Conversation between Claudia Durastanti and Tash Aw

Strangers

‘Who taught you to speak?’ was the first question people asked Claudia Durastanti when they heard that both her parents were deaf. ‘What language do you dream in?’ they asked when they heard she had moved from Brooklyn to the Italian countryside when she was six.

In Strangers I Know, Durastanti looks back on a childhood in which two deaf parents never connected with reality, the outside world, each other or their hearing children. Strangers I Know is a novel about silence – the silence of deafness, the silence of the immigrant – and how it can be transformed by the love of language.

Strangers on a pier

In his first work of non-fiction, Malay author Tash Aw stays close to home. Although ‘home’ turns out not to be such an obvious concept for a descendant of the Asian diaspora. Tash Aw’s grandparents left mainland China in the 1920s in search of a new life in Malaysia. With The Face: Strangers on a Pier, Tash Aw wrote a letter to his late grandmother. A letter with questions – why so much shame about their origins, for instance – and insights, about his own position as the eternal other in ever new homelands.

Nicky Aerts will be in conversation with Claudia Durastanti and Tash Aw about the search for the impact of class, migration and art on their lives and work.

Org. Passa Porta, Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Bruxelles, De Bezige Bij

picture tash aw © Stacy Liu, Claudia Durastanti © Sara Lucas Agutoli