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“Mongrel Beauties” –Pico Iyer

Several years ago, a book arrived on my doorstep that was like no other novel I could remember
reading. Its characters were all spirits of a kind, rootless and drifting far from home, and all of them had
gathered like partial ghosts, in a shelled nunnery in Italy at the end of World War II. At their centre was a young
woman from "Upper America," as she called it, with a name that could have been Czech or Japanese or even -
who knows? - Canadian. By her side was an Indian who hungered for stories about Toronto, "as if it were a
place of peculiar wonders." Stealing in and out of their presence was a wanderer with the highly baroque
Italian name of Caravaggio, though he, too, was a foreigner in the Italy where they found themselves, and
came, as it happened, from Toronto. And lying in bandages in their midst was a "desert Englishman" without a
name and almost without a face, whose origins and identity were mostly in shadow.
The book possessed me in ways both mysterious and easy to explain. Its scenes, precise, ornamental,
full of exotic information, made me feel as if I were walking through a series of bejewelled chambers, sensual,
and deliberate and arched, a kind of literary Alhambra. The action was presided over by Renaissance murals
and suffused with the spirits of Tacitus and Herodotus and Kipling, yet as the characters exchanged stories of
desert winds and streets of parrots, golden temples, and tropical spices, they made it feel as fresh as
tomorrow. And the love scenes, charged with the lapis elegance of high Arabic poetry, threw open the windows
of the stuffy house of English letters to let in a new, intoxicating light.
Yet the truest attraction of the novel for me lay in something deeper: for even as it scrutinized the past
and positioned its characters in scenes now fifty and sixty years behind us, it seemed to me not so much a
historical novel as a revolutionary one, charting the outlines of a new kind of society in which strangers could
interact and love and talk in a new kind of way, "unconscious of ancestry." And if it didn't read like the
traditional English novels I'd grown up with at school, it also didn't read like a typical novel from North Africa or
Sri Lanka; it was something else, outside the familiar categories. The Cold War had ended three years before
the book came out, and geopoliticians were telling us that all the old divisions were now extinct. But in The
English Patient this new world order was already a fact of life, and any assumptions you might make about the
nationalities of its characters -that the English patient was English, say, or that the one enlisted in the British
Army was British - would be wrong.
"Gradually we became nationless," reminisced the title character. "I came to hate nations." His closest
associate among his fellow explorers had died, he said, because of nations; categories could quite literally be
fatal. And as the four figures circled around one another in the candlelight, all "international bastards" in the
English patient's pungent phrase, they moved, as the narrative kept putting it, like separate planets, "planetary
strangers."
This vision of people turning like stars, independent universes almost, far too large and mysterious to
be pushed into the boxes of application forms, so excited me that I went back to Michael Ondaatje's previous
novel, In the Skin of a Lion, and found that it concerned the people, mostly immigrants, who helped build
Toronto in the early twentieth century. Not map-makers and explorers, in this case, but bridge-builders, yet
really it came to the same thing: their lives were devoted to making a connection between two different worlds,
old and new, or East and West. The English Patient was a sequel, I came to understand, which was describing
the next stage in Toronto's foundation, imagining a neutral zone in the middle of war in which strangers from
different worlds could come and heal their wounds, in part by sharing stories, kisses, blood.
I don't know how much of this Michael Ondaatje consciously intended, but I do know that he could not
help but be influenced by his own multicultured background, growing up in Sri Lanka, going to school in
England, and then coming to a Toronto in which it might have seemed that many of his different homes - from
Asia, Europe, and North America- were coming together. The writer's mixed-race siblings - or "mongrels," as
he might provocatively have called them- lived, I learned, on three different continents even now. And his
quietly visionary book spoke with particular beauty to a typically mongrel reader like myself, born in England, in
an Indian household, living in California, and spending most of my time in Japan.

The sudden appearance of the book on my doorstep had another, and a more practical, aptness
because, just three months before I entered its universe, I had taken my first trip to Toronto, the ideal way
station for a traveller from California who wanted to go to Cuba. As I walked around the city, stepping across
centuries and continents each time I crossed a side street, I found myself, as many people had told me I
would, in the eastern city of my dreams. Everywhere I went - to a ball game at the SkyDome, peering in at
"Indian-Pakistani-style Chinese" restaurants, strolling among the shifting colours and sovereignties of Bloor
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Street - I saw a confluence of tribes not so very different from what I would encounter in The English Patient. In
some ways, what I was seeing was a place with the sense of history (and so the sense of irony) of the England
where I'd grown up, and the sense of future (and so the sense of expansiveness) of the America where I'd
come to make a new life. And I found myself exhilarated by the quick-wittedness and intelligence of a culture
that seemed free of the competitive bustle and noise I might expect to find in New York. Here, I thought, was
all Manhattan's software without its hard drive.
This was a lot, perhaps, to see in just two days, en route to the vibrant mayhem of Havana. And the
Torontonians I met expressed surprise and even alarm at my enthusiasm, inured as they doubtless are to the
ravings of short-time visitors. As anywhere, they told me, the city was governed by a hierarchy that the
innocent newcomer couldn't see, and that was no more eager to surrender power than any other status quo,
as locked inside old resentments as anything in Britain or South Africa. The newspapers, besides, were full of
the latest secessionist talk from Quebec, and the recent outburst of even small disturbances in the wake of the
Rodney King verdict had everyone debating once again the virtues of multiculturalism.
Yet for all of that, I came away with a sense of possibility I hadn't felt as I'd travelled to other of the
globe's defining multicultures, whether in Singapore and Cape Town and Melbourne on the one hand, or in
Paris and London and Bombay on the other. On paper, at least, the reasoning was clear: according to the UN's
official statistics, Toronto was the most multicultural city in the world. It was also, statistically, the safest big city
in North America and, by general consensus, the best organized. Put the two facts together, and you could
believe that a multiculture could go beyond the nation-states we knew and give new meaning to that outdated
term "Commonwealth." Take in, further, my sense that Canada had the most exciting literary culture in the
English-speaking world, and you could believe not only that it offered an example of how a country could be
greater than the sum of its parts, but that it even presented us with visions of what that post-national world
might look like.

I took these thoughts back with me to California, and then, a few years later, another book came my
way, from Canada, that pushed The English Patient's vision even closer to us in time and space. Fugitive
Pieces, by Anne Michaels, was a singing and precise attempt to see how Toronto could be a healing place and
a haven, the place where people from the old world - fleeing the Holocaust - could make a kind of sense, and
even art, out of all that they had lost, and in embracing the English language, enter an "alphabet without
memory." Like the Ondaatje novel - and unlike the classic works of a Thackeray or Jane Austen - it offered a
vision of a world without hierarchy, in which there was no fixed centre. We need to honour the past, it said, and
yet the future can be what we make of it.
My sense of the Canada of the imagination, as a powerful space between old worlds and new
increased, and then, perhaps in response to this over-eagerness, someone suggested I read Neil
Bissoondath's slashing attack on Canadian multiculturalism, Selling Illusions. When I did, I was constantly
sobered, not because so much of it seemed wrong, but rather just the opposite: for long stretches I felt myself
agreeing with his every word. Official multiculturalism, Bissoondath argued, proposed a new kind of racism as
a supposed cure for the old; it defined people entirely in terms of their ethnic origins and, to that extent,
confined them to divisions that would always keep them apart, locked inside their pasts. And the affirmative
action that was often multiculturalism's handmaiden seemed an attempt to redress the injustices of the past by
creating injustices in the future. For Bissoondath, government-sponsored multiculturalism turned "ethnic
communities into museums of exoticism," gladly celebrating the Other at the level of foods and festivals, but
not really inviting him into the city's inner workings - indeed, encouraging foreigners to remain colourfully
foreign, as if they were still pavilions in some World Expo theme park. Toronto, he wrote of the city I'd been so
taken by, is "the intolerance capital of Canada."
I had to listen carefully to this argument, not least, of course, because Bissoondath wrote with the
wisdom of one who'd grown up in that swarming de facto multiculture, Trinidad. And his powerful words about
how tolerance was being promoted instead of real acceptance echoed much of what I'd heard in Canada from
those referred to, in one of the less happy local terms, as "visible minorities." Yet I was most grateful to him
because he clarified for me exactly what multiculturalism should and shouldn't be.
Bissoondath's book reminded me, in fact, precisely of why I had found the books of Ondaatje and
Michaels so inspiring. The vision they advanced had nothing to do with government agencies or institutional
white papers; it arose simply from the readiness to respond to others on a level deeper than their customs,
clothes, or colour. For it was only at the level of the imagination, it seemed to me, that we could begin to think
differently about one another, and to make meaningful an acceptance so natural that we didn't have any words
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for it. And it was only at the level of the individual that we could truly penetrate the Other (and let the Other
penetrate us). Official multiculturalism, Bissoondath concludes, is "ethnicity as public policy; it is society's view
of the individual's assigned place within its construct."
Real multiculturalism, I thought, would be individualism as private practice: the individual's response to
society's shifting orders.

There was another dimension to Bissoondath's concern, and that was the enduring fear that diversity
leads to disorder - a global Los Angeles in a way, where no shape or coherence is visible amid the swarm of
relativities, and each group simply retreats into its own corner to practise its own customs and worship its own
gods. The mosaic becomes a collection of jangled shards, more than likely to draw blood, and a country that
exults in existing between the spaces ends up neither here nor there. Too many cultures spoil the broth. When
Bissoondath explained that Quebec appealed to him in part because it drew strong lines around itself and
consolidated its identity instead of letting itself blur into vagueness, I realized that this was precisely why I felt
steadied and often solaced by Japan, which kept itself distinctive, in part, by trying to keep out people who
looked like me. Differences cannot just be wished away.
There is a political and practical answer to this, and it has been put forward eloquently by Michael
Ignatieff, who stresses that one of Canada's great benefits is that it's never been in a position to confuse
political and ethnic identity, or to become a "One Nation" state; from birth, Canada has had to be held together
by shared beliefs, not shared roots - as if it were the political extension of that "moral fiction," as lgnatieff calls
it, by which we're all one in the eyes of the law. "To believe in rights is to believe in defending difference," he
notes in The Rights Revolution. "Pluralism does not mean relativism. It means humility."
Yet an even stronger answer, I thought, came in the vision of art as a preserver and generator of
images that stand above all racial and ideological differences, joining us together by commanding our
collective gaze. Gods can be divisive; images or pictures of gods need not be. (Anyone, whether Jewish or
Muslim or Hindu, can be moved and uplifted by a madonna.) And where the administrator tries, inevitably, to
abstract humanity, and turn a whole group into a single category, the imaginative writer, the novelist, does the
opposite, giving us a single being who can contain a hundred different cultures. Indeed, the best response to
Bissoondath's argument came in a work of fiction in which immigrants to Canada debate displacement in a
nuanced and human way, aware of how little it lends itself to resolution. The name of the book was Digging Up
the Mountains, and its author was a distinguished new Canadian novelist called Neil Bissoondath.

These days, in fact, Canadian literature seems to be enjoying an astonishing resurgence, largely
because it's written by newcomers from all the corners of the world, finding themselves, in Canada, surrounded
by people from the other three corners, and trying to work out what community can mean when the street is full
of strangers. But what gives it special potency is that these new voices are still surrounded by the distinguished
voices of an older Canada. Margaret Atwood's writing, for example, remains essential partly because it does
have a centre, and it tells us of the structures and traditions against which new Canadians have to define
themselves; though she's a radical and futurist in her own way, Atwood has also become a voice of the
"indigenous Canada," as I might subversively call it, registering how the new Canada can seem threatening or
even malign to someone who recalls the old.
In The Blind Assassin, her recent Booker Prize winner, Atwood, through a protagonist who's known
Toronto since the 1920s, expresses a certain wryness about the fact that suddenly, the world of her youth- the
Canada of white spaces and trackless wilderness that the novelist described in her 1972 survey of Canadian
writing, Survival- is splintering into all the colours of the rainbow, and "Toronto the grey," as it is sometimes
called, is full of "oranges and lemons bright as a sunrise, and mounds of sugar and mountains of yellow
butter." Toronto's "no longer a Protestant city," her feisty character pronounces, "it's a mediaeval one," and
when she says that, I find myself thinking of "the market," the "caravansary," that Anne Michaels finds in
Toronto, like the "meeting place" that the city's name means in Iroquoian. A city, Aristotle tells us, is a unity of
unalikes.
For many years - for all my life, really - I've been travelling the world looking at how different countries
and people try to make sense of the multicultural mixes we're all becoming. One of the unusual and potent
things about the present moment is that the very issue that so many cultures and cities are facing is exactly the
same one that more and more individuals such as myself are confronting: How to fashion a sense of self or
home when all the traditional co-ordinates are gone? And how to make a peace among the disparate, often
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competing, cultures inside of us? How, in short, to begin to create a sense of direction - and foundation - when
the world is spinning around us at the speed of light?
And insofar as international beings- or "global souls," as I have called them are more and more urgently
discussing new notions of identity and belonging, more and more of us are honorary Canadians, worrying at
the very issues of globalism and multiculturalism that Canada was addressing before the rest of us knew they
existed. Precisely because Canada is not obliged to determine the world's economic and political future, as it
southern neighbour seems to be, it is in a perfect position to ask questions about how the buzzword "global"
can be attached to something deeper, more durable, than "global markets" and "global networks." Long before
demonstrators filled the streets of Seattle, Canadians were asking what a "global conscience" might be, and
how we might find "global loyalties."
That is one reason Canada gives me hope: I'd rather entrust the future to writers of fiction than to
software writers, in part because the former have a strong sense of where we've been, as well as of where
we're going. And I'd rather the Other be explored and celebrated by novelists than by committees, in part
because writers have a sense that every moment is individual, and seldom goes according to plan. "We are
communal histories, communal books," the English patient says, and the idea becomes liberating largely
because he, and the people around him, are all unassimilated mavericks, outside any form of society. The
luminous vision of Fugitive Pieces cannot be translated into public policy, but it gives each of us, in our private
moments, a sense of how to think of our lives differently and how to remake them in that light. Politics is still
often local; fiction travels the world.
The creation of a community and the creation of a work of art have a lot in common, as both those
books remind us: each begins with a vision, a product of thoughtfulness and imagination, and then each tries
to find a structure so that its vision can be communicated to the world. That is one way in which poets can be
"unacknowledged legislators of the world," in Shelley's words. And in my travels, which often take me to three
or four countries in a week, I haven't come across many stirring visions of the future in Los Angeles or Hong
Kong or Liverpool.
They may be on their way, but for now there's no South African English Patient and no Fugitive Pieces
in Atlanta. The plural and protean identities that Canadians have been juggling, if only in their minds, for
decades are only now becoming realities for members of, say, the European Union.
When I hear Canadians, especially of African descent, talk of "racism with a smile on its face," and
when I visit a school in Scarborough, and learn that 70 percent of the students come from homes where
English is not the spoken language, I am forcibly reminded that creating a common vision isn't going to be
easy. Immigrants bring rhythms and colours and books to their new homes, but they also bring suspicions and
resentments and fears. The Tamil Tigers recruit for members in that high school, and ethnic groups regularly
tear up their old enemies' flags at City Hall.
Yet the only way to begin to heal division, as I see it, is through vision; and the only way to start doing
things differently is by thinking differently. Hate, as Graham Greene writes, is just a failure of the imagination:
the inability truly to imagine how the world looks to that person across the table, and how we look to him. An
Indian, I can say from experience, only begins to step outside the enmities and divisions of his parents when
he stops identifying himself as Indian, and moves towards a larger definition - or, perhaps best of all, settles
inside a space outside all definitions. He may learn how to do that, Canada has taught me, by reading the
fiction of a fellow immigrant from Italy.
At the beginning of this piece, I used the highly unlovely word "mongrel" instead of the euphonious,
government-approved word "hybrid." I did this deliberately, to bring home the fact that the process of mingling
cultures is a messy one, rough at the edges and not easily soothed into placid euphemisms: every time two
worlds cross, there's a spark of uncertainty and even fear that rises between them that is bound to have some
danger in it. But I also did it to suggest that the absence of a pedigree is no bad thing. If you look very closely
at The English Patient, you'll see that there aren't four living beings in that Tuscan villa; there are five. The fifth
is a dog, an "old mongrel," as Ondaatje writes, "older than the war." The mongrel was there before the others
arrived, the book suggests; and he will be there long after they depart. He is, the book begins to say, the herald
of a bright new world.