Why This Metamorphosis?

Abstract

“Why This Metamorphosis?” investigates ideas of immigrant longing, loss, and love, by examining second-generation American writer Jhumpa Lahiri’s work, and particularly too, her radical and courageous decision to abandon English—in which she was successful and proficient—and move, wholeheartedly, into Italian, a language she knew nothing of. The result of such a migration was the Italian-language memoir, In Other Words. This paper will also work closely with Lahiri’s short fiction “A Temporary Matter,” juxtaposed with the aforementioned non-fiction-leaning In Other Words, to establish a sense of cohesion between the fictional worlds she creates for immigrant characters, and the reality she experiences in her own immigrations.

While there is a lot to be said about the marginalisation and othering of immigrant identities, this paper’s investigation attempts to go beyond such a sense—it is interested, particularly, in the magicality of the margins and, what this paper refers to as the “in-between spaces” in which immigrants have been placed. It asks: what can be created in such an in-between, what can be refused and repelled, and what is, ultimately, to be found.