The Mother Tongue in Foreign Lands
by Jennifer Haigh

Travel is an integral part of my life as a writer.? To write in English while surrounded by other languages is, for me, a profound experience.? As writers, we are exquisitely sensitive to language:? it is not just our medium but our means of entry, the lens through which we view the world.? Traveling has taught me about the power of language and its limits.? To observe people living in a language I don’t understand forces me to listen in a deeper way, to pay attention to nonverbal cues I would otherwise fail to notice. The world is never more fascinating to me than when it is filled with unfamiliar sounds.?

I began traveling in earnest at age 19, when I spent a junior year abroad in France. I lived with a French roommate who spoke no English, and spent weekends with her family in the countryside outside Toulouse.? The experience of living in a language not my own was extraordinarily formative for me as a young writer. It made me understand that all human relationships are made of language. In French I was a different version of myself, direct and unequivocal -- not because my character had changed, but because my limited vocabulary made it difficult to convey subtleties of meaning. I was less prone to abstract musing, not because such questions no longer interested me, but because I had a shaky command of the subjunctive. I felt younger in French, na?ve and childlike, incapable of sarcasm. On dates with French man, I couldn’t come up with clever rejoinders. If a man said something ridiculous, I lacked the skill to put him in his place. Because forming sentences demanded a lot of work, I listened much more than I spoke. The less I spoke, the more fascinating men found me. I was chagrined to realize I was far more attractive to men when I couldn’t say anything smart.

When I think back on that year in Toulouse, I remember loneliness. I had plenty of French friends, but my inability to be fully myself in those relationships led to a particular type of anomie that made me hungry to write. I wrote for comfort, for entertainment, for my own companionship. On the page, in my native language, I could convey completely and precisely what I saw and heard and felt and imagined.? I could engage in wordplay, or throw my voice like a ventriloquist; I could be funny or lyrical or bombastic or analytical, according to my own whims.

Paradoxically, my new fluency in French led me to a greater command of my own language. I found myself deconstructing English sentences in the same deliberate way I studied French ones. I learned to consider the history of the words I used, to ponder the subtle differences between synonyms, how a Germanic word like “freedom” had an entirely different gestalt from its Latinate synonym, “liberty.”? I came to understand that the pedigree of a word, its provenance, was integral to its meaning, and that choosing to deploy one word over another could change, subtly or sometimes dramatically, the shape and rhythm and trajectory of a sentence.

In a profound way, foreign travel has sharpened my vision. It is human nature to become inured to the familiar, highly efficient in navigating the landscapes we know well.? Life is reduced to routine, mindless habit. We notice only what is immediately necessary and relevant, and interact with our surroundings in an automatic way that seldom leads to deep insight.

Many years and books and journeys later, I still depend upon travel to invigorate my relationship with the English language. The months I have spent writing in other countries – in France, in Italy, Sweden, Denmark.and now China -- have fed and enriched my writing in ways I could never have predicted. When I am lost or paralyzed or discouraged in my work, it’s like pressing the reset button. I crave the deep and fertile loneliness of foreign travel, which has never failed to inspire me. It leads me to see the world with new eyes and yearn to confide in the empty page. My native language is the home I take with me, where I am free to express my deepest thoughts, confident in my ability to recognize and understand, to be recognized and understood.