Global Citizenship
In Mario Vargas Llosa’s 2010 Nobel Lecture, subsequently published as In Praise of Reading and Fiction, the Peruvian writer describes his experience living far from home and sheds some light on the way this has shaped his literary work:
I never felt like a foreigner in Europe or, in fact, anywhere. In all the places I have lived, in Paris, London, Barcelona, Madrid, Berlin, Washington, New York, Brazil, or the Dominican Republic, I felt at home. I have always found a lair where I could live in peace, work, learn things, nurture dreams, and find friends, good books to read, and subjects to write about. It does not seem to me that my unintentionally becoming a citizen of the world has weakened what are called “my roots,” my connections to my own country—which would not be particularly important—because if that were so, my Peruvian experiences would not continue to nourish me as a writer and would not always appear in my stories, even when they seem to occur very far from Peru. I believe, instead, that living for so long outside the country where I was born has strengthened those connections, adding a more lucid perspective to them, and a nostalgia that can differentiate the adjectival from the substantive and keep memories reverberating. Love of the country where one was born cannot be obligatory, but like any other love must be a spontaneous act of the heart, like the one that unites lovers, parents and children, and friends.
I carry Peru deep inside me because that is where I was born, grew up, was formed, and lived those experiences of childhood and youth that shaped my personality and forged my calling, and there I loved, hated, enjoyed, suffered, and dreamed. What happens there affects me more, moves and exasperates me more, than what occurs elsewhere. I have not wished it or imposed it on myself; it simply is so.
Having been born and raised in a country where I no longer live, I really resonate with Vargas Llosa here—and I’d wager anyone else who was raised a third culture kid will feel likewise.
I don’t get a chance to return to Guatemala as often as I’d like, but my love for Guatemala is real—it is not obligatory or imposed. While my dual citizenship may have come to an end when I turned 18, my Guatemalan upbringing still nourishes me in important ways. That’s why, as Vargas Llosa puts it, “What happens there affects me more, moves and exasperates me more, than what occurs elsewhere.”
Nonetheless, there’s a sense in which I don’t fully belong to Guatemala, just as I don’t always feel at home in the United States. In their defining book Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, David Pollock and Ruth Van Reken write, “The TCK builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture are assimilated into the TCK’s life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background.”
That’s precisely why I gravitate toward those who have also found themselves between cultures—with all the joys and complications such a life entails. The details of my life may differ widely from someone like Vargas Llosa—I’ve never been to Peru, I haven’t won a Nobel prize, and I wouldn’t think of marrying my cousin, for starters—but on the matter of unintended global citizenship, at least, the two of us stand on common ground.