Another Home

This is a wide-ranging conversation between two old friends, writers Caryl Phillips and Pico Iyer, whose family life and work has been shaped by migration: from St. Kitts to Britain and the United States in Phillips’s case, and from Bombay, to Britain, California, and Japan, in Iyer’s. Finding kinship in their experience as “not-really-English English-raised nomads,” they discuss their parents’ expectations as colonial migrants, the layered meanings of “home” and the equally layered experiences of feeling (and being made to feel) a foreigner in various places, instances of living with a “great, rich, multi-cultured treasure-house” of literary references, various forms of “double consciousness” and/or cultural bifurcation (Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Sam Selvon, among other luminaries), English as a home, and “home” as “a sentence we’ll never complete, and one to which we’ll always keep adding.”