DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
05 February 2009
The Language of Betrayal
By Ha Jin
Ha Jin is a Chinese-American writer who was born in China, migrated to the United States in 1984, and began to write novels in English. He has written five novels, including A Free Life (2007), Waiting (1999), which won the National Book Award, and War Trash (2005), which received the PEN/Faulkner Award.
This excerpt is from The Writer as Migrant (2008), a collection of the Campbell Lectures given by Ha Jin at Rice University.
The antonym of ‘betrayal’ is ‘loyalty’ or ‘allegiance.’ Uneasy about those words, the migrant writer feels guilty because of his physical absence from his native country, which is conventionally viewed by some of his countrymen as ‘desertion.’ Yet the ultimate betrayal is to choose to write in another language. No matter how the writer attempts to rationalize and justify adopting a foreign language, it is an act of betrayal that alienates him from his mother tongue and directs his creative energy to another language. This linguistic betrayal is the ultimate step the migrant writer dares to take; after this, any other act of estrangement amounts to a trifle.
Historically, it has always been the individual who is accused of betraying his country. Why shouldn’t we turn the tables by accusing a country of betraying the individual? Most countries have been such habitual traitors to their citizens anyway. The worst crime the country commits against the writer is to make him unable to write with honesty and artistic integrity.
As long as he can, a writer will stay within his mother tongue, his safe domain. The German writer W.G. Sebald lived and taught in England for over three decades and knew both English and French well, but he always wrote in his native language. When asked why he had not switched to English, he answered there was no necessity. That he could give such an answer must be because German was a major European language from which his works could be rendered into other European languages without much difficulty. In contrast, the Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera started writing in French when he was already over sixty. Such a heroic effort might signify some crisis that prompted the novelist to make the drastic switch. If we compared Kundera’s recent fiction written in French with his earlier books written in Czech, we can see that the recent prose, after Immortality, is much thinner. Nevertheless, his adopting French is a brave literary adventure pursued with a relentless spirit. Just as the narrator of his novel Ignorance regards Odysseus’s return to Ithaca as accepting ‘the finitude of life,’ Kundera cannot turn back and continues his odyssey. That also explains why he has referred to France as his ‘second homeland.’
I have been asked why I write in English. I often reply, ‘For survival.’ People tend to equate ‘survival’ with ‘livelihood’ and praise my modest, also shabby, motivation. In fact, physical survival is just one side of the picture, and there is the other side, namely, to exist – to live a meaningful life. To exist also means to make the best use of one’s life, to pursue one’s vision.
Copyright © 2008 the University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
