If someone were to ask me, What is the most agonizing intellectual experience you have ever had? without hesitation my response would be: Writing a book in a foreign language. Finding the precise words to express even simple, familiar thoughts can sometimes be laborious. Rending complex or subtle ideas using a relatively meager vocabulary feels as painful to me as one would imagine it to be for a long-starving Somali mother squeezing milk for her baby from wizened breasts. Every sentence compels a compromise. What I write down is never exactly what I want to say. I can only select from the narrow choices available to approximate, from a far distance, what I am trying to say. The vivid, the sophisticated, the subtle, and the personal style are all sifted away, leaving only the dry, the rough, and the basic. I feel myself in a constant process of self-distortion.

The basic difference between what one writes in one's native language and what one writes in a strange foreign language is that, in the former, one's thoughts command words that, in turn, penetrate and stimulate one's mind. But in the latter, words dictate one's thoughts and only float on one's mind.