The Global Soul

by Pico Iyer

  To see how this uncertain sense of self would play out in what is effectively Canada’s unique (and uniquely un-American) religion, I went one day to the International Hockey Hall of Fame, or Le Temple de la Renommée du Hockey, as it is even more aptly known in French. The shrine is located, as it happens, within one of the city’s plushest buildings, constructed in 1855 to house what was then the largest bank branch in the country (and the original Stanley Cup is kept in a darkened steel-lined vault that could have been housing the jewels of the Tower of London at least). Old Canadians and new were ascending a grand staircase to the Great Hall, a chamber topped by a forty-five-foot stained-glass dome, with twenty-four fanned panels depicting allegorical dragons guarding gold from eagles. “For Canada, our national pride and composure hung on the eighth game of the series” said a board that took one through every palpitating moment of the Summit Series in 1972, in which the Canadians took on the Soviets they had originally taught to play the game. A silver coin put out by the Royal Canadian mint to commemorate the victory sat in the display case.

  “Our team was made up of a cross-section of the Canadian ethnic mosaic,” the explanation concluded, summarizing the triumph—“French Canadians, English Canadians, Ukrainian Canadians, Polish Canadians, German Canadians, Italian Canadians. The mixture of backgrounds was an important ingredient in the success of our team” (how, I couldn’t begin to imagine, since the Soviet team must have drawn upon no less a degree of diversity).

  Yet for all the national pride, the headquarters of the National Hockey League, administering Canada’s religion, was in New York City. At Nagano, only three months before, I’d watched Canada fail somehow to win the gold medal in men’s hockey, in women’s hockey, even in curling (while the so-called Canadian curse meant, yet again, that a Canadian world-champion figure skater failed to claim Olympic gold). Canada did finally win a much-publicized gold in snowboarding, and then its new national hero was briefly stripped of the medal after testing positive for marijuana.

  For me, spending time in Toronto had the same effect as slow adrenaline: here was all New York’s intelligence, I felt, with none of the neurosis, and all of London’s sophistication, without the sourness. There was a sense of tempered idealism here—an optimism made rigorous by irony—that both warmed my heart and inspired confidence: I found myself telling Torontonians that their city had all Manhattan’s software without, so to speak, its hard drive.

  Yet Canada’s proverbial lack of confidence seemed as impossible to shake as America’s sense of being Master of the Universe (however much both were contradicted by circumstance), and when I opened the city magazine, it was to find a whole article listing “the most inept teams in our city’s history” (no easy task, it said, given Toronto’s “long and storied tradition of abysmal franchises”). At the traveling British exhibition in the museum, someone had been so impressed that he’d written, “It’s just too good for Canada,” and when the local Blue Jays had finally made it to the World Series—the first non-American team to do so—the Marine Corps had famously unfurled the Canadian flag upside down. Everything seemed fodder for this sad sense of excludedness: while I was in Toronto, a small controversy broke out in the U.S. about the fact that its home-run champion Mark McGwire was using anabolic steroids (legal in Major League Baseball, as they are not in many arenas). Instantly, to my amazement, in Toronto, the discussion turned into an “Us against Them” lament in which people complained that McGwire was being lionized for using the same substance for which Ben Johnson had been stripped of his 1988 Olympic gold medal. Ten years on, the memory lingered of how Canada’s world-champion gold medalist had been almost instantly exposed, and disqualified, as a cheat (with black Canadians adding that when Johnson stood on the podium, he’d been acclaimed as a Canadian; but as soon as he was disgraced, he’d been identified again as a “Jamaican”).

  A few hundred yards away from the International Hockey Hall of Fame, in a corner of the underground labyrinth that stretches for eleven square blocks in the center of Toronto—a shiny, well-ordered Everyworld underlining the clamor of cultures above—I happened into a small bookshop, and decided to see what I could find on Canada. There were two shelves of volumes in all, beginning with the expected picture books hymning the nation’s mighty rivers and its untamed wilderness (at the time he was writing, Marshall McLuhan claimed, as many as 250,000 lakes in Ontario alone remained unnamed).

  Apart from such Glimpses of Our Great Canadian Heritage, though, nearly all the books played out Canada’s anguished debate with itself. Misconceiving Canada sat next to Inventing Canada; Symptoms of Canada was not far from Scorned and Beloved. Who Are the People of Canada Anyway? asked “Citizen X” (an “over educated student of Canadian politics who wants to tell the truth”); the copy on his back cover asked, straight out, “Does Canada have a future?”

  Marshall McLuhan, in sharing his loonie’s worth on this inescapable theme—“The Case of the Missing Face,” as Hugh Kenner called it—had put a positive spin on undefinedness. Canada’s “low-profile identity,” he suggested, its “multiple borderlines,” and flexible sense of self—all prepared it ideally for our borderless, virtual world, and, he went so far as to say, “the Canadian North has replaced the American West.” Besides, in the U.S., too, I might have seen books with subtitles the equivalent of Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century and Canadian Social Values at the End of the Millennium, How We Talk About Canada and An Essay on the Canadian Identity.

  Yet still it cast a somewhat miasmal aspect—The Trouble with Canada sitting next to Fighting for Canada. “Instead of asking ‘What’s wrong with Canada?’ author Will Ferguson asks, ‘What’s wrong with Canadians?’ ” the flap copy of another volume offered. The title of that book was Why I Hate Canadians.

  In the U.S., I’d long felt, immigrants had actually breathed new force and energy into the country’s sense of itself; by acting as if the American Dream were true, they had helped to make it so. In Canada, I thought, the latest immigrants would be performing their most invaluable task if they could remind their new neighbors that possibility could be strengthened, and not undermined, by skepticism, and that greatness did not stop at the forty-ninth parallel.

  Writers, again, had the potential to be central to this task of self-definition, in part because so many of them, recently arrived in Canada, were dealing with exactly the same issues, loosed from traditional categories and trying to find new meanings for citizenship and belonging as they worked to make a peace between their different selves. Traditionally, an exile is an outsider, worrying at private issues of divided loyalty and homesickness that distance him even further from the rooted people all around; but in Toronto, often, a mongrel, many-headed exile was surrounded by a mongrel, many-headed city—a community of exiles looking for itself as he was—and so could find himself central to a city as floating as he was.

  So even as the city was schooling me in new terms for foreignness, its latest immigrant writers were teaching me new ways to talk about the divisions among foreigners, and among the different kinds of foreignness within them; blessed, often, with identities “at once plural and partial,” in Salman Rushdie’s phrase, they were seasoned at discussing how the Janus-headed man could be regarded as two-faced, and the woman with dual nationality could suffer from double vision. It is no coincidence that many of the characters in Toronto fiction are spies, double agents playing one side off against another, or changelings commuting between opposing sides of a hyphen—in Chang-rae Lee’s powerful phrase, “several anyones at once.”

  The destinies, the double crossings of these people who think, in Derek Walcott’s phrase, “in one language and move in another” have become one of the essential themes of modern literature, especially among those who live between many homes; and Toronto, of course, has become the spiritual home of those who wish to thrash out the issue. The two classic paths of exile have long been the ones defined by James Joyce in Paris (re-creating the city he loved in inex
haustible, obsessive detail—as it looked on June 16, 1904) and Samuel Beckett, nearby, flying beyond all particulars to some universal abstract space. In Toronto, to an uncanny degree, the traditions had been updated, for the international age, by Rohinton Mistry, re-creating his lost Bombay, and Michael Ondaatje, envisioning a world beyond nation-states.

  It was no surprise, then, that one of the most visible students of nationalism, Michael Ignatieff, though now based in London, was born of a mother from Nova Scotia and a father whose own father had been the minister of education in the last cabinet of Tsar Nicholas II (his maternal grandparents living on Prince Arthur Avenue in Toronto); or even that the most vivid accounts of modern Iraq and Iran I’d read—the other side of the Rushdie debate—had come from a Welshman who reimagined the Middle East on Toronto’s Balmoral Avenue. Again, as in the Paris of old fancy, there was a sense that many people had come here specifically to dissolve nationality, and to subscribe to Wole Soyinka’s creed: “I am a writer and therefore an explorer. My immediate tribe remains the tribe of explorers.”

  One day in Toronto, I picked up a local first novel called The Electrical Field and found that the text was rich with Japanese words, though none of them italicized (they were Canadian words now, it was telling me). When I happened to talk to the book’s young author, Kerri Sakamoto, visiting Japan, she said that she probably felt more at home in Los Angeles, in Little Tokyo, than in this foreign country to which she was linked only by a last name and distant grandparents.

  Another day in Toronto, I picked up a book called Borderline, by an author who described herself as “divid[ing] each year between Australia, North America and Europe” and one of whose earlier works was called Dislocations. The author, Janette Turner Hospital, seemed absolutely to belong to the Ontario where sometimes she lived; her characters were people thrown across a moving globe (“She felt at ease in airports” is how Hospital introduces her protagonist, “and in the hearts of great cities. Because, she said, they are full of other people who don’t belong—my closest relations”). The action begins, literally, on the border between Canada and the U.S., a kind of phantasmal zone where we meet a white woman born in India, a serial adulterer, and a truck that, opened for inspection, reveals, in the midst of hanging carcasses, a group of “illegals” peering out, “refugees from another time and place—the Ice Age, say, or the age of myth”; and as the book develops, its characters seem always to be calling in from foreign locations, sleeping with spouses not their own, living in borrowed places.

  Such novels, of course, could be written anywhere—and, in fact, more and more are—but there was a particular aptness in their being set and conceived in a city that had always worried about how exactly it fit into things, and how best it could balance its English and French and American pasts. “A Canadian poet is an exile condemned to live in his own country,” the Montreal poet Irving Layton had written, and his friend and running mate Leonard Cohen, in his novel Beautiful Losers, writes, “There are no Canadians. There are no Montrealers. Ask a man who he is and he names a race.” Only one generation earlier, many of Canada’s strongest writers—Mavis Gallant, Mordecai Richler, Cohen himself—had gone to Europe or America to find themselves; now, with the world turning on its axes, suddenly exiled writers were coming to Canada, and what had once been the periphery was becoming a center. In Ondaatje’s anthology of “Canadian stories,” From Ink Lake, the “Canadians” came from Malta, South Africa, India, and the West Indies, and one of the few “indigenous” stories, “The Man from Mars” by Margaret Atwood, tells of how an immigrant looks to the classic white Canadian (she doesn’t know whether he’s Chinese or Japanese—an interpreter, she thinks, though south or north of the DMZ?—and she doesn’t have a clue about what to make of his attentions; he is an alien from another planet).

  There is, to all this, a simple economic component: publishing has become as global as every other business nowadays, and writers, in any case, are speaking to—and for—readers as hybrid and many-souled as themselves. Successful novelists often become perpetual tourists, visiting all their markets on a never-ending tour, in many languages, so that airport departure lounges and hotel rooms are the settings in more and more novels, and publicists who used to talk of copies sold now boast of how many languages they’ve reached (Arundhati Roy’s debut, The God of Small Things, went into thirty-six languages, from Estonian to Croatian, in its first year). Even the advance words of praise on a postcolonial novel—I’m thinking of Chitra Divakaruni’s Mistress of Spices—come from a perfectly balanced group, including one Latino, one Chinese woman, one black man, one Japanese Hawaiian, one Japanese American, and, for fairness’ sake, one white Southern male.

  But beyond such details, there was a higher and more exacting sense that the new international writers—the writers of Harbourfront—were actually creating visions for the postnational future, inspirations, in a way, for Toronto. Rushdie, for example, invoked the ideal of Moorish Spain—a convivencia in which Christians wore Arab clothes, Jewish literature was translated into Castilian, and Moorish styles prevailed—as a model for his beloved, multicultural Bombay (being threatened by fundamentalists who would wish to shrink the Many into One), while Caryl Phillips, by setting some of his last novel in fifteenth-century Venice, was looking at the birthplace of the ghetto (where Jews were quarantined), which also, in Shakespeare’s vision, looked for its defense to a Moor. In 1913, even before the Mexican writer José Vasconcelos dreamed up a whole new miscegenated race—la Raza Cósmica—the Canadian C. J. Cameron, noting how people were coming into Canada from all directions, was anointing it “a vast laboratory of grace in which God is fashioning the final man. The final race will not be any one nationality but will be composed of elements from all races.”

  While I was visiting the Harbourfront Writers’ Festival, Carol Shields won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, traditionally given to the best American novel of the year. Shields, an American who’d lived in Canada for thirty years, had also, however, won the Governor-General’s Award for fiction, given to the best Canadian novel of the year, and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, for Britain’s strongest novel. The best thing about contemporary writers—and Canadians in particular—was that no one seemed to know where they were from.

  My last night in Toronto, I found myself in the Bar Italia (where, I was told, groups of Serbian kids sometimes got together with groups of Croatian ones, in a conscious effort to show their parents that they had entered a new country) on ever-more-mingled College Street. Ours was a typical Toronto gathering—five people, four of whom were from parts of South Asia as different as Jerusalem and Damascus. Our talk, as so often in the modern city, was of home and belonging; the simplest questions brought not-so-simple answers.

  “You’re from Lahore, I gather,” I said to the tall Muslim man I’d just met—a video importer—and he said yes, while adding that he’d grown up here, and his parents lived in the suburbs; he’d been educated at Vassar, and his girlfriend was a Christian, from Hyderabad, in southern India.

  “Once Indians start migrating,” he smiled, “they never stop.”

  “But that’s true of all diaspora people,” offered our token white, a Jewish man with two non-Jewish sons. “Look at the Jews. The company I work for, they’re all Latin American—that is, people who left Europe in the late thirties, settled in Uruguay, Peru. Now they’re here. It could be the U.S., it could be anywhere. Once you leave home, you could be anywhere.”

  The man from Lahore was not convinced; his partner, after all, was born of parents who’d grown up in Mysore, then moved to England, and then to Kansas, and then to Nova Scotia, where (this was the New World) they settled down in a small village filled with other Christians from Mysore.

  “They think I’m a traitor,” the woman said in a husky drawl that was pure America. “They still have Indian passports; I’ve got two—British and Canadian.”

  “Why Canadian?”

  “Because when I was in high
school, I wanted to become a page in the House of Commons. And you have to be a Canadian to work in the House of Commons.”

  I looked at the two of them—Muslim and Christian, dark and fair, India and Pakistan: the man from Lahore was here because he wanted to recruit Indians for his company, and the ones in India were banned from visiting Pakistan: it said so on their passports. So he had to come all the way to Toronto to find South Asians who were technically Canadians.

  “The two of you would probably not have gotten together if you’d been at home,” I said.

  “That’s true,” the man acknowledged.

  “Also, here I could appreciate our commonness more,” the woman added. “I mean, I felt more comfortable with a South Asian because I knew we shared certain assumptions.”

  “That’s right! When I came to the U.S., as a seventeen-year-old from Karachi,” her partner said, “all my friends were Jewish. It wasn’t a conscious thing, but something in the way they interacted with their parents, and the values they had, their relation to their grandparents, I could relate to.”

  “I know what you’re saying,” said the Jewish man, motioning to his Indian partner. “As soon as I met her parents, I felt at home. The way they spoke, the way they acted with her, the smell of their house, the feel of it: I was in my aunt’s house. I felt instantly at home, comfortable; I fell asleep!”

  This was how conversations went in Toronto, all the old categories dissolved, none of us able to tell—or needing to tell—who was Canadian and who was not, which person was the Indian born in Pakistan, which the Pakistani who’d grown up here. There were Christians and Jews and Muslims and Hindus (and none of the above) in our group of five, yet what brought us together was precisely the fact that each of us was surrounded by four different religions.