I first encountered the name, Pico Iyer, last year while reading Geoff Dyer’s latest book, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. Dyer refers to him while writing about the nowhereness of hotels and airports, locales that have become emblematic of the global era. To my chagrin, I discovered that Iyer’s is not a new voice; he has been publishing books for more than twenty-five years. How had I overlooked him? Months later, I stumbled across Iyer’s The Global Soul in a used bookstore on Johnson St. in Victoria, a locale that is emphatically not emblematic of the global era. Now that the world seems all abuzz with Pico Iyer—essays in the New York Times and a new book released this month—I think it’s worth visiting his earlier work.
The Global Soul makes for unsettling reading not so much for what is in the book as for what might have been in the book had its publication been delayed for five years. Published in 2000, it provides us with a snapshot of an emerging global culture just before 9/11. I read it with an archaeologist’s relish for a simpler age when people were more trusting and less anxious, when people could pass through airports without having to submit to body scans and pat downs. In 2000, there were cell phones and email and internet technology, but no hint yet of the inaptly named social media. There was no flaming, no comment trolls, none of that ceaseless and polarizing chitter-chatter that has turned much of our public interactions into a barrage of ad hominem attacks.
As that rare creature, the native Torontonian, I find The Global Soul particularly poignant because Iyer’s longest, and perhaps warmest, chapter is an extended meditation on multiculturalism and the way it plays out in Toronto. I think it’s a universal response that when a non-native non-resident tries to understand life in your home town, you prick up your ears. You want to know how you are perceived elsewhere in the world. Iyer’s concern here is to ask whether multiculturalism is real or just some made-up anti-myth which we apply to ourselves to keep the newcomers happy while we natives surreptitiously impose our culture upon them. Iyer wants desperately to believe in the “city as anthology”. He observes: “Toronto … seemed to me a much more hopeful and witty vision of a world not conforming to the old categories without dwindling into a universal Nowhereland …”
Iyer may be viewing the city through rose-coloured glasses or reading his own needs into the landscape, except that he demonstrates no qualms about writing scathing criticism when he feels so inclined. In the next chapter, he savages Atlanta. It is “a small town’s idea of what a big city should be.” It is global “by virtue of being featureless.” Its buildings are “all the interchangeable props of an International Style that could, in its latest incarnation, be called Silicon Neo-Colonial.” Its deepest division is not racial but “between those who were willing to buy into the belief that profit curves could be the answer to suffering and those who were not.” Given his assessment of Atlanta, one assumes that if Iyer had not liked Toronto, he would have said so.
One of the things Iyer gets about Toronto is the deep sense of irony that pervades local culture. Perhaps this is a defence against being (mis)taken for an American city. This gives rise to an unease “expressed with a good humour I wouldn’t expect to find in England”. The reference to England is curious since ironic humour strikes me as more of a Scottish habit and for precisely the same reason. Like the Scots, we must steel ourselves any way we can against an overbearing cultural presence south of our border.
I learned early on that many Americans are deaf to our tone of irony. In high school, I remember music exchanges with American high schools. We would feel inferior when faced with marching bands that performed with military precision. When it came our turn to play, at least a couple of our students would be stoned. We’d play horribly. We’d laugh afterwards and the teacher would accuse us of being apathetic. Maybe we were apathetic. Mostly, the experience made us cringe. We’d rather share half-assed jokes than perform anything with military precision—music, football, or war for that matter. Or consider the Canadian reputation for politeness. It is astonishing how many times I hear my fellow citizens say “I’m sorry.” However, outsiders (or at least those without an ear for irony) may miss that our apologies are often delivered like a knife in the back.
Although Iyer doesn’t make the point, at least not explicitly, he suggests a connection between irony and multiculturalism. His characterization of irony as “a chastened sense of history” anticipates his observation “that if the essential question that America asks of every newcomer is, “What will you do with your future?” Canada adds to it the more difficult one: “What will you do with your past?” Irony gives us the detachment to entertain a twofold vision. While we can appreciate the optimism of America’s forward-looking gaze, irony gives us imaginative space where we can maintain that part of our identity which lies behind.
Oddly (for someone born here), I share that twofold vision. Recently, I’ve reconnected with friends from high school, many of the same ones who went with me on those music exchanges to American high schools. Now, we share with one another in ways that were impossible as teenagers. In this sharing, I have discovered how I was perceived as one of the few Toronto-born WASPs in my circle of friends: I belonged in a way that none of them did. What is curious (ironic even) is that I perceived myself as an outsider too. I perceived my normal as Iyer’s multiculturalism, a linguistic and cultural soup and me floating in the broth like one more ingredient.
Twelve years after The Global Soul first appeared, do Iyer’s claims for multiculturalism in Toronto bear up under scrutiny? Undoubtedly things have changed. 2010 was a benchmark year for us in several ways. In 2010, Toronto ceased to have a dominant ethnicity. We are all minorities now, although I suspect the locus of political and economic power remains with WASPs. Also in 2010, Toronto hosted the G20 summit. Twenty world leaders were whisked into the downtown core for thirty-six hours, then whisked out again at a cost of more than $1bn. Nineteen thousand police and paramilitary personnel secured the event and effected the largest mass arrests in Canada’s history. At the time, something felt different, but I couldn’t characterize it. On reading Iyer, I wonder if the difference lay in an absence of irony. None of this belonged to Toronto. Even the protests seemed out of place. In the grand tradition of colonialism, the protesters came here mostly from elsewhere to do our protesting for us, deploying their globalized Black Bloc brand of tactics without regard for local nuance, which is, well, ironic, given that they described themselves as anti-colonial anarchists.
Finally, in 2010, Toronto elected mayor Rob Ford, a conservative in every sense of the word. Although Ford claims to be motivated solely by economic considerations, his “derail the gravy train” brand of fiscal restraint has harsh consequences for new arrivals and ethnic minorities. For example, Ford has slashed the public library budget and wants to eliminate city-run daycare spaces, two services which are invaluable for people trying to get a foothold in this city. Again, drawing on Iyer, I note that one of the things which distinguishes Ford from his predecessors is tone deafness. He does not hear irony. Or, to switch metaphors, he lacks the twofold vision that would allow him to respect our past even as we move forward. His inability (or is it his refusal?) to hear irony also denies him the capacity to empathize with those who inhabit hybrid identities.
Although Iyer’s perceptions of Toronto still apply, I think it’s fair to say that recent changes indicate an erosion of multiculturalism even as the city becomes more multi-ethnic.
If you find my assessment harsh, I’m sorry.