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Transcending Borders at the Jaipur Literature Festival
By STEVEN P. KERCHOFF To view the article in magazine format,
Please click here for the PDF File  Pico Iyer personifies the concept of a writer without borders-born in England to Indian parents, raised in the United States and the United Kingdom, and now living in Japan. For Iyer, the whole world is equally alien or equally home. His writing explores the space between cultures, and the people who inhabit that space. Iyer writes in The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home, "Having grown up simultaneously in three cultures, none of them fully my own, I acquired very early the sense of being loosed from time as much as from space-I had no history, I could feel, and lived under the burden of no home." Iyer was among the writers, editors, readers, publishers and performing artists who gathered at Diggi Palace in Jaipur, Rajasthan, to engage in spirited conversation during the Jaipur Literature Festival 2009, sponsored in part by the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi. A range of genres were featured, including not only belles lettres but also journalism, travel writing, history, biography and children's literature. The theme of writing that transcends borders emerged repeatedly at the event, with participants from India, the United States, United Kingdom, Pakistan, Australia, Malaysia, China and Bangladesh. Chronicling his development, Iyer joked that as a student of literature he learned no marketable skills, only how to read and write. "The more I studied literature, the more I was only qualified for unemployment." Despite this modest claim, however, he went on to become an essayist with Time magazine. Iyer later took a leave of absence to write Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East, published in 1989 amid an explosion of travel writing. In exploring the clash of cultures that occurs when East meets West, Iyer saw a reflection of his own multicultural heritage. "To some extent," he said, "it was my background speaking." In contrast to this global soul, American memoirist Michael Patrick MacDonald focuses on one very specific place and time, yet he too conveys something universal about the human experience. In his deeply moving memoir, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, MacDonald narrates his experiences of growing up in the impoverished South Boston neighborhood known as Southie. MacDonald chronicles the neighborhood's poverty, violence, and crime, which no one would acknowledge or discuss openly. This insular neighborhood skyrocketed to national infamy in 1974 when riots broke out over the racial desegregation of schools. In his remarks at the festival, MacDonald recounted his experience of leaving this neighborhood, "moving from a small, tight world which you thought was the only world." He described his subsequent work as a community organizer in black and Latino neighborhoods, where he found that "people didn't even know that there was such a thing as white poverty." His decision to write a memoir grew out of his experience as a community organizer, when he heard mothers telling their stories as a way of reaching out to other people and witnessed the impact of storytelling both on the audience and on the storytellers themselves. MacDonald observed that having a love/hate relationship with one's place of origin is a universal experience, and that a return to that place can be a part of the healing process. Reminiscing about the connectedness and community and the sense of being part of a larger social fabric, he stated, "It still to me is the best neighborhood in the world." In a post-festival interview with SPAN's Deepanjali Kakati, MacDonald described writing as "…finding a language to speak about sometimes unspeakable things." He said, "Writers kind of sort things out for others by de-tangling chaos and making a story that has some value. Ultimately, when we do this, we are also sorting things out for ourselves. And if we really go there for ourselves, then it tends to work for others...it tends to be universal. And basically, turning any tragedy and pain into a gift (for others but ultimately for ourselves) ought to be our mantra for making this world livable for all." MacDonald told SPAN that his second book, Easter Rising, deals with "that oft-asked question" of how he avoided being trapped in Southie's cycle of violence and poverty. "...For me it is ultimately not about getting out, but instead learning to embrace all that we come from and learning to work with it in order to go forward. So getting out, seeing the bigger world was one step toward my own 'rising,' but the return home (in a new way, with a new understanding of how to be in the world in all of its chaos and pain) was just as important....the return home, to Southie, to learning to embrace everything about my family and my community (wherever I may end up geographically)." In the fiction of Nadeem Aslam, a British writer of Pakistani origin, the social fabric is also rent asunder by violence, and by warfare and religious fundamentalism. Aslam has often publicly expressed his admiration for the Sri Lankan-born Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient. When a member of the audience asked Aslam about Ondaatje's influence on his writing one might have expected his answer to focus on style, since both writers exhibit an extraordinarily lush prose. Aslam responded, however, that it was Ondaatje who liberated him geographically and inspired him to expand beyond his own experiences of Pakistan and England and to explore the entire world in his writing. In a session on travel writing, moderator William Dalrymple, the British writer, asked Vikram Seth, who is perhaps better known as a novelist and poet, what the travel writer offers to the reader that the Encyclopædia Britannica does not. Seth responded that he hadn't originally planned to write a book when he hitchhiked through Tibet, but people kept asking him about the trip. When he wrote a few pages about his journey, his father encouraged him to seek out a publisher. The resultant book, From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet, focuses not merely on the journey itself but on the personalities and the encounters, the people as well as the places. Born in Calcutta and educated in the United States, as well as in England and China, Seth is a traveler whose writing reflects his experience living in several countries. During his years at Stanford University in California, he studied economics, poetry and Mandarin and returned there to teach writing. A polyglot, he is influenced by a variety of cultures, yet says English is the "instrument" in which he conveys his art. Iyer described travel writing as autobiography in disguise, an inquiry, a conversation and a self-portrait, "using a place to work things through that you wouldn't be able to work through at home." All of the great travel writers, he said, are "fiction writers on holiday." In Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar, American travel writer Paul Theroux describes the experience of serious readers meeting their counterparts. In a passage that captures perfectly the spirit of the Jaipur Literature Festival, he writes, "I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike-intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits." MacDonald experienced this during his interactions with people in India. It's one thing to find that there is a universal language that allows communication from South Boston in Massachusetts to the South Bronx in New York, he said. "But it's another thing to find out, when traveling to the other side of the globe, to India, that we do indeed have the capacity to tell stories and to hear stories with understanding and empathy and total connection to the universal elements." As information resource officer for the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, Steven P. Kerchoff manages American Libraries in India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Deepanjali Kakati also contributed to this article.
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