Pico Iyer: Travel Writer

By Barrie | June 8th, 2007 | No Comments

Essayist and novelist Pico Iyer is widely considered one of the greatest travel writers of his generation. Born in England to Indian parents in 1957, he was raised in California, educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard, and now lives mainly in rural Japan outside Kyoto.

His essays, reviews, and other writings have appeared in Time, Conde Nast Traveler, Harper’s, The New Yorker and Salon.com. His books include Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, Falling Off the Map, The Global Soul and Sun After Dark.

From June 6-9, Iyer will be the featured guest of literary events organized by the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. Author Daniel Ziv caught up with Iyer in New Zealand via email for a special pre-visit interview.

Question: Bali features in some of your earliest travel writing 20 years ago, but so thoroughly documented was the Island of the Gods even back then that you felt compelled to focus on how no other place epitomized cliched exoticism or supply-and-demand tourism like Bali. In a recent book review you lamented the way “locals are encouraged to play carefully constructed versions of themselves for visitors”. Now, on your umpteenth visit to the island, how do you go about distinguishing some kind of “real” Bali from the packaged version — or has one become hopelessly absorbed into the other?

Answer: I think I’ve always felt that the “real” Bali, the real anywhere, is a hybrid thing, a construction, a mingled product of Bali itself and influences from other parts of Indonesia and all that we foreigners bring. To that extent, authenticity to me has never seemed the same thing as purity — if anything, it’s the opposite … and the real Bali would have less to do with pristine indigenous traditions, watched by invading tourists, than by the dance, the glances, the dialogue between them.

Whenever I go anywhere, I think, I can’t hope to capture the “real essence” of a place, or what it is under the surface; I’m only there for a few days, usually, I’ve never studied Bali (or Thailand or India), I speak none of their languages, I know less than the average Joe stumbling into them. All I can hope to record and understand is my interaction with them, which may speak for what many bungling visitors feel and experience.

My misunderstandings, my searching out a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Denpasar, my making the wrong turn around Monkey Forest Road, my getting everything wrong and, infamously (to myself), on my first trip to Bali mistaking mosquito repellent for incense and a light-switch for a lizard.

I leave to anthropologists like Clifford Geertz the business of beginning to explain Bali from a professional outsider’s point of view; I’m there just to make the mistakes that any tourist might make, and then to describe the losmen [inns], hustlers, touts and heart-breakingly sweet and genuine people I meet. I’m as thrilled to see Bali again, to see where it is now and where I am now, as I would be to see any old friend.

To most outsiders, Indonesia is imagined either as a dreamy tropical paradise or a dangerous political hell. The fascinating reality that lies between those two cliches is rarely covered in literature or the global media; consequently, Indonesia continues to be hugely misunderstood and underappreciated, especially compared to super-sized neighbors like India and China. Why do you think this is so? Are you interested in writing more on Indonesia?

I would love to write more on Indonesia, but alas I’m in no position to do so. If you know as little as I do, you can’t hope to say more than a few sentences. But many years ago, when I first fell under the spell of Asia, I began to feel, just as you say, that Indonesia was the most overlooked, the secretly richest and to that extent the most mysterious country in Asia; I even began to hatch plans of coming and living for a year or two in Java, so bewitched was I by the currents that I felt pulsing through the earth and just out of my reach in the air.

India, Japan, China had all been graced with centuries of misunderstandings, at that point, but Indonesia, for all its vastness and diversity, was more or less terra incognita.

…As someone of Hindu origin, I did spend eight years trying to steep myself in Islam, and to learn more about Islamic traditions and beliefs, which came out in my book, Abandon, a novel about Islam and its dialogue, its romance with the West, but I’m still in no position, alas, to say anything useful or informed about Indonesia.

Generally, though, I love what you say here, and I do feel there is a terrific opportunity for someone to begin to open up and light up an amazing place that most of us know far too little about.

The “Starbuckization” of the planet is landing us in front of the same branded landscapes no matter how far we venture from home. Yet you’ve rejected the notion that travel — in the traditional sense of “voyaging to otherness” — is on the brink of expiration. You recently wrote, “A McDonald’s in Thailand is to me as Thai as one in Santa Barbara is Santa Barbaran — and the world to me is as inexhaustible as it ever was.” So is a more subtle, nuanced, pop-cultural view the key to eye-opening travel and travel writing in this jet-setting age?

I wouldn’t say that a subtle or nuanced or pop-cultural perspective is so important as just a human, open-eyed and attentive one. The main reason we travel, most of us, is to be educated and refreshed and startled by all the things we see abroad that we never expected to see and might never see at home; and the most important part of that comes from leaving your assumptions at home and just trying to open yourself to whatever happens, and to respond to it honestly.

And as you suggested in your last question, this largely means leaving behind our notions, our stereotypes, our biases…

Whenever I’m walking down a street in Ubud — or Kuta Beach or Jakarta — most of what I’m seeing and talking to is people. And they don’t seem any “less Balinese” than they ever were. They may have a hunger and fascination for Starbucks, America, MTV, in much the same way as many of us visitors are intrigued by Balinese masks, rituals and cremations; the fascination of the Other works both ways, and is a two-way street.

I’ve never seen pop culture as very interesting in itself; my last few books have been on mysticism, after all, and my next one is on the Dalai Lama. But places like McDonald’s do give us a way to see how the same small pool of symbols and goods become different in every place you visit.

In India, most of their dishes may be vegetarian, and a McDonald’s may reek of spiced tea, while in Japan many a McDonald’s I visit is as silent as any Japanese restaurant, and filled with immaculate young ladies wearing Dior. The common pop-cultural prop just gives us a way to see how many cultures are delivering the same sentence — or delivering the same dish — in a very different accent.

In the past decade, with books such as Abandon and Sun After Dark, you seem to be taking a more personal (rather than merely observational) interest in religion, spirituality and mysticism. Have you become more introspective? Or is this your new method of travel — digging deeper (rather than further-flung) in a quest to discover new places of that aren’t really “places” in the traditional sense.

That’s a wonderful question, and for me, just as you say, the impulse is always to try to explore new ground, to go to places I haven’t been before, to push myself around the next corner or into the next adventure. So having been lucky enough to travel quite a bit, from North Korea to Bhutan, and from Paraguay to Iceland, I did think that it might be intriguing to look a little bit at the countries inside us, states of mind as well as states with flags, to explore those places that sometimes we run away from precisely by flying to Bali or Koh Samui.

And having written quite a bit of straight reportage about the places I visited, I thought it might be interesting to come at them in a different way, through memory or the imagination or fiction. I wouldn’t say this marks a more introspective way of doing things so much as for me a new and therefore fresh approach.

…But I’d definitely agree with you that my aim as a traveler is to try to shake myself up constantly, to force myself into new forms and interests, to keep pressing onto new ground. When we speak of being moved or transported, after all, we’re seldom speaking of just taking a 747 to Jakarta.

You arrived on the literary scene in your mid-20s as a precocious wunderkind writing hip cultural essays for Time magazine and groundbreaking books that helped redefine travel in our age. Now you’re an established, successful veteran of the genre. Is that strange to you? Do you miss the pioneering excitement or carefree anonymity of your earlier years?

What an interesting question. I must say that to me I seem as lost, as bewildered, as full of new fascinations as I ever was, and the world remains as confounding and exciting to me now as when I began my current life. I’m not sure how established I am — I live, after all, in a two-room apartment in rural Japan with no bicycle or car or TV I can understand, living more or less as a student, having to write lots of pieces every month to pay the bills.

And I still like to travel as I did then, eating in fast-food places, staying in two-star guest houses, just shambling along the streets. Anyone who’s seen this character in T-shirt, torn jeans and aromatic shoes would probably say I look as unrespectable now as I did then (though with less hair). Everywhere man is settled, as Emerson said, and only insofar as he is unsettled is there any hope for him.

On the other hand, I do know what you’re saying. As a writer at this point, I may be addressing readers who’ve run into my work before, and so bring expectations to it, or things they liked or disliked, and so will never see me as clearly as when they picked up my first book and wondered who this character was with the strange, global name.

And I’m aware that if I do try to force myself to do things I haven’t done before, I’ll be upsetting some readers who want more of the same, or who enjoyed an earlier book of mine and want to know why I’m repudiating instead of just reproducing it.

What are you reading these days — in fiction and non-fiction? Are there any young new literary voices that have excited you lately?

I read everything and constantly, and there’s never any shortage of amazing new stuff coming over the horizon. It’s 5 a.m. right now, and I’m sitting at a borrowed computer in a room in Auckland typing as the light comes up, so I’m not as fresh as I might be, but I can say that the most exciting novel I’ve read this year was What Is The What by Dave Eggers, a harrowing story of a Lost Boy of the Sudan, traveling across Africa to come to America and then arriving at last in America, and confronting its reality and not just its dreams.

I just read a remarkable first novel called Whiteman by Tony d’Souza, a young writer who served as a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa, and wrote one of the best books I’ve ever read to come out of his Peace Corps experience, full of woundedness and desire and lust and revolution, as uncensored and immediate as a Paul Theroux story. I’m a huge admirer of Peter Hessler, who already seems to me one of the classic travel writers of our lifetime, and who has opened up China with a humanity and a literary grace that I don’t run into very often.

I’m wild for the fiction of David Mitchell, who seems to me to be the first great novelist of the global generation. When I wrote Video Night in Kathmandu, 20 years ago, I thought that someone really ought to come along and remake the world of fiction by taking in this new landscape in which Tokyo and Hong Kong and London and New York were all really part of the same city, and some spirit pulsed between every one. Just before the new millennium, David Mitchell wrote Ghostwritten, and I realize that someone had done this — an Englishman based in Hiroshima, no less — and that now at last the world I recognized on the ground was on the page, too.

To me the world of the word and the writer has risen to the challenge of the new moment more excitingly and imaginatively than I could ever have imagined. I still love reading Donald Richie on Japan, Philip Roth, Rohinton Mistry, Thomas Pynchon, all the classic masters; but when I read David Foster Wallace, or David Mitchell, or White Teeth or Brick Lane, I see that there will never be a shortage of new old masters.

Can you tell us anything about your next book?

My next book, out next Spring, is called The Open Road, and it’s about globalism and the 14th Dalai Lama. I’ve been fortunate enough to have gone to Dharamsala and to have spoken with the Dalai Lama since 1974, when I was 17, so for 33 years now I’ve been chronicling his passage through the world.

And one of the things that really excites and intrigues me about him is how he takes all the stuff of the modern moment, all that we’ve been discussing in this interview, and tries to see how it can be turned to the good.

A great pragmatist, and a believer that anything can be an instrument for something beneficial, he takes globalism, the Internet, plane travel, even the celebrity culture — things that many of us regard as problems — and sees how they can be used for transmitting ideas of possibility, and for doing things that no previous Dalai Lama has been in a position to do before.

He takes exile, which many of us associate with sadness and loss, and sees it as opportunity, a chance to make a new Tibet, closer to the world, more modern and less divided, outside the physical territory of Tibet.

As I study and live globalism, I’ve always tried to find voices that inspire or that point to the better prospects hiding out within this new reality. And to some degree I’d much rather listen to Bono or David Mitchell or the Dalai Lama when I think about the global century than just to Microsoft or to Ronald McDonald. They seem to speak for an inner and an imaginative globalism that is much more exciting to me than just the stuff of global marketplaces and global technologies.

Since globalism is the reality out of which we have to fashion our lives and our excitements, since it represents the cards with which modern man has been dealt, I’ve spent my entire writing life, I suppose, seeing how it can open avenues and liberate us to do things that were unimaginable before.

I spent much of the past two years flying around watching U2 play everywhere from Copenhagen and New Jersey to Tokyo, while also seeing how the Dalai Lama takes his simple, practical, often trans-Buddhist ideas of compassion and responsibility, everywhere from Zurich to Hiroshima. So my next book, already finished, will be an attempt to see how this one impressive and very practical Tibetan traveler has decided to try to turn the modern world to some good.

Daniel Ziv is author of Jakarta Inside Out and Bangkok Inside Out.

For information on Pico Iyer’s visit, see www.ubudwritersfestival.com.