| Thursday, April 26, 2007 1:44PM | | | | Trojanow and Burton | Posted By: Luke Epplin
|
The Bulgarian-born novelist Ilija Trojanow, who writes in German, is a fascinating individual. Exiled from Bulgaria at the age of five, Trojanow’s family fled first to Germany and then to Kenya, where he was mainly raised. After completing his university studies in Germany, Trojanow founded a publishing house dedicated to African literature, then moved to Mumbai for five years, where he hiked the same trail that the explorer Richard Burton did in the nineteenth century, winding along the shores of the Ganges, trekking to Mecca, and eventually ending up in eastern Africa. At other points in his life, he has acted in a Bollywood film as a Nazi ambassador who speaks in flowery metaphors (though the director worried that Trojanow wasn’t “German enough” to play a credible Nazi, let alone one that oxymoronically speaks in flowery metaphors), lived in South Africa, and completed a three-day hike down Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, an act so foreign to the car culture of Los Angeles that police officers would routinely stop him to ask if he needed assistance. As Trojanow quipped: “Anyone walking on foot in California is either an immigrant, a jogger, or insane.”
Trojanow, joined by the Indian novelist Amitava Kumar, was leading the event Postcolonial Writing in a Globalized World, and it seemed fitting that Trojanow held Sir Richard Burton, an equally restless individual, in such high esteem. Burton blazed through numerous countries in the 19th century, mostly on foot, a style of travel that Trojanow also favors, finding that walking allows one to experience a place with the entire body rather than just with the eyes. Traveling in a car or a train, he remarked, puts a distance between the viewer and the Other (in this case, the people native to the country), whereas traveling on foot allows the viewer to experience, albeit imperfectly, the landscapes and sensations of the people living there. Burton documented the Other in a way that was inadvertently yet inevitable shaped by his Western sensibility. He listed, for example, the “tribes” (a Western word) of Africa according to the information that he recorded from each village, information that proved misleading in many occasions, mainly from cultural misunderstandings and miscommunication. Through his travels, Burton was often in opposition to the Other, immersed in the nations but separated in such a way that allowed him to write and document these “exotic” lands for a Western audience. Trojanow stated that although he’s mirroring Burton’s journeys, he’s doing so from the opposite side of the coin, hoping to define himself in alliance with the Other, which is exactly what he says a novelist has to do: “To write a novel, you have to become the Other, you have to enter into the characters and sense what they would sense, experience what they would experience. Otherwise you’re just stage-managing the characters, moving them from point A to point B.”
Increased migration has led to greater mobility between nationality and cultures. Trojanow spoke of external migration across borders, but also stressed internal migration within nations from the countryside to the cities. He also noted his distaste for the way that the word globalization is being bandied about nowadays, as though it’s a recent phenomenon, when in fact globalization, or at least global exchange, has been ongoing for centuries. He finds now that there appears to be a debate between the Essentialists and the Confluentialists in Western countries. Essentialists believe that nations and ethnic or religious groups are who they are because of certain enduring traits and values exclusive to themselves, whereas confluentialists believe that the assimilation of different cultures, peoples, and beliefs are responsible for who we are, and that this process is in a constant state of flux. It is an ignorance of history, Trojanow said, that has led us to believe that immigration and globalization are recent problems.
It was a thoughtful and intriguing event, followed by a rousing question and answer session. The audience really responded to what the participants had to say about immigration, globalization, and perceptions of the Other throughout time. Beyond that, it was encouraging to see so many people attend a six o’clock event on a rainy day.
| | | |
| | |
|
