ABSTRACT
Jhumpa Lahiri (an Indo-British American writer) has been socioculturally de-territorialized for more than once. Her writingscapes keep on shuttling between both the terrains—India and America. Moreover, the process of L1 (Bengali) and L2 (American English) acquisitions in her case was a complicated one. As a result, Lahiri suffers, not just from a territorial, but also from a sense of linguistic uncertainty while dealing with her literary creativity. Lahiri shares a sense of houselessness in both English and Bengali. She seeks to write in Italian and to reterritorialize herself in Rome because her diasporic dislocation(s) haven’t imposed Italian on her. To fully absorb her unusual and unexpected struggle of building and dwelling within a different linguistic and creative space altogether, a close reading of the two novellas—In Other Words and The Clothing of Books—is important. This chapter makes a simultaneous reading of both the novellas to understand the nature of Lahiri’s linguistic craving for a house of her own, reflecting her present subject position as a diasporan and a diaspora writer. While the first novella records the turbulent journey undertaken by Lahiri towards a linguistic house space, the second novella celebrates her stoic acceptance of the fact that there is no such fixed linguistic house space—it is a trap, a mirage. She welcomes this newly achieved linguistic fluidity and realizes that her ultimate creative space floats on a linguistic terra infirma. The chapter also posits binary opposite spaces of household furniture and housewares set up against hotel and open streets to problematize Lahiri’s conflicting ideas about a writer’s creative and linguistic determinants of cultural representations so much so that her experimentations lead her to a crossroads, forcing her to choose between Bengali, English and Italian linguistic building blocks to create a nurturing house space.
