One morning I woke up to realize I was the enemy. I had spent my life feeling largely outside of domestic political issues in Britain, Europe or America. I was always either an immigrant or an émigré: from leaving the USSR as a nine month old, to moving stateless around Europe as a toddler, then being naturalized by Britain as a child but leaving again as a teenager, in order to drop by as a student and then depart again heading to Berlin, Prague, Moscow, while most of my family were in the United States and Ukraine. I hardly ever voted because I felt it wasn’t my right to get so involved in my host countries’ affairs.
When I came back to London as a father, I was surprised to see it had changed. Part of the reason I had originally left was a sense that Britain was ultimately a closed sort of place. Now, suddenly, London was full of perpetual migrants of all walks of life.
Before I had been seen by the Brits as a harmless oddity. Now I was part of something coherent and threatening, especially in the context of Brexit. “The problem for people like you is…” a leading Brexiteer lectured me. “It must be hard for people like you…” a Brexit activist consoled me. “Can’t you tell Brexit happened because of people like you…” a philosopher scolded me. It was confusing. What “people” did they mean? Slowly it crystalized: they meant I was a “Globalist” rather than a “Localist.” I had been cast as one side in an increasingly popular political framework, both in Britain and the United States, which divvied up the landscape into a cultural clash between patriots and rootless cosmopolitans, communitarians and citizens of nowhere. A Globalist—that’s who I had been my whole life! I thought I had simply been Awkward.
But the closer I peered at the Localist versus Globalist divide, the more it started to dissolve.
Take the economic part of the portrayal, which purports to pit national economic priorities against the interests of international finance. But funders of Localist movements have a striking tendency to live or base their businesses in offshore tax havens, whether it is Brexit referendum campaign funder Arron Banks, the Brexit-backing newspaper moguls the Barclay brothers, or “nationalist heroes” like Vladimir Putin. What patriots! It isn’t financial globalism these stalwart defenders of the Somewheres dislike; it’s the idea that there might be a global way to regulate their cash they find objectionable.
Then there was the math. Dividing up politics into Globalists versus Localists implies that they are somehow equal groups. But the majority of people still feel themselves as belonging to one nation or another. Unlike more evenly split Left versus Right fights over economics, or clashes over social issues like abortion, there will always be overwhelmingly more people on the “local” side. The frame is a spin doctor’s sleight of hand—a way of redefining a minuscule minority as a threatening majority to secure electoral victory for unrelated causes.
And then there was the way the local versus global story seemed to assume the existence of an abstract, Globalist identity. This hasn’t been my experience at all. As a child, I’d spent some time at an international school full of people from all sorts of countries. The result was everyone accentuated their national stereotypes in order to define themselves. When one moves from country to country, something similar happens: you become an expat—more of the native self you might have ever been. The only time I have been English is when I lived “abroad.”
What I’ve found, however, is that as one moves, one begins to see how random national identities are, how accidental it is to inherit one and not another. This can make it harder to be fanatical about identity. But whenever I have to do anything meaningful, whether write or raise a family, I find that I can only do so by acting through a language and its baggage. Even the mere act of speaking draws you into a tunnel of all that was said before in that language—all that is imprinted on it—and you realize you can express yourself through it only by giving yourself up to it, and then pushing away from it. To give a tiny example: Even though I have nothing at all personally linking me with the British Empire, whenever I speak British English, its history—or rather the history of how people talk about it, whether with pride or disgust—flows through my mouth, as if it were somehow part of my own past. This could lead to confusion. When I lived in Scotland I was frequently rebuked by Scots for all the sins of the English against them. It would take a while to explain that while I sounded English, I really wasn’t. But I still felt weirdly guilty nonetheless, as if the evils had been soaked up in the language.
Perhaps some sort of Globalist identity exists in corporate speak, or in the dryer bits of academia, but it’s not fulfilling—not something you could communicate to your children. When I (attempt to) raise my children, I speak to them in different languages. If I speak to them in English, there is always the imprint of English schools and universities I attended, with their hundreds of years of class games and self-loathing. And when I talk to them in Russian, out come all the hundreds of years of Russian children’s stories and poems I was weaned on by my parents, mixed with the lingering anxiety and verbal tremors of Jewish fears of pogroms.
As my children become more self-aware I see them toy with ways to define themselves. Are they English? Russian? Jewish? Ukrainian? European? How to be all and none at the same time—and thus true to themselves?
I started to wonder who else had shared this experience. How had they resolved it? I began to look around for a book for guidance. I searched among contemporaries, but it was when I received a copy of Gaito Gazdanov’s The Buddha’s Return that I found a clue.
For those not familiar, Gazdanov was one of the most intriguing of the Russian White émigré writers. He fought in the Russian Civil War, moved to Paris in his late teens, drove a cab, and lived in great poverty until he was discovered as a writer. He always wrote in Russian despite spending most of his life in France. Gazdanov has been rediscovered in English recently, thanks to Pushkin Press, where Bryan Karetnyk’s translation captures his semi-quaver of sarcasm perfectly.
The Buddha’s Return is an unusually structured book. The main detective plot appears only halfway through the story when the narrator is accused of murder (only to be finally cleared utterly by chance). Its real subject is migration and identity. It plays out among the White Russian émigrés in Paris, whose differing fates reveal the randomness of social roles. The super-rich are left beggared, only to then become rich again by accident; criminals fake noble pasts; vagabonds take on the airs and graces of novelized aristocrats; and penniless writers provide fake biographies for those who want to recreate themselves.
The narrator is a student incapacitated by the relative nature of identity—“this aggregate of absurd, random conventions”:
I saw myself as a composer, a miner, an officer, a laborer, a diplomat, a tramp . . . so I began to believe I really had no idea who I might be the very next day.
These metamorphoses mean that he is ultimately unable to focus himself enough to feel or act, unable to suspend his own disbelief about any role he might inhabit. This has led to the destruction of an important love affair. In order to be in a relationship, you have to be prepared to take on the role of a lover.
In a nice little touch, Gazdanov has his hero endlessly working and unable to finish a paper about the Thirty Years War, the war that eventually lead to the emergence of clear national identities after the Peace of Westphalia—a paper the narrator is writing as a favor to a friend who is in turn ghost writing it for someone else.
As social roles and identities break down, so do the borders between waking and dreaming, and between reality and hallucination. Gazdanov manages all this so deftly that when the narrator is arrested for a crime he says he didn’t commit, the reader always has the aching sense he may have done the deed in a fit of delirium without realizing. Indeed the only times when the narrator stands up for who he is—clearly states what he did and didn’t do and defines where his own borders are—is when he is placed under arrest and imprisoned, first in an extended dream sequence, then in “real” life. Gazdanov is reversing Kafka’s formula. For Kafka, getting caught in the absurdities of bureaucracy, law and punishment means losing your identity. Gazdanov’s hero only affirms his identity when in prison and under interrogation, which in turn suggests that identity is itself a prison.
At the end of the book the narrator has some sort of epiphany where he glimpses everyone he has ever known in the book in a massive hallucination and, after the totality of the terrifying vision, is reborn to himself. Able to function again he can recommit to his love affair, “the only illusion for which, perhaps, it was truly worth defending myself.” But in a final twist, Gazdanov does not have his narrator becoming French or settling in Paris with his beloved. She has moved to Australia, and in the final scene the hero is again on the move. His period of not knowing who he was is only a prelude to a rebirth which in turn inspires another “long sea voyage.”
Trying to make sense of Gazdanov’s strange, slyly smiling little book, I’m tempted, or perhaps need to, interpret it as an attempt to find a way to capture a permanent migrant’s relationship with identity. What Gazdanov seems to be saying is that on the one hand identities are relative, constructed and theatrical—not “you”—but on the other hand, one has to enter into them in order to function, as there is no way to act without an identity. Ultimately however, the trick is to embrace them in order to then outstrip them, to be in a permanent process of inhabiting and then moving beyond an identity, with no final resting place.
This could all read sententious in a dead-handed, superficially “spiritual” sort of way, were it not for Gazdanov’s light, ironic tone throughout, as if what he is proposing is a game for the reader to engage with on the subject rather than some great “truth” to be preached. But irony is also the right mode for his central idea. Irony means saying something while moving beyond it at the same time, being both inside a meaning and outside it.
Which is why Globalists don’t exist. I would know, because I am one.