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BOOKS WITHOUT BORDERS
In the new Global Lit, the concept of nationality has become a lot more complicated.

Text: CHARLES FORAN

YOU ARE ON AN AIRPLANE, READING THIS MAGAZINE. You may be one of the million people who will cross a border today. You may even be one of the thousands who will change national addresses in the next 24 hours, part of the largest ongoing migration in human history. You might already carry a couple of passports. You are certainly on the go.

Looking for books that will tell you about your pilgrim soul? They are out there, if you want them. One is actually called The Global Soul and its subtitle, "Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home," captures the manic pace, and some of the underlying anxiety, of our age. Author Pico Iyer is fast becoming the champion of a literary movement born of these shifts in notions of identity and belonging. Iyer says this kind of writing, dubbed Global Lit, "doesn’t need the old borders, the old definitions." Rather, it needs up-to-date flight schedules.

Even if Global Lit were only a publishing phenomenon, it would be worth a look. In the last decade or so, bestseller lists in Canada (and elsewhere) have grown top-heavy with authors whose names are difficult to pinpoint on an old-fashioned map of ethnicity. Literary fiction may strike the outsider as aloof from commerce – how can the market discover the next Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner? – but that isn’t the case. Markets are established, then they are expanded. There were plenty of novels about India before Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things exploded onto the scene in 1997. But perhaps none of those books was quite so poetic or featured an author quite so attractive. Roy was translated into 36 languages in her first year. Novels of a similar pitch have been appearing monthly, it seems, ever since.

But the phenomenon is also broadly cultural, part of our giddy delight at our capacity to shrink the planet into byte-sized samplings of music and literature, television and films. At first glance, it might surprise that writers would want much to do with this pan-cultural grazing. Isn’t fiction obsessed with the search, to paraphrase Pico Iyer, for home?

Rohinton Mistry has lived in Canada for a quarter-century, but his novels and stories have never left the Parsi community in Mumbai (Bombay). Though Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian has long resided in France, his novel Soul Mountain is an intimate dialogue with China, an act of creative courage, given that he had to know the censor would ensure no one there could read this monumental work.

Global Lit, in short, isn’t about authors finding themselves outside their native countries. Where you live doesn’t really matter as long as the place recognizes your freedom to write. What defines the movement is its thematic focus on realignment. What marks many of its practitioners are how various realignments made them who they are.

It is Neil Bissoondath, the child of Indians living in Trinidad, who writes fiction from Quebec City about the conflicting worlds within emigrants. It is Michael Ondaatje, born into the Dutch ex-pat community in Sri Lanka, who in The English Patient and other books composed in Toronto, denies the supremacy of maps of nations over maps of the heart. It is Kazuo Ishiguro, transplanted from Japan to England as a boy, whose novels inhabit the minds of orphans floating in seas of doubt about belonging.

And Global Lit remains, first and still foremost, Salman Rushdie. In the beginning, critics agree, were the playful words: "I was born in the city of Bombay... once upon a time." The sentence opens Midnight’s Children, Rushdie’s 1981 paean to the glories of mixing and matching identities, stories and languages. Two decades later, the iconoclast is still at it with his mischievous new novel, Fury.

Salman Rushdie’s long shadow, and the origin of so much fine writing in post-colonial India and its diaspora, poses questions. Is Global Lit wedded to certain complexions? Is it married as well to English, an ever more dominant lingua franca? The impact of Tahar ben Jalloun in France, a Moroccan writing in French, would suggest a broader canvas. Equally, Shanghai native Ying Chen and Haitian Émile Ollivier are expanding the borders of Québécois literature. Globalization is challenging the sovereignty of languages everywhere.

This past fall, Montrealer Yann Martel published his second novel. Life of Pi tells of a journey at sea involving an Indian man and a Bengal tiger. In an author’s note, Martel explains that, after false-starting another project, he did what any sensible writer would for inspiration: "I flew to Bombay." Yann Martel has resided abroad for much of his life, thanks to diplomat parents. He lives in French but writes in English. In Canada, the crude politics of identity literature still gets play and writers are often "read" as much by their profile as by the words in their books. Life of Pi, a sly parable of the follies of potted certainties about the self, has received strong reviews in the author’s native land.

The final query about Global Lit concerns its own soul. All this movement has to come at a psychic cost. The Japan-based Pico Iyer, the son of Indian emigrants to England who currently reside in California, may call himself a "post-national mix-up" and may write from the suburbs of Kyoto, but he grants the anxiety factor. As he says in The Global Soul, books about the future need to address "our dreams, of disconnection, of displacement, of being lost within a labyrinth of impersonal spaces."

Indeed, the best Global Lit – such as Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans – often creates challenging dreamscapes in its narratives. They are, however, in their own fashion, still about home. That the location, and meaning, of "home" has become fraught, the source of both wonderment and unease, is simply how more of us are now living. But then, if you are on an airplane, reading this magazine, you may already be feeling that truth deep in your bones.