The Global Soul

by Pico Iyer

  “One country’s not enough,” said a sweet, unplaceable soul who approached me one night at a gathering in rural Japan, introducing himself as half-English and half-Japanese, though he thought of himself as Malaysian (he’d spotted me, clearly, as a fellow in-betweener). “When I’m in England, there’s a part of me that’s not fulfilled; that’s why I come here—to find the other part.”

  One spring day in London, I went to see Kazuo Ishiguro in his home along the Northern line, near “J.J. Town,” as he wryly calls it (for its large population of Jewish and Japanese émigrés), a house he shares with the Glaswegian wife he met while both of them were working with the homeless, and a young daughter. “Ish,” as he is generally known (like many a Graham Greene character, he goes usually by his last name), seems in many ways a quintessential Global Soul, not quite a part of the Japan he left when he was five and not really a part of an England where his name and face (though not his manner) brand him instantly as a “foreigner.” One reason his fiction speaks to readers across the world is that Ish is a seasoned translator of sorts, used to converting the values of Japan into terms the West can understand, while bringing to both his not-quite homes a nostalgia and an amused detachment that few natives could quite muster.

  Ish in conversation, I soon notice, uses “they” for both his apparent homelands, calling the English the “natives” even as he pronounces Nagasaki with the short a’s no Japanese would ever use; he speaks only a child’s Japanese, he keeps assuring me, yet in English he uses the word aeroplane with the careful articulation of one who’s learned it as a foreign term, while a boy (and at a time when the things themselves were not so common). In recent months, he says, he’s been spending much of his time trying to find the perfect name for a half-Japanese, half-Scottish daughter who will be growing up in an England very likely full of Muslim fundamentalists (and their enemies). His prose, of course, is of the classic, antique sort you seldom find in England anymore, and bespeaks the keen attentiveness of a lifelong mimic.

  “I can actually remember this process,” he says, “of listening to words I didn’t know the meaning of and literally copying the sounds.” The only “un-English” boy at all the schools where he found himself, he realized that his survival depended on impersonating an English boy, while also putting his exoticism to occasional good use. “Whenever it was convenient for me to become very Japanese, I could become very Japanese,” he says disarmingly. “And then, when I wanted to drop it, I would just become this ordinary Englishman.”

  And suddenly, in a flash, I am taken back to myself at the age of nine, going back and forth (three times a year) between my parents’ home in California and my boarding school in England and realizing that, as a member of neither culture, I could choose between selves at will, wowing my Californian friends with the passages of Greek and Latin I’d already learned in England, and telling my breathless housemates in Oxford how close I lived to the Grateful Dead. The tradition denoted by my face was something I could erase (mostly) with my voice, or pick up whenever the conversation turned to the Maharishi or patchouli oil. With any of my potential homes, in fact, I could claim or deny attachment when I chose; and where the traditional being knew that his home, his past, and his community were all givens, often to an oppressive degree, someone like me—or Ish, or Madame Nhu—could select even the most fundamental details of our lives.

  The other striking thing about Ish, I’d already seen, was that I’d closed both his last two novels without knowing the protagonist’s first name; in his most recent one, The Unconsoled, five hundred pages of action, or its absence, had taken place more or less in a hotel, in some unnamed foreign town through which a touring artist walks as through a labyrinth in a dream, surrounded by people and passions he can’t begin to fathom. The book is a novel about a state akin to jet lag, a nightmare of disorientation and disconnection, and its main character, at some level, doesn’t know where he is, whom he’s among, or who he is taken to be. Ish deliberately keeps all colloquialisms and local references out of his books, he tells me in his surprisingly open, precisely affable way, because he knows, from eighteen-month promotional tours around his global markets, that most of his readers will greet him in Norwegian, or Mandarin, or Portuguese.

  As I listen to him, I think that with this new kind of lifestyle is coming to light a whole new way of writing (and dressing and eating), as Global Souls face their equivalent of the same issue that confronts nations at the end of the old world order. The heroes of many contemporary novels are multicultural foundlings—one typical one, in Bharati Mukherjee’s Leave It to Me, is called “Devi” now (she was once “Debby” and once “Faustine”) and, in search of her mother, finds that her forebear carried six different passports at least; this child of Eurasian parents learns about the mysterious East from a Chinese lover in San Francisco. The person reading such a book, I suspect, will be equally mixed up often (in terms of national name tags) as she listens to “Norwegian Wood” sung in Punjabi (and wreathed in sitars), and dines on French-Korean food from down the street. All that her parents could take for granted, she has to create from scratch.

  In a way, it seemed, the central issue before us offshore beings (as before the floating world around us) was how to keep the soul intact in the face of pell-mell globalism; and how to preserve a sense of universality in a world that was apt to define unity in more divisive ways. I think, for example, of the man from the Punjab who picked me up recently at Lester B. Pearson Airport in Toronto, and for whom all the traditional immigrant questions were complicated many times over as members of his family, his community, set up on different continents.

  “Here not like home, sir,” he assured me, as almost every Indian cabdriver in Toronto did. “Here is no corruption. Indian picture we have here, sir; Indian market. Even Indian street name, sir.” (I think he meant Albion and Dundas.) But when I asked him if he felt at home in the adopted city whose praises he was singing, his voice turned soft, and gathered feeling.

  “Where you spent your childhood, sir, you can never forget that place. I am here, sir, and I like it here. But”—and I could hear the ache—“I love my India.”

  I know a little about the Global Soul in part because, having grown up simultaneously in three cultures, none of them fully my own, I acquired very early the sense of being loosed from time as much as from space—I had no history, I could feel, and lived under the burden of no home; and when I look at many of the most basic details of my life, I realize that even though they look hardly strange to me, they would have seemed surreal to every one of my grandparents. Growing up, I had no relatives on the same continent as myself, and I never learned a word of my mother’s tongue or my father’s (because, coming from different parts of India, they had no common language save that of British India). To this day, I can’t pronounce what is technically my first name, and the name by which I go is an Italian one (though often mistaken for Spanish, Portuguese, female), mostly because my parents, realizing I’d be living among people foreign to Indian polysyllables, named me after a fifteenth-century Italian neo-Platonist whose name was easy to spell and to pronounce.

  As a permanent alien, I’ve never been in a position to vote, and, in fact, I’ve never held a job in the country where I more or less live; I thought relatively little (though my parents were middle-class academics, far from rich) of going to school over the North Pole, and have never had a partner who belongs to the same race. (“Miscegenation is the great hope and future of mankind,” an optimistic soul in San Francisco tells me. “It’s not possible to hate your grandson.”) The son of Hindu-born Theosophists, I was educated entirely in Christian schools and spend most of my time now in Buddhist lands (the Caribbean islanders would call me a “Nowherian”); and, though I spend most of my year in rural Japan or in a Catholic monastery, I’ve nonetheless accumulated 1.5 million miles on one American airline alone.

  A person like me can’t really call himself an exile (who traditionally looked back to a home
now lost), or an expatriate (who’s generally posted abroad for a living); I’m not really a nomad (whose patterns are guided by the seasons and tradition); and I’ve never been subject to the refugee’s violent disruptions: the Global Soul is best characterized by the fact of falling between all categories (and at college, for example, I counted neither as a local, who could receive a government grant, nor as a foreigner, who was subject to a specially inflated fee). The country where people look like me is the one where I can’t speak the language, the country where people sound like me is a place where I look highly alien, and the country where people live like me is the most foreign space of all. And though, when I was growing up, I was nearly always the only mongrel in my classroom or neighborhood, now, when I look around, there are more and more people in a similar state, the children of blurred boundaries and global mobility.

  I’ve grown up, too, with a keen sense of the blessings of being unaffiliated; it has meant that almost everywhere is new and strange to me (as I am new and strange to it), and nearly everywhere allows me to keep alive a sense of wonder and detachment. Besides, the foreigner is in the rare position of being able to enjoy the facilities of a place without paying the taxes, and can appreciate the virtues of anywhere without being wholly subject to its laws. My complexion (like my name) allows me to pass as a native in Cuba, or Peru, or Indonesia, and none of them, in any case, is more foreign to me than the England where I don’t look like a native, the America where I’m classified as an alien, and the India where I can’t speak a word of any of the almost two hundred languages. Enabled, I hope, to live a little bit above parochialisms, I exult in the fact that I can see everywhere with a flexible eye; the very notion of home is foreign to me, as the state of foreignness is the closest thing I know to home.

  Yet deeper than such tidy formulations, any number of questions begin to gather, and the fact remains that humans have never lived with quite this kind of mobility and uprootedness before (indeed, the questions themselves may be the closest thing we have to home: we live in the uncertainties we carry round with us). A lack of affiliation may mean a lack of accountability, and forming a sense of commitment can be hard without a sense of community. Displacement can encourage the wrong kinds of distance, and if the nationalism we see sparking up around the globe arises from too narrow and fixed a sense of loyalty, the internationalism that’s coming to birth may reflect too roaming and undefined a sense of belonging. The Global Soul may see so many sides of every question that he never settles on a firm conviction; he may grow so used to giving back a different self according to his environment that he loses sight of who he is when nobody’s around. Even the most basic questions have to be answered by him alone, and when, on the planes where he may make his home, the cabin attendant passes down the aisle with disembarkation forms, it may be difficult for him to fill in any of the boxes: “Home Address,” “Citizenship,” “Purpose of Visit,” even “Marital Status.”

  I can answer almost any of these questions from a variety of perspectives, I often feel (depending on whether I’m calling myself Indian in Cuba, or English-born in Burma, or affiliated with California in the Philippines). But though this can be a natural- and useful-enough impulse in response to the question, “Where do you come from?” it becomes more treacherous in answer to the question “Where do you stand?”

  Every one of these concerns is, of course, still the province of a tiny minority (and a relatively comfortable minority at that); the most urgent issues in the world today, as the plaintive voices of Davos remind us, are still the same ones they’ve always been: how to get food on the table, and find shelter for your children; how to live beyond tomorrow. Indeed, one of the most troubling features of the globalism we celebrate is that the so-called linking of the planet has, in fact, intensified the distance between people: the richest 358 people in the world, by UN calculations, have a financial worth as great as that of 2.3 billion others, and even in the United States, the prosperous home of egalitarianism, the most wired man in the land (Bill Gates) has a net worth larger than that of 40 percent of the country’s households, or perhaps 100 million of his compatriots combined (according to Robert Reich). The rich have the sense that they can go anywhere tomorrow, while 95 percent of the new beings on the planet are among the poor; I worry about the effects of E-mail and transprovincialism, while two-thirds of the people in the world have never used a telephone.

  Not long ago, I flew to Haiti, just two hours from New York City, and, stepping off the plane, I walked into the pages of the Bible. Women were relieving themselves along the main streets and the principal sights on view along National Highway One were tombstones. The sidewalks were crowded with people around the Centre de Formation Intellectuelle, but that was mostly because unemployment was running at 70 percent; the sign that said TOMORROW BELONGS TO HAITI was all but obscured by mountains of trash. Most of the adults I saw around me, I learned, had never had a day of formal schooling, and the average man would be dead by the age of forty-four. Though only 5 percent of the people I saw would vote in the coming elections, it was unsafe for anyone to go out at night, people said, “because of democracy.”

  Haiti still remains the globe’s rule more than its exception—more and more of the countries I visit are descending into anarchy—and it makes a mockery of the concerns of the Global Soul, as of the airline’s happy talk of “15,000 travellers transcending borders every minute.” There are more telephones in Tokyo, it’s often said, than on the entire continent of Africa. But these very discrepancies are one of the by-products of the age, and more and more of us, moving between countries as easily as between channels on our screens, are tempted to underestimate the distances between them. My parents, when they traveled to the England that seemed the end point of an educated Indian’s destiny, had to travel by boat, through the Suez Canal, or around the Cape of Good Hope, and the two weeks at sea, on the Peninsula and Oriental lines, gave them time to measure the distance between the two countries; now, such shifts are instantaneous, and it’s not always easy to differentiate between traveling from Seventh Avenue to Eighth Avenue and traveling to a place that has no tradition or values in common with our own.

  I woke up one morning last month in sleepy, never-never Laos (where the center of the capital is unpaved red dirt and a fountain without water), and went to a movie that same evening in the West-side Pavilion in Los Angeles, where a Korean at a croissanterie made an iced cappuccino for a young Japanese boy surrounded by the East Wind snack bar and Panda Express, Fajita Flats and the Hana Grill; two weeks later, I woke up in placid, acupuncture-loving Santa Barbara, and went to sleep that night in the broken heart of Manila, where children were piled up like rags on the pedestrian overpasses and girls scarcely in their teens combed, combed their long hair before lying down to sleep under sheets of cellophane on the central dividers of city streets. It is hard not to think that such quick transitions bring conflicts, and sometimes illusions that we haven’t confronted before, and though I, as a sometime journalist, travel more than many people I know, the planes on which I travel are full of management consultants and computer executives and international aid workers and tribal backpackers who fly much more than I do.

  And what complicates the confusions of the Global Soul is that, as fast as we are moving around the world, the world is moving around us; it is not just the individual but the globe with which we’re interacting that seems to be in constant flux. So even the man who never leaves home may feel that home is leaving him, as parents, children, lovers scatter around the map, taking pieces of him wherever they go. More and more of us may find ourselves in the emotional or metaphysical equivalent of that state we know from railway stations, when we’re sitting in a carriage waiting to pull out and can’t tell, often, whether we’re moving forwards, or the train next to ours is pulling back.

  Thus even those people whose lives haven’t changed are subject, at times, to a universe increasingly shaped and colored by the Global Soul, and the Banglades
hi who’s never moved from his village finds himself visited by images of Hong Kong (on-screen), and videos from Bombay, and phone calls from Toronto, perhaps, while the Torontonian who’s never left the city walks out of his grandmother’s house, only to see signs he can’t read and hear words he can’t understand, among people whose customs are strange to him. Never before in human history, I suspect, have so many been surrounded by so much that they can’t follow.

  The temptation in the face of all this can be (as the great analyst of the modern condition, Graham Greene, saw) to try to lay anchor anywhere, even in a faith one doesn’t entirely believe, just so one will have a home and solid ground under one’s feet. To lack a center, after all, may be to lack something essential to the state of being human; “to be rooted,” as Greene’s fellow admirer of Catholicism, Simone Weil, said, “is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”

  In response to the bombardment of data all around us, we steady ourselves, often, with the consoling sound of a “global village”: a village, after all, in the ancestral sense, is a truer, simpler place of shared ideals, linked by a common sense of hierarchy and center (all the things cyberspace, in fact, eliminates)—the village, as even Muammar Gaddafi writes, in his latest screed in favor of ancestral tribalism, Escape from Hell, “is peaceful, clean and friendly; everyone knows everyone else.” There “is no theft in the village” (as he writes in an earlier book, The Village Is the Village). Yet what we are entering is, in fact, much closer to a global city, with all the problems of rootlessness and alienation and a violent, false denaturing that we associate with the word urban (the “city,” writes Gaddafi again, “is just a biological worm in which humans live and die without perspective, without patience.… The city kills social instincts and human feelings”). When the twentieth century began, scarcely 14 percent of all humans lived in the city; by the time it ended, the figure was roughly 50 percent (and the twenty-first century, UN officials say, will be the “century of cities,” with perhaps thirty-three “megacities” rising up by the year 2015). The place we reassuringly call a village looks already a lot like a blown-up version of Los Angeles, its freeways choked, its skies polluted, its tribes settled into a discontinuous pattern—the flames of South Central rising above the gated castles of Bel Air.