2nd Research Posts 2009
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LITR
5731 Colonial-Postcolonial Literature 
Debbie Sasser
12-04-09
Pico Iyer on Post-Colonialism and the Sense of Home
Pico Iyer, a post-colonial travel writer I introduced in my first research post, has captured my interest, because he writes about issues of colonialism, culture, and globalism with an authoritative, fascinating international perspective. His travels, his multicultural background, and post-colonial life experience are subjects that find their way into all his writings in compelling, unique, and somewhat challenging discourse. His ideas on the individual's sense of home will be the focus of this research post. I will aim to bring Iyer's overarching concept of globalism into dialogue with his post-colonial perspectives. My research will discover how travel can cause a person to feel either at home or alienated in a similar way that colonization can make natives feel out of place even though they are at home.
My research began with an interview with several post-colonial travel writers by Kati Stammwitz. I was interested in the questions she posed, and gravitated towards the interview she conducted with Iyer. Stammwitz says, "The issue of identity is a crucial one for post-colonial writers/travelers, who (as post-colonials) often lack a stable sense of self due to colonization and displacement." She, like me, seeks to find out if travel can be a way of "discovering or recovering one's (post-colonial) identity" (Stammwitz). Iyer was born in Oxford, England to Indian parents, and grew up in California, but says he is simply international or post-national. "[I have] the ability to look at all of them [India or America or Britain] with something of the warmth of an insider and the discernment of a visitor. This sense of partial estrangement does, of course, have its dangers, but I think it opens up new possibilities that a whole world of 'global villages on two legs' is just beginning to experience, in its lives and in its words" (Stammwitz).
Iyer delves further into the idea of globalism throughout his interview with Moe. "I think what we notice among the younger generation is that they have this much more global sense of home, literally." He goes on to say that the idea of home has become something identified through family background, marriage relationships, and physical location (Moe). While in another interview, conducted by Matthew Davis, Iyer explands his concept of home into the realm of colonialization and post-colonialization ideas. He says that travel writing used to be, "mostly white, nearly always male, often from England, and about going to Africa and Kenya and surveying the strange customs of the natives. And I think now it is more and more about a half-Thai, half-German girl living in Iowa City, going to an Afghanistan full of German aid workers and Japanese businessmen." (Davis). He went on to blur the idea of the colonizer versus the colonized by saying that traveling is now more about exploring a multi-cultural society as a multi-cultural person. "A travel writer has to rethink what discovery means, and exoticism and movement" (Davis).
On his own quest for discovering his self or his concept of home and all the word 'home' encompasses, Iyer uses a unique analogy. He discusses this analogy in an interview with Joe Moe of Weekend America. He says home is like a manuscript that he is constantly revising, updating, and adding to. He went on to say that when he was young his idea of home was like a 20 page essay, whereas now it had become more of a haiku (Moe). Here, Iyer also discussed his current lifestyle, which involves spending about half of his time living in Japan and the other 50 percent traveling (Moe). When Iyer stays at an apartment in Japan, he says he feels the most at home, because he is 100 percent an outsider (Moe). His ideas on home cross over into the experience of post-colonials, because their idea of self identity diminishes as colonial influences cause depthlessness, suppression of native values and norms, and marginalization of culture. Even though native people live in the colonized place, they are likely to feel, over time, like citizens of nowhere. Iyer says, "Now more than ever, we have more access to other cultures than ever before, but not necessarily more understanding about the cultures, so what we do is take all the forms without necessarily what they represent" (Davis).
Iyer wrote about this merging, misunderstanding, mystery of cultures in his book The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home. Ironically, Iyer reflected on his book in a way that seems to indentify its contents, ". . . I thought that was an important territory to address at that time, and I had had a chance to experience more globalism than some. But that book makes me sea sick and dizzy, and I don’t like reading it, though I felt it had to be written in that very jangled way" (Davis). In the book, Iyer discusses multiculturalism through the eyes of the city of Toronto. "The hope of a Global Soul, always, is that he can make the collection of his selves something greater than the whole; that diversity can leave him not a dissonance but a higher symphony" (Iyer). Iyer sees these same qualities in the city of Toronto which he calls a Global City. He later learned that the city used to be a no-man's-land for native people groups and that its name means 'meeting place' (Iyer). In his travels, Iyer met people from all over the world with connections to Toronto, which seems to attest to the idea of globalism which it so perfectly embodies.
Iyer brings to light intriguing concepts regarding post-colonialism, travel, globalism, multiculturalism, and the idea of 'home' or self identity. His conclusions are drawn predominantly towards the concept of globalism, because his travels and personal life experiences have made him multicultural and capable of confidently, comfortably thriving in the world he considers a global village. In my research, I found his most compelling argument to be his idea that there is currently trends towards less dialogue and interaction between the colonizer and the colonized as there are exchanges between multicultural individuals. However, I believe the blurring, culture flattening influences of colonialism are still prevalent and evident in the world today; and they are sometimes experienced through detrimental, oppressive, and suppressive outcomes.
Works Cited
Davis, Matthew. "Pico Iyer: On Travel and Travel Writing." November 30, 2006.
http://www.worldhum.com/features/travel-interviews/pico_iyer_travel_writing_20061104/
Iyer, Pico. The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home. New York: Knopf, 2000.
Moe, Joe. "On the Road with Pico Iyer." November 29, 2008. http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/11/29/pico_iyer/
Stammwitz, Kati. "Turning the Telescope in the Other Direction: Four Interviews with Post- Colonial Travel Writers. Pico Iyer, Frank Delaney, Dan Jacobson, and Dervla Murphy."
http://webdoc.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic99/stamm/1_99.html