Stories of a couple, of children who are leaving, of obsessions and loneliness, but also of micro-violence, and sometimes directly of violence, against the stranger, the emigrant. Stories set in Rome in which, in the end, everyone is a foreigner, sometimes their own. Jhumpa Lahiri, who won the Pulitzer for the Interpreter of Emotions stories, returns to the genre with Roman Tales (Lumen), and he does so by changing English again for the Italian of the country where he has lived for years.
It was precisely the language that ended up bringing this writer to Rome a decade ago, born in London to Bengali parents but raised in the United States who has always wondered about identity. "Rome for me has become a crucial site, despite all its flaws and problems, it has become my city," says the author. "And having said that, it is not. It triggers a series of very important reflections for me on what are always my themes. Belonging, possessing, who we are, what I am, how to describe myself, how to define myself. How to answer the perennial question of where I am, which has always followed me. And in Rome the problem is not resolved, it worsens," he warns.
In this sense, about the racist violence that permeates his stories, he says that Rome is not special, that the US is full, but at the same time he says that things like "if you are not white, they do not speak to you in Italian" hit him. , this morning it happened to me at the Fiumicino airport when I asked for a coffee, they answered me in English, not the white man behind. And that, what does it mean in the end? That all Italians are white". Another anecdote of my own: "I stand in line at a supermarket and the man behind me starts a telephone conversation in which he says that Rome is full of tourists, foreigners, as if they were surrounded. And obviously I understand that the problem is not the tourists but the new Romans, who are part of the city, the culture, everything. And it worries me because I don't see integration, but rather indifference and fear".
And he explains that the episodes that he narrates in the book he has lived through his skin or that he has followed through the newspapers, like the emigrant family expelled by their neighbors from the apartment, there is a scandal and then a reality that remains in me is forgotten. and it disturbs me. I myself in Rome have so many lives... one with friends or going to presentations, dinners, shows, a world in which I am Jhumpa, but as soon as you get out of that dimension of people who love you is another matter and you never know. A strange double reality."
In this sense, the election of Giorgia Meloni and the declaration of an immigration emergency do not help. "Her victory has not surprised me at all. The stories are written in the period that she is rising and preparing the way to win in the street. Perhaps that she won in the street has surprised me a little, disappointed me, and now she is a a new reality, a new government and it affects everything, the culture, that migratory emergency, the atmosphere in general. And there is an undergrowth that seeks to support all those foreigners who, when people like that win, emerge. They don't feel they should measure themselves more, They can express their opinion. And racism, she says, "is always scary."
Fear, he says, of losing his own identity, of being contaminated. "And instead, we know for centuries that everything grows thanks to this pollution. It's how Rome grows, which was nothing at the beginning of its history and needs to bring people from all over to grow. Everything exists thanks to travel, explorations I am a fruit of all kinds of contaminations, crossings, migrations, I know nothing else, only this human impulse, a need to transfer, go to another place, experiment, learn another language, because it is an opening, an enrichment. And there has always been so much hostility, so much senseless fear. Haven't they studied the history of the country, who is the American? But everything is made up and makes people have a small and provincial look, that they think we are like that and the others They are there and they are like that".
And he says that for two years he has been translating the Roman Ovid's Metamorphoses into English. "There you see the true foundation of the city. He is always in dialogue with the other, with the Greek world, its mythology, its language, which he transforms and writes this crazy story in which episode by episode he underscores the instability of everything, of identity, of who we are, precariousness, that razor's edge that we all have, that we can become something else at any moment. That's your lesson. We have too narrow a perspective, people don't understand the reality of existence , of human nature, of history. With the head of someone like Ovid, you understand that reality is created by dialogue, that things need to be mixed, that life is slippery".
