Scattered All Over the Earth

As a work of speculative fiction, Scattered All Over the Earth imagines a future formed from the implications of the present. It explores a world that continues to struggle with the forces of climate change, and particularly, with the cultural change brought about by climate-driven migration. Technology and migration shrink the world and bring cultures closer together, making Europe a place of cultural ferment in which new and hybrid traditions are constantly being born. At the same time, cultures do not always meet on an equal footing, and the pressure to assimilate can cause traditions, identities, and even languages to disappear. The most potent symbol of this fear of erasure is the “land of sushi.” Though numerous cues make clear that this vanished nation is Japan, neither Japan nor the Japanese language is ever mentioned by name in the book—as if the nation has disappeared so completely that even its name has been erased from existence. Hiruko spends her life hoping to find someone else who comes from this land so that she can speak her native language before it, too, disappears.

This notion of erasure is also explored when Knut watches a TV interview with a woman who lived through the reunification of East and West Germany. In most of the West, the fall of the Berlin Wall is almost always presented as an unambiguous triumph for freedom and human rights. This woman presents an alternate view: “After reunification, people’s lives in the West went on as usual, while ours in the East changed radically. Textbooks, prices, TV programs, working conditions, even our holidays—everything was adjusted to the West. We were suddenly like immigrants in our own country” (4-5). When East Germany rejoined West Germany, the Soviet culture that had dominated for so long was pushed out and replaced with Western culture. It is an example of how, with globalization, the dominant culture threatens smaller and less powerful ones. This continues to happen in the imagined future of the novel.

In many places, however, the novel presents a more nuanced view of the changes that occur as cultures interact—often poking fun at the notion of cultural purity or authenticity. This is especially true in the sections dealing with food. Hiruko and Knut go searching to find someone who speaks her native language by looking for those connected to sushi, a sensible choice given that her country is identified in the novel as “the land of sushi.” They discover, however, that many sushi restaurants are fusion places that blend sushi and other cultural foods and are often very different from what Hiruko considers “real” sushi. Moreover, the people who work in these restaurants come from all over the world, something Nanook also discovers early in his time in Copenhagen when he asks a sushi chef why he and his coworkers speak English rather than what he assumes is their native language: “I’m American, and he’s Vietnamese,” the chef replies, laughing (99). Surprised, Nanook responds, “Then could an Eskimo work here?” thus beginning his career as a sushi chef.

This hybridity is especially evident in Chapter 3, when Akash brings Knut and Hiruko to an Indian restaurant, expecting to introduce them to authentic food, and is startled to find the menu unrecognizable: “On the first page were ‘Recommendations for Lunch,’ which consisted of three choices: ‘Satori Pizza,’ ‘Lotus Dream Pizza,’ and ‘Meditation Pizza’” (51). When she questions the waiter about why they serve pizza, he responds that the menu is very popular at the Osho International Meditation Resort in Pune. Akash is appalled, but Knut points out that cultural diffusion moves in multiple directions at once: “Italian or Indian—it doesn’t really matter. After all, don’t they say Marco Polo brought the idea for pasta back to Europe from Asia? That makes Italian pasta a kind of Asian food” (52). Pizza itself is the quintessential globalized food; though it originated in Italy, it was almost unknown outside the Neapolitan working class until it became popular in America, and it now exists in a dizzying variety of forms around the world. In traveling to India, it has become Indian, and now it returns to recolonize Europe as a new product—no more or less authentically Italian than it is Indian. In the globalized world of the novel, cultural authenticity is an illusion: To belong authentically to any culture is to be inevitably bound up with others.