Identity
Two Languages, One Voice: Writing Between Cultures
My grandmother spoke Urdu. My teachers spoke English. My parents, depending on the day and the subject and the level of emotion involved, spoke both.
I grew up understanding that certain things could only be said in one language or the other. Urdu had words for feelings that English had no equivalent for — the particular ache of dil girda, the untranslatable quality of tabassum. English had a precision and a distance that Urdu, in its warmth and its indirection, sometimes resisted.
When I began to write fiction, I wrote in English — it was the language of my education, my ambition, my literary inheritance. But I found, again and again, that the stories I most wanted to tell were stories that lived in the gap between the two languages. Stories about people who were always translating — not just words, but selves.
All the Names We Carry is, in many ways, a novel about this translation. About the cost of it, and the richness of it. About what is lost when you move between worlds, and what, unexpectedly, is gained.
I have come to believe that this in-between space — the hyphen in British-Pakistani, the pause between one language and another — is not a deficit. It is a vantage point. From here, you can see things that those on either side cannot.