From Living in the Transit Lounge
a talk given by Pico Iyer
in January at Yale University's Da1venport College . Iyer is the author of Video
Night in Kathmandu and The Lady and the Monk; a new collection of his essays, Falling
Off the Map, will be published next month by Knopf. Iyer's essay Selling Our Innocence
Abroad appeared in the December 1991 issue of Harper's Magazine.
By the time I was nine, I was already used to going
to school by transatlantic
plane, to sleeping in airports, to shuttling back and forth, three times a year,
between my parents' (Indian) home in California and my boarding school in England.
Throughout my youth, I never lived within 6,000 miles of my nearest relative. From
the time I was a teenager, I took it for granted that I could take my budget vacations
(as I did) in Bolivia and Tibet, China and Morocco. It never seemed strange to me
that a girlfriend might be half a world (or ten hours' flying time) away, or that
my closest friends might be on the other side of a continent or sea.
It was only recently that I realized that all these habits of mind and life would
scarcely have been imaginable in my parents' youth; that the very facts and facilities
that shape my world are all distinctly new developments and
mark me as a modern type.
It was only recently, in fact, that I realized I am an example of an entirely new
breed of people, an intercontinental tribe of wanderers that is multiplying as fast
as international phone lines and frequent flier programs. We are the Transit Loungers,
forever heading to the departure gate, forever orbiting the world. We enjoy our habits
duty free, we eat our food on plastic plates, we catch the world through rented headphones.
We pass through countries as through revolving doors, resident aliens of the world,
permanent residents of nowhere. Nothing is strange to us, and nowhere is foreign.
We are visitors even in our own homes.
This is not, I think, a function of affluence so much as of simple circumstance.
I am not, that is, a jet setter pursuing vacations from Marbella to Phuket; I am
simply a fairly typical product of a movable sensibility, living and working in a
world that is itself increasingly small and increasingly mongrel. I am a multinational
soul on a multicultural globe on which more and more countries are as polyglot and
restless as airports. Taking planes seems as natural to me as picking up the phone
or going to school; I fold up my self and carry it around with me as if it were an
overnight bag.
This kind of life, of course, offers an unprecedented sense of freedom and mobility
tied down to nowhere, I can pick and choose among locations. At the most basic level,
this means that I can get on a plane in Los Angeles, get off a few hours later in
Jakarta, check into a Hilton, order a cheeseburger in English, and pay for it all
with an American Express card. At the next level, it means that I can meet, in the
Hilton coffee shop, an Indonesian businessman who is as conversant as I am with Larry
King and Magic Johnson and Madonna. At a deeper level, it means that I need never
feel estranged. If all the world is alien to us, all the world is home.
I have learned, in facts to love foreignnesso In any place I visit, I have the privileges
of an outsider, I am an object of interest and even fascination, I am a person set
apartable to enjoy the benefits of the place without paying the taxes, Distance-on
both sides-lends enchantment; policemen let me out of speeding tickets, girls want
to hear the story of my life pedestrians will gladly point me to the nearest golden
arches.
People like me learn to exult in the blessings of belonging to what feels like a
whole new racev It is a races as Salman Rushdie has saids of People who root themselves
in ideas rather than placesf in memories as much as in material things, people who
have been obliged to define themselves,because they are so defined by others by their
otherness people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occurw unprecedented unions
between what they were and where they find themo selvesî. And when people argue
that our very notion of wonder is eroded, that alienness itself is as seriously endangered
as the wilderness that more and more of the world is turning into a single synthetic
mono culture I reply that I am not worried a Japanese version of a French fashion
is something news I say not quite Japanese and not truly Frenchv Hybrids are the
art form of the time
And yet sometimes, I stop myself and think, What kind of heart is being produced
by these new changes? And how does one fix a moving object on a map? I am not an
exile really or an immigrant? not deracinated I think any more than I am rooted.I
have not fled the oppression of war or found ostracism in the places where I do alight.
I can scarcely feel severed from a home I have scarcely known. But when the cabin
attendant comes down the aisle with disembarkation forms what do I fill in?
Alienation, we are taught from grade school, is the condition of the time. This is
the century of exiles and refugeese of boat people and stateS lessness and estrangemenc
more than a third of all Afghans live outside Afghanistan; the second city of the
Khmers is a refugee camp; the second tongue of Belfast is Chinesee The very notion
of nation states is outdated; many of us are as crosshatched within as Beirut.
To understand the modern statew we are ofo ten tolda we must read Vo S Naipaub Naipaul
is considered the definitive modern traveler in part because he is the definitive
symbol of modS ern rootlessness; his singular qualification for his wanderings is
not his staminaw or his bravado, or his love of exploration-it isw quite simplyw
his congenital displacement. Here is a man who was a foreigner at births a citizen
of an exiled community set down on a colonized island.
Here is a man for whom every arrival is enigmatic, a man without a home-except for
an India to which he stubbornly returns, only to be reminded of his distance from
it The strength of Naipaul is the poignancy of Naipaub the poiS gnancy of a wanderer
who tries to go home but is not taken in, and is accepted by another home only so
long as he admits that heys a lodger there.
There is, however, another way of apprehending foreignness and that is the way of
Nabokov. In him we see an avid cultivation of the new: he collects foreign worlds
with a connoisseurís delight; he sees foreign words as toys to play with, he
treats
exile as the state of kingsv This touring aristocrat can even relish the pleasures
of ìLoî culture precisely because they are the things that his own high
culture lacks; the motel and the summer camps the roadside attraction and the hotSfudge
sundaes I recognize in Nabokov a Europeanís love for America rooted in Americass
very youthfulness and heedlessness. I recognize in him the sense that the newcomerfs
viewpoint may be the one most conducive to bright ardor (a sixteen yearold, after
all may be infinitely more interesting to a forty year old than to a fellow teenager)
Nabokov shows us that unfamiliarity can in any contexts breed content. That instead
of taking alienation as our natural states we can feel partially adjusted everywhere.
That the outsider at the feast does not have to sit in the corner alonef taking notes,
he can plunge with abandon into the pleasures of his new home.
We airpor to hoppers can, in fact, go through the world as through a house of wonders,
picking up something at every stop and taking the whole globe as our playpen or our
supermarket. We donít have a home, we have a hundred homes. And we can mix and
match as the situation demands. Nobodyís history is my history the Japanese.English
novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, a great spokesman for the privileged homeless, once said
to me. Whenever it was convenient for me to become very Japaneses I could become
very Japaneses and then when I wanted to drop it, I would just become this ordinary
Englishman. Instantly I felt a shock of recognition. I have a wardrobe of selves
from which to choose. And I savor the luxury of being able to be an Indian in Cuba
or an American in Thailand
to be an Englishman in New York.
And so we go on circling the world six miles above the groundv We listen to announcements
given in three languages. We confirm our reservations at every stop. We disembark
at airports that are selfsufficient communities with hotels, gymnasiums and places
of worship. At customs we have nothing to declare but ourselves.
But what is the price we pay for all of this. What is the new kind of soul that is
being born out of this new kind of life. For us in the transit lounges affiliation
is as alien as disorientationv We become professional observersable to see the merits
and deficiencies of anywheref to balance our parentss viewpoints with their enemieís
position. Yes, we say, of course itts terriblew but look at the situation from Saddamís
point of viewh I understand how you feels but the Chinese had their own cultural
reasons for Eananmen Square. Fervor comes to seem to us the most foreign place of
all.
Seasoned experts at the aerial perspectivew we are less good at touching downs Unable
to be stirred by the raising of a flag, we are often unS able to see how anyone could
be stirredv I some times think that this is how Rushdie the great analyst of this
condition, became its victim. He had juggled homes for so long, so adroitly, that
he forgot how the world looks to someone who is rooted in country or belief. He had
chosen to live so far from affiliation that he could no longer see why people choose
affiliation in the first placev Besides being part of no society means one is accountable
to no one and ne ed respect no laws outside oneís own.
We becomes in facts strangers to belief itselfs unable to comprehend many of the
rages and dogmas that animate and unite people. Conflict itself seems inexplicable
to us sometimes, simply because partisanship is, we have the agnosticís inability
to retrace the steps of faith. I can not begin to fathom why some Muslims would think
of murder after hearing about The Satanic Verses yet sometimes I force myself to
recall that it is wef in our floating skepticism who are the exceptionss that in
China or Irans in Korea or Perus it is not so strange to take life or give it up
for local principles.
We tell ourselvesf self servingly that nationalism breeds monsters and we choose
to ignore the fact that internationalism breeds them too. Ours is the culpability
not of the assassin but of the by stander who takes a snapshot of the murder. Or
when the revolution catches fire hops on the next plane out.
Some times, though I am brought up short by symptoms of my conditions They are not
major things but they are peculiar oness and ones that would not have been so common
fifty years agov I have never bought a house of any kinde I have never votedv I have
never supported a nation (in the Olympic Gamess say) or represented my country in
anything. Even the name I go by is weirdly international because my real name a poly
syllabic unpronounceable Indian one makes sense only in the home where I have never
lived. I wonders sometimes if this new kind of non-affiliation may not be alien to
something fundamental in the human state. The refugee at least harbors passionate
feelings about the world he has left the exile at least is propelled by some kind
of strong emotion away from the old country and toward the new indifference is not
an exile's emotion. But what does the Transit Lounger feel What are the issues that
we would
die for? What are the passions that we would live for?
Airports are among the only sites in public life where emotions are hugely sanctioneds
We see people weep shout kiss in airports, we see them at the furthest edges of excitement
and exhaustion. Airports are privileged spaces where we can see the primal states
-fear recognition hope- writ large. But there are some of us, perhaps, sitting at
the departure gates boarding passes in hands watching the destinations ticking over,
who feel neither the pain of separation nor the exultation of wonder, who alight
with the same emotions with which we embarked, who go down to the baggage carousel
and watch our lives circling, circling, circling, waiting to be claimed.
