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Born in Milan, i have been living in Hong Kong since 1997.
Leaving home was easier than going back. You change, your country becomes unfamiliar, unheimlich.
Home dissolves into a state of permanent longing.
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When you leave your country you retain an emotional connection with the place where you were born and grew up, but over time that place becomes a fiction, it lives in your imagination, constantly recreated by your memory, which we all know is very selective.
When you encounter new places, you see them reflected in that distorting mirror of your past, you experience them at a particular point in time, you haven’t witnessed their development, you haven’t seen them change with you.
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In Ancient Greece they had a word to describe this predicament, Nostos, ‘return to the homeland’.
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The concept of Nostos was so important that it gave rise to a whole epic genre - Homer’s Odyssey being the most representative example of this genre. The journey home entailed being shipwrecked, going through countless trials and ordeals, but the real challenge was to retain one's identity.
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All my characters share a similar condition: they are outsiders, people who live in exile, or on the run. My stories, on the other hand, are mostly set in Hong Kong, because this is the city I observe every day.
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I live in a sort of double exile, because by writing in English I am also exiled from my mother tongue, which I regard as the matrix of my identity.
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Am I still an Italian writer even if I don’t write in Italian? After all, language is what really binds our national identity. I can’t answer this question.
My situation is by no means unusual. The list of exophonic writers is extremely long and getting longer.
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Writing in a foreign language does offer some benefits though. When you detach yourself from the body of the mother’s tongue signifiers seem to come from the outside: language - no longer natural and spontaneous - becomes artificial. You start noticing how arbitrary signifiers actually are, you see the gap between words and their meanings.
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Language is not a neutral medium; it is populated with the intentions of others. Each word you choose resonates with the echo of its previous uses and contexts, social and ideological connotations. You become suspicious of any pretence of neutrality.
This peculiar standpoint of ‘outsideness’ is what I am interested in and what I write about. Often the semiotic and conventional character of a given culture is apparent only to an outside observer moving through a field of alien words and alien value-judgments.
As a writer I handle the English language, my medium of expression, as I would any artificial, potentially toxic substance, that is, with caution.
