06 April, 2005 - 14:35

Ok, I have to say it. I've been holding out for far too long in my little Malawi Missives.

Global Soul.

I know you're wincing. Please, do, because I'm also wincing at the thought of quoting something by someone that is: 1)completely non-academic and, 2) not even a fun word to think about. There are a lot of contemporary one-hit-wonder words that I enjoy saying: metrosexual being one of them. It's fun to bring into a conversation, but this word up there... I know. Winceful.

But that's all I can think about lately since I've been meeting handfuls of people who have decided to, more or less, abandon all that it means to be a geospecific national. I had lunch with two Danish friends and a white Malawian friend.

(At this point, if I was really trying to be Mr. Pico Iyer, I would have said something dreadful like, "... as we sat around eating a Greek feta salad, sipped mineral water from France, sat in chairs made in Taiwan, spoke about our Canadian-funded & Swedish-managed jobs, smoking Norwegian cigarettes." But, you see, I managed to make it parenthetical.)

And all of a sudden Jean Beaudrillard starting spitting up his French eau gazifi� and gave me an internal lecture about the simulacrum. Because I thought I may have had it figured out when I was in Canada - this idea that the world is a simulation only, that is actually very little altruism to human agency. But I'm not so sure now. Is it ok just to say that the world is fucked up?

To make a conscious decision to work and travel all over the world is difficult to normalise. When pushed into an discussion about these sorts of things, I usually take the side of espousing complete indifference in a comparison of Bobbie-Joe in Kansas City who wants to get married, live in a trailer and have six kids in so-called stark contrast with Stephen Lewis, special UN envoy for HIV/AIDS who flies around the world giving lectures on the pandemic. Because, really, it's all the same. Thematically, the challenges are different but mentally they are exactly the same. It's a smug lie when someone says it's "bigger deal", or it's a "more frightening step" in someone's life to move to a place like this compared with Bobbie-Joe getting married at the local Baptist church. It's just that we have more elaborate acronyms to hide behind.

But this white, Malawian friend both embodies that pretentious term I used at the top of this entry while concurrently taking on the set of challenges that Bobbie-Joe faces. This is all relatively new to my brain, so you must excuse my ignorance as I suspect it is something that most people have already figured out.

So the trick is figuring out which one is sustainable. Life of meandering the planet or staying put in a real, local community?

Oh!this subjective use of "real", "local" and "community" bugs me. Is it really that our reliance on technology has shifted those terms or is that just what we're being forcefed from pop-culture, quasi-academics like Iyer?