“One of the beauties of the modern global age is the outsider is making even the insider rethink her identity.”

Author and travel writer Pico Iyer made a choice to stay on the outside. “I have never claimed a nation,” he says in a conversation with GDX’s Ratna Omidvar that explores perspectives ranging from “being foreign” to the understated role of play and sport in bringing us closer.

But not everyone gets to choose. Reflecting on the refugee crisis, Iyer reminds us that many people living in countries not their own don’t have a choice:  “The vast majority of people on the move were propelled out of their homes by necessity, famine, war, totalitarianism and never wanted to leave their homes, [they were] catapulted into a vacuum, caught between a country that has rejected them and another country that won’t let them in.”

With 32,000 refugees in flight daily, many in refugee camps for years, receiving countries have to do more to make a home for them. But for Iyer the real tragedy is how little we know about these people: “the experience of exile is largely unheard.”

Which is why travel is more important than ever: “Our screens vividly bring faraway places into our homes, projecting an image of closeness, but every encounter with the foreign in the flesh reminds us forcibly of how much lies far beyond our reckoning.” But how much do we know about their circumstances? How can we get to know these people better? What are their journeys? How can we help make a home for them?

If travel humanizes and humbles us, so can the experience of “being foreign.” Reflecting on her own refugee and immigrant past, Omidvar has learned to cherish that sense of “the other.”  For Omidvar, staying “a little uncomfortable”, can help keep us open and aware of  that “little bit of the outsider” in all of us.

Iyer agrees: “One of the beauties of the modern global age is the outsider is making even the insider rethink her identity.”

Listen to Pico Iyer’s and Ratna Omidvar’s full conversation here.

 
GDX Annual Lecture

Recently in Toronto for the launch of the inaugural GDX Annual Lecture, “Our New Migrant Reality,” Pico Iyer addresses key issues of culture, identity and what it means to be foreign.  Watch the Pico Iyer lecture and Q&A with journalist Doug Saunders, The Globe & Mail.

Media

Global Migration and Finding Home: Pico Iyer in conversation with Paul Kennedy (audio interview), CBC Ideas.

Iyer also ponders the word ‘foreign’ in The Globe and Mail, reminding us that “It’s not a Small World After All.”  In spite of what we have in common, Iyer suggests, “…the distances, the differences between cultures are often greater than ever before.” Read the full article here.