Writer, Traveler, Global Soul: Pico Iyer
Diplomats travel the globe representing their countries to the world. Pico Iyer travels to represent the world to his many readers. Whether from North Korea or Katmandu, Iyer’s writing describes the collision of cultures occurring in a world set into perpetual motion. Iyer too is in perpetual motion, so much that he “only has an official home where he never actually spends any time.” For the past nine years, however, Iyer’s return tickets have led him to his Japanese partner and a two-room apartment in Nara. Paper Sky stole a moment with Iyer to ask what the rest for the world looks like- and how to get there.
The author’s profile you provide never mentions the phrase, “travel writer.” Do you not consider yourself a travel writer?
I suppose not. I’ve grown up with cultures crossing and overlapping a lot, and so I’m naturally inclined towards studying cross-cultural relations. Travel is an easy way of doing that. But for me, travel is nearly always a means to an end. The travel part of it is less interesting than either the encounter with foreignness or just the mingled romance and comedy and sometimes tragedy that take place when two strangers bounce off one another. There are some writers who write books of adventure about walking across Tibet or penetrating the lost, inner recesses of the Amazon. I think those books in some ways are about the physical movement. Mine are more meant to be about mental or emotional movement. Jan Morris, whom I regard as the monarch of the field, says that she’s not a travel writer, but she writes about place. Many a so-called travel writer would probably like to steal that sentance from her.
How much of your last year was spent on the road?
Maybe four months. But in the midst of that, when I come to Nara, I pretty much never leave my immediate neighborhood. I don’t have any means of transportation when I’m here; I only walk as far as my legs can take me. Also, three or four weeks of the last year I spent in a monastery in California, where I certainly didn’t move. So I tend to go back and forth between extreme forms of being either absolutely still, which is when I get my writing and thinking and reading done, and moving around a lot, which is when I get my experiencing and savoring of the world done. So for example, last August I was in Yemen and Oman and Greece and America. In September, I was in Canada and Singapore and Thailand- and then I came to Nara and didn’t move for three months. Then, when I emerged, I went to Bolivia and Peru in January, and in February I was in India and Vietnam and Thailand- and Japan for a day. I sometimes almost literally circumnavigate the globe to the point of being on three for four continents in one week. But when I get to the other end, I don’t move.
Were you affected by the biggest travel story of the last year: terrorism?
Not at all. In the week of September 11th, I flew several times domestically, and the following week I flew to Japan and then to Singapore. One of the other ironies of September 11th was that almost while the buildings were still in smoke, the New York Times called to ask me to write about the event. And I said I couldn’t, because that day I was proofreading my newly completed novel about the collision between Islam and America.
As with that new book, a lot of your writing deals with spirituality and religion, from Zen to Islam to Christianity. How do current events and the ideology of religions versus progress affect your view of the this postmodern world you describe in books such as The Global Soul?
I think both the Islamic revolutionaries and many others who are very committed to some religious belief believe that progress in some ways involves going backwards. To the past, to something essential, away from the modern world. A part of me has a lot of sympathy with that. The main theme of The Global Soul and a lot of my thinking is the swarm and jangle of crossing cultures- the sort of postmodern world that increasingly looks and feels like an MTV video, hectic and fragmented and exhilarating. And I think sometimes I feel that the more we experience the MTV commercial of the modern world, the more we hunger for whatever can take us out of it, which usually does have to do with some kind of spiritual retreat or grounding in tradition or faith. In The Global Soul, I was trying to take the reader and myself right into the heart of the modern chaos. To convey that sense of commotion and seasickness and exhaustion and jet lag as a way of suggesting why people retreat to monasteries or unplug themselves. And the book I’ve just finished is very explicitly about the dialogue between the Islamic world, which I think is very much speaking for tradition and faith, and California, which in some ways is the opposite extreme.
Is there anything in your new book about the resolution between Islam and the West that might be applicable to what’s going on now?
It’s very much about individuals confronting the situation. All of the main characters are in California, but they find solace and humility and even freedom by going to places in the Middle East. So I think it’s more about the hunger that lies in some of California where there is so little tradition that people are craving for what the older cultures offer. It is partly about the ways in which people dream about cultures opposite to their own.
In terms of a resolution to the current Moslem-McWorld debate, I’m a great believer in travel itself as a way to cut through stereotypes and assumptions and to see another culture in all its nuance and otherness. In some ways, recent events seem to have been about people on both sides of the world stigmatizing the other on the basis of stereotypes-Moselm radicals seeing America in terms of its heavy-handed government (and mass culture), Americans condemning an Islam they know very little about. The best solution in either case, I think, is actually going somewhere, and coming to see how like oneself it is, and how different. I’m very glad that last August I spent a few weeks in Arabia. At the time of September 11th, the thing I was most grateful for was that I could see all those events as they would seem to somebody sitting in the Yemeni port of Aden. To be able to see the world from the perspective of this desperately impoverished, disenfranchised Arabic place-near, in fact, where Osama Bin Laden was born. To me, one of the great glories of the modern world is that so many of us are able to see how the world looks to people in very different circumstances. And since the poorer (often Moslem) half of the world seldom has the resources to come and see us, it’s up to those of us who are privileged to go and see places where people are living in very disparate conditions. I think that’s where we can really help and begin to make a difference.
Your writing is filled with a love and knowledge of literature; reading it gives one the impression that literature and travel share something in common. The experience of a vicarious self, for one. For example, you once described the saddest goodbyes said by the traveler as “those we say to ourselves, at foreign airports, as we shed the daring and irresponsible selves we have come to acquire abroad, and recollect our normal working lives.”
That sounds very familiar! And funnily enough, maybe three days ago, I was reading Donald Richie’s Inland Sea again, and I thought independently to exactly the same conclusion. I actually scribbled a little essay about how the great travelers are great readers. Partly because I think travelers are by nature solitary, and a part of what they’re bringing to the cultures they visit is the reading that they have. One thing that makes Donald Richie such an extraordinary, majestic writer on Japan is that he brings this huge body of knowledge of all the books that he’s savored from every culture. As he wanders around the inland sea in that book and starts relating it to Johnson and Rousseau and Jane Austen, all the books that he’s bringing with him give him a perspective that he would never have if he was only quoting Kawabata or Murasaki Shikibu. There are some wonderful things to be said about the similarity between these two very solitary pursuits that both are taking place in the imagination in some ways. Emerson wrote about how all of us invent the books that we read. And I think in the same way we invent the places that we visit.
You mention the phrase, “great traveler.” What makes a “good traveler,” and do you think there is such a thing as a “bad traveler?”
I think the main thing involved in traveling usefully is to leave assumptions at home and to surrender as much as possible to the otherness around you. The beauty of traveling is suddenly seeing the world from a radically different viewpoint that turns everything you imagined on its head. If there is such a thing as a “good traveler,” it’s somebody who yearns to see the world through the eyes of the people he’s visiting, somebody ready to be shocked and transformed. If there’s such a thing as a “bad traveler,” it’s somebody who has his mind made up before he leaves.
To me, the only real travel that’s important takes place inwardly, away from one’s initial assumptions. So for example, when I’m going on holiday, I tend not to go to Hawaii or Paris or London, because I feel they’ll in someways reinforce my assumptions and prejudices. I will go somewhere like Haiti or Ethiopia or Yemen, because I’m fairly confident that they’ll shake me up and give me a lot to think about when I come back. Camus says what gives value to travel is fear. Although I’m not endorsing fear as an end in itself, I am a believer in challenging and unsettling oneself.
So you do yearn for that even when traveling on holiday?
Since I’m lucky enough to travel for a living, I don’t do much in the way of holiday-making itself. One thing that I’ve been doing in recent years is to take my mother on holiday every New Year’s. But I’ve taken her to places like Cambodia, Easter Island and Syria. So even taking my 70-year old mother, I’m trying to take her places that I think will be interesting and challenging. After all, most of these places are much less dangerous than Los Angles or New York. When we’re sitting in the comfort of our homes in California or Japan, we assume that India or Cambodia or Haiti are dangerous, and that home isn’t. But actually, statistically, places like LA and Washington are much more dangerous than Beirut or Phnom Penh. Though Japan is a pretty safe place.
Do you plan to keep your so-called home in Japan?
Left to my own devices, I’d be delighted to live in Japan for the rest of my life. I can’t think of a place anywhere in the world that agrees with me and that I respect and admire more than Japan. Even though I still live here on a tourist visa.
This interview originally appeared in Paper Sky No. 1 (May, June, 2002)
