What I've discovered about writing in a language that isn't my own, especially since I'm a non-native speaker, is that there's a different type of liberty. Non-native speakers typically do not experience this liberty because they never had to learn how to earn the words.
When I write in English, I don't feel like I am at home, and that is the key thing I realize now. My mother tongue is full of family, memory, obligations, and all of the unspoken things between people who have lived together for far too long. Moroccan Arabic is where I grew up; Standard Arabic and French are where I went to school; but English, when I first came to it, held nothing of mine. It was a blank slate. And on a blank slate, you can say almost anything.
This isn't just some romantic idea. There is nothing wonderful about the moment you go to grab a word and find only a brick wall. There is no poetry in a collapsed sentence due to carrying a load that was better suited for something else. At worst, writing in a foreign language is simply a list of quiet failures, approximations instead of precision, paraphrasing in place of the exact word that exists in another language altogether.
However, the physical separation from both yourself and the object of your writing that occurs through writing in a foreign language allows you to see the truth more clearly as well. If you write about pain in your native language, the pain will be in the same room as you. However, if you write about it in a language that you studied, earned, and practiced, the pain will still be there, but you are outside, looking in from a little further away than you would have otherwise been. You can look at it more directly.
It is for this reason that I believe so many authors who moved from one country to another, carrying one language within themselves while writing in another, produced works of uncommon honesty. Not because exile cleanses. Rather, because the difference between what you feel and what you can express forces a sort of clarity. You cannot afford vagueness when each word is going to cost something.
There is a word I found in French, morganatique, used by His Late Majesty King Hassan II, the first time I heard it. It refers to a union between an individual of royal or noble birth and an individual of lesser social standing, in which any offspring are automatically excluded from inheriting titles or property rights. An entire feudal structure resides within this word.
I tried to find an equivalent in Arabic. There wasn't one. Not because the concept of unequal marriages did not exist, rather, because the mechanisms established to distinguish these types of unions were based upon the inheritance structures and laws created during medieval Europe, and thus did not occur in the same manner in Arabic civilization. The word morganatique never crossed into Arabic because the world it defined never needed to be named there.
When I saw the word again in English, morganatic, I finally understood something about language that I had not previously been able to articulate. Words are not labels affixed to existing realities; they are remnants of entire civilizations. To write in a foreign language is to inherit, word by word, the sedimentation of cultures you were never born into. And occasionally, often unexpectedly, one of those words names something you knew long before you could express it.
All of my fiction lives in this space. Things that exist in one language but not others. Concepts that translate poorly. The self that can only be expressed through the gap between languages.
I write literary fiction in English. I teach English to students in Morocco. While these two facts may appear unrelated, they most definitely are. Every day I witness learners fighting against the mechanics of a language, reaching for expression and falling short. I recognise that battle from my own writing desk. The search for the exact word. The compromise. The rarest moments when a foreign language gives you what your native tongue could not.
It appears that the borrowed tongue was never truly borrowed. The moment I began to write in it, it became mine. And this transition, from something foreign to something personal, is, I think when I reflect on it, exactly what fiction is for.