Global Soul

Photo by: PhotoGrandma

I have just finished reading Pico Iyer's 2000 book The Global Soul. I was interested in it because he tackles the subject of globalization and rootlessness and also has a central chapter on Toronto.

This is not a book review. Just some thoughts and observations. I've found some of Iyer's ideas intriquing, others less so. His writing style can be circuitous at times, and though he has not become a favourite writer, he is thought-provoking. This book was written almost 10 years ago as well -- before 9/11 -- so if anything, globalism has continued to spin even further into a new reality.

He is quite fond of Toronto and its multiculturalism, at one point calling Canada the 'Empire of the future.' In a sense I feel that. He seems to think Toronto had it all together in 2000, but still I think of Toronto as a city that will SOME DAY be great. I don't think it knows itself. Yet he has travelled far more extensively than I ever will, so his perspective is, again, that of a worldly outsider.

Unfortunately, much of the Toronto I see and feel at times is more similar to the Atlanta, Georgia, he can't quite feel comfortable in.

The last two chapters of his book -- on his birthplace Britain and his adopted home Japan -- are the best and most involving, and maybe the book should have been re-arranged to have these chapters up front, as the chapters are essentially strung-together essays.

I have sensed this globalism strongly since coming to Toronto. Much of it is from living in the city, and much of it is due to my work at a newspaper. Windsor, where I was born and, for the most part, raised, was a multicultural border town. The multiculturalism there felt different. The city was built on subsequent waves of immigrants: French, English, Irish, then after World War II Italian, Ukrainian, East European. Later Chinese, Vietnamese, Middle Eastern and East European again. Yet though many of these groups would congregate in neighbourhoods, to me there was always a sense of everyone being an integral part of the city of Windsor. Windsor first, as a framework, and then, Canada, united them in a sense of community.

Of course, Windsor is about one-tenth the size of Toronto and Toronto is a little less than half of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The latest census in 2006 showed that half of the people in Toronto were born outside of Canada. So it is not an exaggeration when I say that if I walk downtown at any time of any day, if I see ten people, those ten people are most likely from ten different countries.

I have come to absorb a sense of the vibration that exists from this actuality. Everyone is very connected to another part of the globe -- not in a distant manner, but especially because of the Internet and mass communication and travel, in an everyday intimate manner. There is not a great sense of having left the homeland far behind. There is a sense of everyone trying to make sense of it -- and, I think -- for the most part doing a very good job.

I never considered myself 'provincial' living in Windsor, across the border from Detroit. I think, in a border town, and a port town, there is always a sense of 'the other' and travel, and other worlds.

However, since coming to Toronto, I definitely find myself in another realm. I have co-workers from Iran, India and Somalia who have come to Canada, not as refugees or with their parents, but for a job, in a life that has seen them hopscotch purposely around the globe. I am in awe at the level of sophistication and travel that most of the people new to this country possess.

Pico Iyer writes in The Global Soul, "increasingly nowadays, a sense of home or neighbourhood can emerge only from within." There is truth in that, especially if the sense of home or neighbourhood is constantly shifting.

I want to read John Ralston Saul's book A Fair Country, which brings forth the premise that Canada is different from any other country because it was founded, not really on European dogma, but on Aboriginal philosophies. I saw him on a TVO interview and the premise sounds brilliant.