Italian president Silvio Berlusconi claimed that if lefitsts won Milan's next election, the city would be "flooded by Muslims and Gypsies." At the Roma Pavilion during this year's Venice Biennale, Salman Rushdie took the opportunity to not only challenge this sentiment, but to champion migration as a fierce creative force. Open Society recounts:
We live in the age of the migrant, said Rushdie, a time when more people have moved across the face of the world than ever before. The fact of migration has in large part defined modern urban life—"it is these movers who have shaken and shaped the world we live in"—an age when the majority of the inhabitants of the great cities of the world such as Bombay and New York were not born there. For a long time he has seen this as a creative force, remarking that "I myself would not be possible except in an age of migration," and that to create a hybrid world has always seemed to be an enriching thing.
See Rushdie's testimony on video here.
In other news of creativity and migration, novelist Helen Oyeyemi (about whom I'm still inclined to exclaim, 'Young! She's so young!') is leaving London. The daughter of Nigerian immigrants writes that from her parents, she learned that "you don't have to stay in a place just because you were born there, or because you're used to it." After being assaulted in broad daylight in London, Oyeyemi became something of a nomad. She writes:
Home is where your teapots are. I packed up my teapots and began to roam, usually for six to eight months at a time, though there was recently a year-long spell in Cambridge. What can I tell you about the behaviour of cities? I'm greedy about cities – I like to form my impressions of them on my own, and on foot as far as possible, looking and listening, having conversations with bridges and streets and riverbanks, conversations I tend not to be aware of until a little later, when I find myself returning to those places to say hello again, even if only in memory.
Now I've been doing this for a while I know that I'm looking for a city that would like me to be one of its people.
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