Throughout her article, “Teach Yourself Italian,” Jhumpa Lahiri consistently connects the ability to understand and communicate in a language with a sense of belonging. This idea recurs, from the beginning when she writes, “The language [Italian] still seems like a locked gate” (Lahiri 3), to when she writes “I enter another land, unexplored, murky. A kind of voluntary exile” (Lahiri 6). She uses this wording to establish how being able to communicate in a language provides a sense of belonging within a group and how she found herself outside of all of these groups.
However, her use of the word exile is a strange choice. Generally, exile is used to describe the barring of a person from his/her native country, but in this case, Lahiri is the one barring herself from English and “exiling” herself to Italian. Without the constriction of having a language to fall back on, an opportunity to be easily found in language, Lahiri then completely loses herself in her learning of Italian. By doing so, she allows herself to become boundless, unconstricted by the norms and rules of grammar and free to live as an exile of the English language. By cutting herself off from the known, she forces herself to explore the unknown and adapt so that she can survive communicating in a foreign language. Then, instead of focusing on the strict grammatical concepts that guide one in learning Italian, Lahiri went in without the guide of grammar, losing herself in Italian and writing freely in her Italian diary. This forced her to explore and learn, not just about the Italian language, but about herself. Through this trial by fire, she changed who she was as a person and as a writer. In order to change who you are, is it necessary to make this conscious choice to get lost, or can this kind of change happen by itself?
Into the Abyss 