piccola (Little Mother) and Il Comandante del Fiume (The Commander of the River) and a more recent work Le Stazioni della Luna (The Stations of the Moon). In a lot of this work, she's telling stories of the Somali Civil War and its refugees in Italy and in doing so also thinking about, thinking critically about Italian history and how it's represented for Italian readers. She also does this by incorporating Somali into her Italian writing, and you'll hear some of that in the reading that she gives in this episode. She has won multiple prizes for her work, including the Lingua Madre National Literary Prize in Italy and the Vittorini prize. She holds a PhD in African Studies from the University of Naples and has held multiple fellowships and residencies. She currently lives in Brussels and joined us from there for this episode.

Elena Bellina  05:34

So Amara Lakhous is an Italian author, journalist, an anthropologist of Algerian origin who currently lives in New York City with his wife and children. He was born in Algiers, in a Berber family, and graduated in philosophy from the University of Algiers. But then he moved to Italy in the 1990s for political reasons after work as a journalist in Algiers. And in Rome, he encountered Italian and decided to continue to learn and write into this languages at the University of Rome Sapienza, where he got a PhD in cultural anthropology and started to write fictional academic works in which he mixed Italian culture, African culture in different languages, and cultural questions about [the] relationship between inner Italian migrations and more recent migrations from Africa to Italy. He wrote several books and he was, he immediately, and won multiple awards from in different countries. In Italy, he won the Flaiano Prize, and the Racalmere-Leonardo Sciascia prize for Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, but also the Prix des Libraires Algériens in a year in 2008. And most recently, he was long listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2021 for his novel The Night Bird.

Eleanor Paynter  07:00

So, in this conversation, you'll hear their reflections. And you'll also notice that they're also quite good friends. And they've been through this, this turn in Italian, this, this, these shifts in Italy, are something that they've also experienced together as friends and as writers. And over the course of the conversation, you'll also hear them read from their work, and we'll link to spaces where you can find more of their work and more about their biographies on the show page.

Elena Bellina  07:30

Well, the way they told us about how they met in Rome, when they were very young. They had just arrived and they used to gather with other writers in a very specific bookshop in Rome, where all these very new-culture, new wave of culture, of first-generation Italian, was entering mainstream Italian culture. And they were all free and full of enthusiasm. And so, they started to open up Italian literature to this new world. That was really something that had never happened before.

Eleanor Paynter  08:07

I also found it really interesting when Ubah mentions that she thinks that was also such a unique moment, that there won't be another generation of writers like that one, because of the different, essentially, the different global issues that brought people together in that particular moment in that particular place. That's really interesting. And you can see in their conversation or hear in their conversation, that what was started in those writing networks in the 80s and 90s in Rome, and as they have expanded also in the 21st century, those have become, again, global networks. So now these are writers who are traveling to share their work, whose work is getting translated, who are engaged with writers who are based in the US and elsewhere in Europe and all over the world. And I think that really speaks also to the power of the stories that they're telling as Italian stories that have this really significant resonance.

There's a lot of debate in Italy, about how to talk about literature written by migrants, or people of African descent, who were born and raised in Italy, but who don't necessarily get treated as Italians, you know, either because of the citizenship laws or because of racism and xenophobia. And so, I think part of what, part of what their work is doing also is, it's important that this work is recognized as Italian literature, but it's also really important – and you hear this in the conversation between the writers – that we don't stop at the boundary of the nation and thinking about what this literature represents or who it represents or what it can mean for readers from all around the world.

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah  10:07

Thank you, Eleanor. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited about being in conversation with you and my, my dear friend Amara. We haven't met each other for a long time. But we, I was lucky enough to be in Rome the first years when he was there as well. And, and I think that also my writing has been somehow shaped by this, the conversations that we had at that time. And so, yeah, my name is Ubah Cristina Halle Farah. I'm, I was born in Italy, and in the early 70s, of Somali, a Somali father and Italian mother, and my father, they were both students at that time in Italy. Then, they decided, my father decided to go back to his country. So, I basically was raised and grew up in Somalia in Mogadishu until 1991. So I was at the time, I was almost 18, when I left the country, and lived for a year in Hungary, and then moved to Italy. First, I lived in Verona, which is, which was my birthplace and also where my mom is from. And then I moved to Rome three years later, and I studied in Rome literature. And that’s where, where the place where it started writing and, and thinking about what writing meant for me. At the time, being, I mean, being also Italian, my mother tongue, although I was, I mean, I grew up in Somalia, my, as I often say, my formal education has been in Italian. So yeah. Even though the everyday language was Somali, my technically, my mother tongue is Italian also. Even if it is something that we would question now, what a mother tongue is. Yeah. But I started mainly in Italian.

Amara Lakhous  12:14

So, I'm Amara Lakhous. I am a bilingual writer in Arabic and Italian. I used to say I arabize Italian and italianize Arabic. I was born three times. I was born the first time in Algiers in 1970. And at age 25, I went to Italy. So, I was born the second time. So, I lived in Italy for 18 years between Rome and Turin. And in 2014, I was born for the third time when I moved to New York. So, I have three lives. This is my, my life. And it's, of course, I have been dealing with, with identity for my entire life and borders, like identity, and especially languages.

Elena Bellina  13:04

Thank you. And to begin our conversation, we would love to hear about when you first met in Italy, because you both arrived in Italy around the same time, you were pretty much the same age. How did you meet? How / what happened?

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah  13:19

So how did we meet? Amara, I remember exactly the first time that I came to, to hear you in a, in a public, I mean, event. How can we summarize it? Because we met different times? (Yeah.) I think we were in the same university, I think. Yeah. At La Sapienza.

Amara Lakhous  13:39

I think we met the first time around 1998, 1999, probably 1999. And there was a group for, the fantastic group called Scritti d'Africa. I mean, mostly women interested in Africa. And then at the time, you were a poet. I remember you a poet. And we connected immediately. And when I was working in an Italian news agency in Trastevere and [where] you were living at that time, and there, we used to spend a long time with, especially in the lunchtime for one hour. And I remember Yasmeen… was a baby. Yeah, I remember. I remember. I remember very, very well. And we had a lot of, we shared a lot of events talking about our power, of our stories.

Elena Bellina  14:40

And what language were you using in Rome? I mean, it may sound like a silly question, but what was the language you felt comfortable in sharing?

Amara Lakhous  14:49

Italian. Of course.

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah  14:53

Italian. Our writing language. It was our most, I mean, common language. Yeah. Exactly Trastevere, Scripted Africa. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And many other places, but it is, this was the first place where we used to meet and discuss also, informally about our writing, which writing meant for us. Yeah, it was very powerful.

Eleanor Paynter  15:19

Yeah. And you're talking about this moment, that is maybe also an important sort of benchmark moment, because since then, writing by Italians of African descent has really grown, I think in, in its circulation and, and its recognition in different ways. Also being translated more widely. And, you know, we're speaking with you, both as Italian writers, but acknowledging, of course, that you work across many different languages, you, neither of you is joining this, this conversation from Italy right now. And you've both talked already about how you've migrated multiple times. So, I wonder if you could say something about how you situate yourself in relation to Italy at this point? Or how these, I guess, both in relation to this, this movement that you were both part of at the at the beginning, Amaya, you mentioned Scripted Africa. And yet, Ubah, you've said that your, that you think about yourself as writing from exile, if I heard you correctly. So, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that? Ubah, maybe I'll ask you to start first.

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah  16:29

Okay, yeah. So yes, it was something that I was thinking about all the time, when, since I moved to Belgium, how my writing changed. Because, especially at the beginning, I mean, it was something new that was happening in Italy, and the audience was mainly Italian. So, my impression, I mean, in the 90s, especially when Amara and I started writing, Italy started to be, I mean, it was the years where, Italy started to be a country where people were immigrants, instead of being a country of people going and were migrants going away, going to the US or other countries. And, and so they were realizing that at the time, and without completely forgetting about their colonial history, the colonial past, to me was very, I mean, shocking at the beginning, because people were always asking me why he speaks, speaks so well Italian, and nobody knew anything about the connection with Somalia.

But yeah, but I think that at the time, also, because I lived in Italy, so I was more connected with the society there, more committed maybe to listen to the voices. So, I was quite, interviewing people, using a lot of oral history in my writing. And I mean, the trigger of for the, my writing always came for something that was happening around me, whereas when I left Italy, my kind of, gaze was, was a distant gaze from outside. And I started working more on archives reading and looking at Italy from a distant point of view, and somehow was very interesting, because I grew up in that way. If I can, if you see what I mean, because I was in Somalia. So, starting in Italy, knowing things about Italy, but from a periphery from a distant, from a place that was not Italy, even if the presence of Italy was still there with the books. And I always, I was always telling this thing at the beginning, when I was talking about my writing that because I, I was I wasn't I mean, my language was not changed by the colloquial language in Italy – in Italy, the everyday language and also the television – so, when I arrived people were like, sometimes they were very, how can I say, surprised because I would use words or expressions that you can only read in the books. So and, and they were telling me 'oh, yeah we don't use this' in, in the spoken language. So, so you see this, this is something that I had to negotiate at the very beginning. And then, now I found myself in the same position and looking at Italy from abroad, from a distance.

Amara Lakhous  19:43

I think, I think identity is like a puzzle and you know, puzzle is made, um, with many pieces. So, so in my identity, a lot of many pieces. Arabic, Kabyle (my mother tongue), French, and of course, Italian. And in general, in general, we don't have really any credit for our identity. Because we are born and we are Muslim or are Christian or are, you know, we don’t pick language. I mean, there is no effort to have all that. For example, in my case, I don't have, I did, I didn't make any effort to, to learn Kabyle, my mother tongue, Arabic, French. So I was born and I thought this is heritage. However, with Italian it is completely different.

So, I started learning Italian at age 25, when I moved to Italy. So, I built this, this, this part of my identity with my, with my hands, with my my, with my love. So, this is probably the difference – the main difference with, with Cristina, so. I, this is why I said before I was born at age 25, for the second time, because I was, I was like a baby. In 1995, I started, I started learning, learning Italian from the, from the scratch. So going to school. So, I'm very proud, actually, I'm very, very proud for this part of my identity. And I hope that I can, can transfer this part of identity to my daughters. This is my contribution you could say.

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah  21:37

Can I add something to what Amara has just said? I think that it, with Amara it’s more clear, a point that I make often is that the language will bite and we decide to fight. And it's a political choice, it’s Amara’s choice. I mean, in America it is clear. But because I have been, I've been often asked, why write in Italian? Which, for me, it's obvious. It’s my, I mean, it's my main language, the language that I know, I mean, that I speak better, somehow. But I think that it's also a political choice. I mean, I don't know, in my case, I think also being in this position. It's something that, it's very curious to think about it because there hasn't been a literature, I mean, comparing, if you compare this to Italian situation with England, UK, or, or France, of people coming from X colonies, writing in Italian, from the previous generation.

And so it's, it's really interesting that happened with my generation. We are, and we are all women. We are not many writers, but it's something that, well, it's not going to happen anymore. I mean, we will have people that grew up in Italy, maybe choosing Italian as a, as a language, I mean of expression, but at the same time without having this kind of historical, I mean, burden in a way. So. So this is why also I think that it's a, it's a kind of responsibility. Or. Yes, there is always a choice in something that we choose when, when we opt for a language instead of another one. Yeah.

Elena Bellina  23:42

Now you're celebrated writers, translated in many different languages, and you write in different languages. So how do you locate yourself right now?

Amara Lakhous  23:53

I have to say, it's not my, my business. I mean, I have different identities. And I have three passports, three citizenships. And sometimes people say I'm Italian, some Algerian, American. No, I don't care really. So, because, because the problem here it's about identity is that we, we think about identity in opposite of diversity. And we forgot that without diversity, there is no identity. Without diversity, there is no identity.

If I say I am Algerian, I'm Italian, I'm American. I can say this because they are, they are different people. They are not Algerian, they are not Americans, they are not Italians. If I say I am a man, I can say men because they are women are other genders. So I can say adult, I am father, because there are people that are not fathers. This is the you know, it's like a mirror. So, diversity is a mirror. And as I said before, the best way for us is to expand our identities, to build something new, and try to be original. To be original with our identities. And it's not easy. It's a big challenge. It's a big challenge, but I think it's worth it. Yes.

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah  25:23

I agree with Amara. I mean, yes, identity is not something that we can classify. And we cannot create by opposition. I mean. What we are at the end is the sum of many experiences that we have. I mean. How we built, we built our imagery. I mean. Our imagery is made by different experiences. I mean. Also, the same person who lives in the same place, and you can have the same experiences, will will will have a different, maybe, image / imagery, because the reaction that you have to the outside world can be always different. It doesn't depend on something that is predetermined, and so on. I think that it is like when, I mean, to writers or in general artists, people ask, what is your ideal audience? I mean, there is not an ideal audience. I mean. The, it's not an ambition, but the aim is to reach people, to empathy, and to be. And I think that, I mean, the, the, the work that, that are more powerful, are works that are universal, but at the same time have also something that is very specific and related to this, this great imagery that, that we built an is, it's flexible, and it's not predetermined. So, yeah. So, I mean, the ideal audience is a universal audience.

Amara Lakhous  27:02

Because our main identity is the human identity. This is the, you know, there are humans, and we were born in places by, by coincidence. I was born in Algeria, and I didn't choose to born in Algeria. This is why I am, I said before about the credit. We don't have really a lot of credit about our identity. So, we born in places that we don't / we didn't choose, we gender we didn't choose. But with immigration – this is the fantastic part – with immigration, we can born again and we can build something new, and we can expand our original identity. And, of course, with writing, especially in different languages is fantastic experience.

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah  28:09

'La Stella Spica stava per tramontare e si vedeva il pianeta rosso di Marte in Cielo: un segno nefasto. Per questo io e Shaqlan abbiamo deciso di andarcene. Ma non piove da un anno. Non una traccia di verde, non una foglia, una fronda: le acacie ridotte a carcasse di grovigli grigi. Nei tratti in cui è rimasta, stesa dal vento, l’erba ha preso il colore bianco delle osssa. La terra è di un rosso scuro e infuocato che fa strizzare gli occhi. 

 Shaqlan marcia taciturna al mio fianco, il fucile in spalla, la lunga tunica e il turbante impolverati. I nostri cavalli si muovono lenti nell’arsura, il manto candido incrostato di terra.' (La danza dell’orice (2021), p. 1)

'The Speaker Star was setting and you could see the red planet Mars in the sky: an inauspicious sign. That's why Shaqlan and I decided to leave. It hasn't rained in a year. Not one trace of green, not a leaf, not a frond. The acacia trees reduced to gray tangled carcasses. In the stretches where it remains, flattened by the wind, the grass has assumed the white colors of bones. The Earth is a dark period red that forces the eyes to squint. A taciturn Shaqlan marches by my side, rifle on her shoulder, her long tunic and turban are dusty.'

Eleanor Paynter  29:58

I wanted to shift gears just a little bit and turn to maybe a theme, if that's the right word for it, that has come up, maybe more overtly, in some ways, in the work of Ubah and what you've talked about, also in our conversation just now in terms of colonial memory and the presence of the colonial past. So, I'll pose this to Ubah, but I'm also curious how these questions might resonate differently for you, Amara and your work. Ubah, by wondered if you could speak a little bit to how the relationship between this colonial past but also, in broader terms, questions of trauma and violence and language come together in your work and your approaches to writing?

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah  30:45

Yeah, so on the one hand, I thought that also. So in Italy, this, this conversation is starting right now. And it is very present, even though it's, I mean, it's, it's in its first steps, I think. And I always talk that Italy somehow - but it is a common belief that – [Italy] was not able also to somehow accept people from abroad and to recognize them as Italian, part of Italy. Because – and Amara in his work is very clear about it – that Italy has, hasn't, I mean, in Italy, itself, that it’s not people from the south from the north, there are so many different languages, different histories, and Italy, itself is so diverse. But somehow, they were keeping telling themselves that there was this kind of emanation. Also, the story of the Italy as a state that exists with, with I mean, quite recently. And, and so, on this, this romance, this idea that the about Italian identity, was also, could also rely on this idea that colonies were another, Italian was not a colonizer, were good, and so not accepting black bodies, for instance, or bodies that, I don't know, they wouldn’t describe like Italians. But Italians are so diverse. So, it is really a paradox. And so, I think that dealing with this past could also help to challenge this kind of assumption that was, is common in Italy.

At the same time, I also think that it's something I mean, when when I talk about, I mean, I have also in mind, the history of Somalia as well. Because in those years in the 50s, but also during the period of colonization, we have also what's happened in Somalia and the relationship with Italy was something so huge, that brought Somalia to the Civil War, and to instability that is lasting until today. So, I think that's – I don't want to say that Somali don't have the responsibility of that. Of course, each one of us has that responsibility, until – we always have the possibility of, of, of, of choosing, of taking a position in our life. So, this was also something very important to me, to not – I don't want to take a side in this, this history. Of course, there are historical responsibilities. But at the same time, as human beings, I think that we always have the possibility of, of choosing our, our way and choosing our way and choosing what it is bad for us for our morality and, and take a side in, in our, I mean, in our life.

Amara Lakhous  34:00

You know, last, last year, I taught a course here at NYU called Translingual Writing in Italian, and I had the pleasure to invite Cristina to talk to my students. We read Little Mother (Madre piccola). It's a wonderful book, really wonderful, wonderful book. The style is a new style, because she introduced Somalian into Italian. It's a lot of, it's a poetry and prose together. And the worldview of the, of the, of the book, it’s fantastic because only writers like Cristina can – because they are living in two words in two languages – can tell that this kind of story about Italian colonialism. It's a taboo. Italian colonialism is a taboo.

And I think that today, writers should be like psychologists for their people, for their nation, one can say nations. So, it's the same thing came in nations are like individuals. Individuals have go, you know, decide to go to a psychologist and therapy when they have trouble with their past and their past is, is stopping them to go forward, you know, to go to live in the present and to imagine or to hope for the future. So this is the same. The same thing for nations and Italy today is facing a big problem with her / with their past.

And in my novels, there is always a part of, historical part, talking about, for example, the Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet, the first chapter. The story takes place in Marseille. In Marseille, the half of the people of Marseille today, they have Italian origin. And they started immigrating, starting going in more, say in the 20s, in 20s and even before. And they were basically from the north, not the south. They are from Turin and Veneto, etc. And, of course, they had very terrible experience of discrimination. So, trying to tell the stories, it's really important today to reconcile times with their memory. And writers like Cristina, Igiaba Scego, they are doing fantastic work in connecting and reconciling Italians with their past. It's like, you know, we are psychologists, and somehow, and we try to, you know, to cure traumas. It's not, it's, it's very challenging. It's really, really challenging.

Elena Bellina  37:13

But would you like to say something about your work for the UN as a trauma recovery? Because that's very relevant to what has just been said, and with Somalia and all of that?

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah  37:23

Yeah. So. Okay, so there is something that happened. Okay, so, I've been working for a project that was called Oral History for Peacebuilding in Somalia. So basically, it was like a training for young people living still in Somalia to collect stories and to create, I mean, this kind of conversation about what's happened in the past. And because that hasn't been, I mean, like in South Africa, a reconciliation process in a way. So, it was a tentative true oral history to put different parts of the, of the war at the same table and to listen to each other stories. And it was it has been very interesting for me, especially because I dealt with a new generation that basically lived their whole life during an unstable, a period of instability. Whereas I grew up in Somalia, where the political situation was very different.

But the most important thing is that this job, somehow, this task, brought me to Mogadishu after 31 years, recently. And this is something that I'm still, I mean, elaborating because it has been a very, very, very strong, I mean, an intense experience. You can imagine the insecurity of the city. And also for me to go back there, I was there in February, exactly after 31 years. And Mogadishu is also the city, the place where my son, my first son was born. And, and somehow, I am not giving you many details about this, because I'm still thinking about it, but something that happened was that I was able to see my house after so many years. And it was, it was very, I mean, good for me because – it is related with the metaphor of identity that Amara was mentioning – it is about nostalgia. I didn't have, I didn't have a real nostalgia, but I was like, I would, I would like to see again that house. I would like to see. Because when I left, I didn't know that I wasn't going back anymore. And seeing the house was like something very relieving for me because new people are living there. It was my house, but it's not my house anymore. So that house now has other stories, other people that are living in [it]. So, it was somehow something reconciling myself with, with this past and which in English you call closure. You know. I have seen it. It's, it's still there. But it's not my house anymore. It's, I it was, it used to be.

Elena Bellina  40:38

And since you're talking about that, in terms of the kind of work you do, because you're not just writing, or you come from very different backgrounds. I mean, Amara, you come from anthropology, I mean, you're an anthropologist by training, right? And, and you Ubah, I mean, you’ve been, right now, you work for the UN. You work on different projects. You've been to different African countries for different projects with different internships and different grants. Could you talk about how these crossing boundaries is not just in writing and in your personal lives, but also in terms of disciplines, of training, of possibilities?

Amara Lakhous  41:12

Thank you. It's about borders, and then really critical borders. Because they are artificial. It's really very artificial. And, and this is why I'm, I'm not very enthusiastic about the concept of ‘transnational.’ You know, today in American academia is very, it's fashion – transnational. I don't like this concept, because I am very critical with the idea of nation and nationalism. And I experienced this – because I was born in Algeria into a Berber Kabyle family and I was born in Algiers – so I lived as a minority. And after Algerian independence, the new state of Algerian independence, so the independence state decided to ban my mother tongue. So I speak Berber Kabyle, but I don't know how to write it. But this, this situation didn't push me to hate Arabic. I loved Arabic. I studied Arabic in school, in house Quranic school, and I am writing in Arabic. And this experience helped me a lot to, to love languages and to understand languages, and to try to disconnect languages from nations and nationalisms.

So I, all my languages – I speak five languages – all my languages, Italian, French, Arabic, don’t be, don’t belong to Arabs, don’t belongs to Italians, don’t to belongs to French. Those languages belong to belongs to me. This is my languages. And, and this is the difference between language and nation or citizenship. So, if you want to go to visit a country, you have to have, you know, visa or passport or… But if you want to learn a new language, you are completely free. You can start. You can learn all language that you want and you don't need to ask permission. So, this is about languages.

Languages are our freedom. And instead, nations are borders. And when you have border, each time you find the border, that means there is exclusion and inclusion. Every time. If you have a border, that means that they can stay inside [and] the others should be outside. But this is not about languages. There is no borders in languages.

Eleanor Paynter  43:53

I've thought about this, too, with the way that the transnational frame really centers the nation, even if it's trying to get at something beyond it or some kind of web of relations. But would you – this doesn't exactly capture what you're saying about language, which is really powerful – but would something like the trans-local be truer to your experience of this? So thinking about sort of very, very local connections that stretch across many different kinds of borders, or is that also too limiting somehow?

Amara Lakhous  44:28

I think, I think that there’s, by the way, there’s huge confusion between patriotism and nationalism. And the best way I found to distinguish between them – patriotism is loving your country and nationalism is hating the country of others. And nationalism is always, always about hate. I'm talking about Algerian nationalism. I know, I know it very, very well. And I'm so are critical with nationalism. And I saw for experience, writing in Italian, there are people in Italy that are not so happy. They're not happy that I'm writing in Italian because they believe that this is their language.

If we want to have a different concept, I prefer transling-, translingual, not transnational. Because transnational, we are dealing with the same problem – nations. Nations and nations, nationalisms, and etc., etc. So it's uh... And there is a lot of hypocrisy, a lot, and lots of hate. A lot of real hate.

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah  45:45

I think yes, Amara, and it's just the opposite because writing in a language is always an act of love. It's a tribute. I mean. It’s, it’s a way, also, since you say also that language, that the first, I mean, it’s not um, it’s the language… The first thing why we use a language is this this, I mean, thirst for communicating to, to communicate, to get in touch with other people, to choose stories, to read other stories to, to have access to a different world than ours, than the world that was given to us from other experiences. So, it should be seen as, as it is. I mean.

Learning a language is also - you, you are challenging yourself, you, you go, you go out of your comfort zone. As Amara was saying, I was born again. Because when you start learning a language – and believe me, I learned language (French when I was 40 and it's a very different age as well than 25) – because you have, you think that you have your assumptions and learning a language and communicating with people in a different language is always, I mean, challenging and questioning yourself and putting yourself in a discomfort zone somehow. And yeah. So I absolutely agree with this, this idea.

Amara Lakhous  47:16

I love a lot the concept of crossing. Crossing is really an amazing concept because it means move, moving, and moving from one place to another. There is an adventure. There are risks. Now, when we talk about borders, so we have to keep in mind that borders are like cages. And Cristina said, talked about the comfort zone. So, now we have a fantastic metaphor of a bird. A bird is in the cage. And it’s safe. It’s safe. It’s in cage; it’s safe. But what's the, I mean, it's in comfort zone. What's the price to pay to be inside the cage? It’s freedom. So, our identities basically are a cage and we are protected by, you know, our bars. Those bars are religion, our language, our citizenship. And the biggest challenge is to go outside the cage. You know, to open the door and to go. And this is risky. It's not easy.

Amara Lakhous  48:51

This passage is from Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet.

'Mia madre mi ha sempre parlato un po’ in calabrese, si è rifiutata di seguire le raccomandazioni degli insegnanti sull’importanza di usare esclusivamente l’italiano con i figli. Una volta, dopo l’ennesimo avvertimento, ha risposto: “Alla casa mia parru cumu me piacia. . . parlo come mi pare!”. Mio padre ripeteva sempre che gli essere umani hanno lo stesso destino degli alberi: privati delle loro radici, muoiono. E non c’è una radice più forte della linuga. Credo avesse ragione. Ogni persona che lascia la propria terra è come un albero trapiantato altrove, guai a privarlo delle proprie radici.' (Contesa per un maialino italianissimo a San Salvario (2011), pp. 23-24)

So in English: 'My mother has always talked to me a bit in Calabrian. She refused to follow the recommendations of the teachers on the importance of using exclusively Italian with one's children. Once, after the 100th warning, she answered in dialect “at my house ‘parru cumu me piacia ,’ I speak however I want.” My father always used to say that human beings have the same fate as trees. Depraved of their roots, they die, and there is no stronger root than language. I think he was right. A person who leaves his own land is like a tree that's transplanted somehow, somewhere else. It can be fatal to deprive it of its roots.'

Eleanor Paynter  50:31

Readings in this episode included, from Amara Lakhous, an excerpt from his 2013 book Contesa per un maialino italianissimo a San Salvario translated into English in 2014 and out with Europa Editions as Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet. And earlier in the episode, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah Luba read a passage from La danza dell’orice, translated in English as Words for Portraits, and out with Juxta Press in 2020. Have a look at our episode page for links to these and other works by today's guests and for episodes from our recent seasons, too.

Thanks for listening to Migrations: A World on the Move, a podcast by Global Cornell's Migrations Global Grand Challenge, a multidisciplinary multi-species initiative that studies how the movements of people, animals, microbes, resources, ideas and more shape our world. You can learn more about the initiative at migrations.cornell.edu where you can also find relevant links from this episode. Follow us on Twitter @CornellMig. This podcast is hosted by Eleanor Paynter, ACLS fellow and Migrations fellow with the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. The episode you've just heard was co-hosted by Elena Bellina, adjunct faculty in Italian at New York University. Our producer is Megan DeMint. Much of the podcast was produced at Cornell University on the traditional homelands of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' Nation, and we recognize Cayuga Nation sovereignty and the indigenous peoples who have lived and continue to live on this land. Our music is “Basically Really” by Steve Fawcett. Migrations: A World on the Move is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher.