Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"'I'm not Spanish, you see; I'm Indian': Pico Iyer and the Limits of the 'Postnational' Travelling Subject"
Sujata Iyengar
Department of English, University of Georgia
iyengar@arches.uga.edu
Pico Iyer has made a career out of rootlessness. His narrative voice pleads to be considered outside of any particular ethnic or national identity, as a postmodern "global village on two legs" ("Postmodern Tourism," Interview with Scott London, The Sun Magazine, Jan. 1996), the British-educated, California-dwelling offspring of Indian parents, who faxes his articles to Time from a retreat in the Japanese countryside. He identifies himself as "not so much an Indian, but an international traveller" (Sun); this travelling persona vehemently distances himself from any special knowledge or insight into matters Asian in Video Night in Kathmandu (1988):
I make no claim to be authoritative about the places I visited. Quite the opposite, in fact. I spent no more than a few weeks in each country, I speak not a word of any of their languages and I have never formally studied any Asian culture (24).
At such points the narrator adopts a rare stridency, as if overwhelmed by the urge to demonstrate his cultural alienation. It is, after all, not unusual for a professional travel writer to learn foreign languages.
Iyer's insistence that he is not "Indian," his dislike of being compared to other Diasporic writers like Vikram Seth, is partly an effort to throw off the burden of being a cultural representative. It is also, however, a grandly Romantic gesture, figuring the solitary author as a poetic seer or visionary (and Iyer has in fact been selected by the Utne Reader as one of their "future visionaries"). The poem "about the author" that opens The Lady and the Monk (1991), his sensitive account of "a season in Japan," severs both text and author from their respective origins still further:
Pico Iyer was born in Oxford in 1957, and educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard. He is an essayist for Time magazine and the author of Video Night in Kathmandu. Just before he completed The Lady and The Monk, his house burned dramatically to the ground, leaving him with nothing but the clothes he was wearing and the manuscript for this book.
I do not, of course, deny that the unfortunate writer's house became a bonfire; but including this in what is otherwise a very spare description gives it the status of a mythic pronouncement. The author becomes transcendentally itinerant, literally home-less: like a colossus, he strides the world, effortlessly and wryly moving from one country to the next. The Author -- now in metaphorical upper-case -- becomes one who is tied neither to personal and familial history nor, more importantly, to national politics.
But we can't deracinate ourselves completely. On a practical level, we can't change the colour of our skin (even if we change our accents). In fact an early incident in The Lady and the Monk highlights a point at which Iyer is forced to give up his travelling trans-nationality: Iyer, mistaken for a native Spanish-speaker, is asked to translate for an Argentinian political prisoner at a meeting of Amnesty International. Iyer's Spanish is evidently as bad as his Asian languages, and he finds himself making it up as he goes along. This is broad comedy, but it would be categorically impossible were he white (or black, for that matter). Iyer finally reaches the limits of rootless subjectivity, forced finally to acknowledge a specific nationality to the "tortured" Argentinian whom he's supposed to be translating:
"Do you speak Spanish?" [the speaker] asked under his breath in almost unintelligible Spanish.
"Not really. I'm not Spanish, you see; I'm Indian" (37).
My paper explores the limits of transnational identity in Iyer's travel writing and discusses the tensions between his Romantic, literary persona and his own, understated, ethnic identity. I argue that his reiteration that he is a postmodern, postnational subject, the product of multiple discourses and cultures, is in fact a way of re-affirming the Romantic, transcendent and unique individual; I also suggest that this writerly notion of transnationality, while attractive, hinders a reader or would-be traveller from considering the place of committed political action in a global tourist economy.
Dr. Sujata Iyengar
Department of English,
Park Hall,
University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602-6205
iyengar@arches.uga.edu
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