Major Research Paper
MFA in Creative Nonfiction
University of King’s College
2020
Is Travel Writing Redeemable? Travel Writing and the Ethnographic Sensibility
“The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being” (Kincaid 14)
“Power … has to be understood …not only in terms of economic exploitation and physical coercion, but also in broader cultural or symbolic terms, including the power to represent someone or something in a certain way—within a certain ‘regime of representation.’ … Stereotyping is a key element in the exercise of symbolic violence” (Hall 259)
In November 1989, the Into the Heart of Africa exhibit opened at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto.[1] Curated by the cultural anthropologist Jeanne Cannizzo, who had experience working and researching in West Africa, the exhibit showcased over three hundred objects collected in Africa between 1870 and 1925—the height of the scramble for Africa—as well as photographs and written reports from Canadian soldiers and missionaries who participated in the African imperial and colonial project. The exhibition displayed violent images of colonial conquest, racist missionary accounts of African cultural practices, and other symbols of oppressive colonial relations—a Canadian officer’s pith helmet, a large Union Jack flag, and a page from Henry Morgan Stanley’s Heroes of the Dark Continent. Cannizzo had intended to display these materials ironically to critique both Canada’s involvement in Africa’s colonization and the museum’s role as a purveyor of truth and ethnographic authority. She had wanted to highlight ROM’s own part in spreading imperialist ideology through its collecting and displaying of African cultural objects as well as ask what happens to cultures when their artifacts become mere things to look at. She had sought to confront Canada’s imperialist past and to examine critically how museums represent non-Western cultures.
Her approach failed spectacularly. Rather than understand Cannizzo’s exhibit as a subtle and ironic critique of Canadian imperialism, most visitors, particularly those from the African Canadian community, felt that it accomplished the exact opposite: it reinforced and recycled those colonial tropes of Africa as primitive, as the quintessential “other,” as the dark to the West’s light, as negation and nothingness (Mbembe). Cannizzo used quotation marks around the more offensive language—“barbarous practices,” “primitive,” “savage”—to signal the corrupt nature of the discourse and provided disclaimers at some exhibits, yet, overall, her intentions were muddled for many visitors, whereas others, who understood the irony, felt that such materials deserved a far more critically explicit approach. Members of the African Canadian community expressed anger Cannizzo never consulted them and displeasure over how an exhibit advertised to represent Africa’s diversity could, ostensibly, do the opposite. For them, this offensive and inaccurate representation was just another example in the West’s long and ugly history of portraying cultures unlike their own. Indeed, museums, anthropologists, and travel writers have an ignoble history in perpetuating and legitimizing harmful and violent images of the “other.”
I start my essay with this brief summary of Cannizzo’s exhibit to underscore the difficulties and dangers in representing people from different cultures as well as to show representations have power and consequences. Whether through literature, paintings, photographs, or scholarship, representations repeated over time produce discourses shaping and limiting what may be said about a particular topic (Hall 257). Discourses produce a body of knowledge rooted in the exercise of power. In his classic account of how Europe created a stereotypical image of the “orient,” Edward Said argues that the discourse of orientalism not only produced a vision of a controllable and manageable orient but also placed Europe above and superior to it. Power and representation are forever link; no representation exists outside of ideology. Representations are neither innocent nor realistic portrayals of the ways things are but deeply implicated in larger political projects.
Travellers and anthropologists have actively participated in creating discourses and cementing stereotypes about the people and places they visited that served imperial aims. Commenting on the relationship between travel writing and European expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Mary Louise Pratt has written, “Travel books gave European reading publics a sense of ownership, entitlement and familiarity with respect to the distant parts of the world that were being explored, invaded, invested in, and colonized” (21). Concerning African specifically, travel writers, such as David Livingstone and Henry Morgan Stanley, never failed to represent Africa as bereft of civilization, as a place ravaged by the slave trade, an ungodly place full of violence and savagery—a discourse Europeans used to justify the colonial project.
Critics have also labelled early anthropologists as the “handmaidens” of colonialism, as their work attempted to delineate clearly defined tribes and to make them knowable and controllable for colonial authorities. Anthropologists researched and wrote about these cultures in a static, functional fashion, divorcing them from history, emphasizing their exoticism, and boxing them into cages, which, in Jacques Derrida’s words, produced a “violence of difference, of classification, and of the system of appellations” (qtd. in Spurr 4). Among Indigenous communities in North America, moreover, “research is probably one of the dirtiest words in [their] vocabulary” (qtd. in Kovach 24), since qualitative researchers in the early twentieth-century would extract their sacred knowledge and use it to more effectively assimilate Indigenous children into the Euro-American worldview.
Cannizzo’s exhibition, for all its faults, still attempted to uncover the link between power and representation, and still tried to use anthropology’s tools to critique the museum’s purported objective position. Indeed, since the end of (legal) colonialism and the postmodern and postcolonial turn in qualitative research more generally, anthropology has tried to redeem itself and break loose from its old colonial associations (Ntarangwi). Anthropologists, and other researchers using ethnography as their primary research method, have become more reflective, self-critical, and ethical in how they work in and write about the places they encounter. Such a self-critical turn, however, has largely been absent in Western travel writing—an odd omission since travel writing, as literary critics have long argued, has been instrumental in shaping powerful and harmful discourses concerning the “other.” If travel writing has historically had the same power as anthropology in defining and presenting the West as superior to the rest of the world, why has not the genre undergone a similar critical introspection? Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Western travel writers have enthusiastically recycled the same clichés and stereotypes, reused the same images, and reiterated the same language as colonials did, particularly concerning Africa. They reproduce an “always already” made mental landscape filled with images and adjectives associated with the place, and instead of challenging them, they often simply reinscribe their journeys and writing with similar sensations and vocabulary. They become trips of repetition. For many Western travel writers, Africa is simply a cliché in constant need of replenishment. As Binyavanga Wainaina writes in his satirical essay “How to Write about Africa”:
Always use the word “Africa” or “Darkness” or “Safari” in your title. Subtitles may include the words “Zanzibar,” “Masai,” “Zulu,” “Zambezi,” “Congo,” “Nile,” “Big,” “Sky,” “Shadow,” “Drum,” “Sun” or “Bygone.” … In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving…. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.
Africa becomes a homogenous place with magnificent animals, lovely panoramas, and starving, dying bodies. Again, these misrepresentations are more than mere inaccuracies; they present the continent as a docile, different, and agentless mass, completely devoid of history, nuance, and real people. As mentioned above, such representations have real-world consequences.
In what follows, I present two attributes of critical ethnography—reflectivity and dialogic performance—I feel can help salvage Western travel writing from its unsavoury past (and present). They will help in resisting stereotyping, decentring the West as the measure for which all is evaluated, and foregrounding the narrator and all her imperfections and naiveties, all to foster an ethnographic sensibility. After discussing the benefits of each attribute, I show how they are missing from classic and well-known travel texts about Africa,[2] and how, in their absence, these texts tend to perpetuate damaging and harmful images of the continent. I conclude by briefly arguing the radical potential of travel writing—its ability to express a reflexive, dialogic, and multicultural ethos—may be best found in the work of non-Westerners.
Reflexivity demands that we, as writers, examine how our own selves, our life histories and multiple identities, affect not only how and what we write but how we interact and engage with whom we encounter. This self-critical and self-reflexive approach asks what perspectives or perceptions about a place or people we may take for granted. What are our intentions? What biases or unexamined prejudices lurk behind our sentences? What value systems come across in our writing? What representational choices are we making? What voices are we excluding? How have we been conditioned to look at certain places? (Madison 124). To produce ethical writing and to interact ethically with our subjects, we must lay our partialities and biases bare. We must become transparent. We must operate from a standpoint of ignorance, vulnerability, and humility.
Refusing to interrogate our unexamined biases, however, facilitates stereotyping. Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan argue travel writing is an inherently conservative genre whose writers want to capture the allure and intrigue of older, more famous voyages to certain world “zones” layered in myth and the exotic. As the authors explain, “Such [zones], as travel writing and fiction construct and deploy them, are at best incidentally geographical; built up out of several different kinds of knowledge—historical, political, anthropological, cultural, mythical, and experiential—they become complex textual zones.” These zones already exist in the writer’s mind before departing, and they merely reinforce those images through their writing.
Ever since Joseph Conrad published Heart of Darkness in 1899, the Congo has remained one of those zones whose representation relies on an ever-growing bundle of savage portraits. The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe argues the novella is racist because it presents Africa only as setting, which “eliminates the African as human factor.” Conrad uses Africa “as a metaphysical battleground devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril” (qtd. in Youngs 94). Yet despite this critical appraisal, many contemporary travel writers still recycle many of the novella’s tropes. Anjan Sundaram’s[3] Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo, published in 2013, for example, redeploys much of the same imagery as Conrad did. An ahistoricity runs through the narrative presenting Congo realities as almost naturally occurring, outside of cause and effect, outside of context, and outside of history itself. Having remained stuck in the same place for centuries, Congo reads as a backward society, a primitive place, empty of culture and accomplishment. Consciously or not, Sundaram presents himself as a modern-day Marlow (minus the European background) hunting his Kurtz. At times, the comparison rings so true that it approaches parody. Floating along the Congo River, as Conrad did a century earlier, Sundaram marvels at the implicit threat of the jungle, of its unknowability, its otherness:
The barge advanced northward, making a breeze against the rolling humidity. And soon even villages were rare: I was startled at how quickly we had left all signs of human development. Passing us was a constant level of jungle, without variation in the kind of tree—buttressed, stout, covered in woody creepers—or in the deep shade of green, the cauliflower-like crowns. The sound of the barge was a steady drone. All this created a distinct tension. (140)
A reader could easily mistake this passage for Conrad. The barge carries Sundaram away from civilization into the deepest heart of Africa, where settlements are “semicivilized” and where “the need for soap [is] evident from the dirty children” gathered before him (159). The text presents these places as the antithesis of culture, defined by lack. The reader gets the sense that Sundaram already had a clear “Congo” in mind before he even arrived. Sundaram writes without self-reflection, without a critical appraisal how he has digested Congo images over the years. As a result, the Congo becomes cliché; it becomes the zone in which “history disappears; the landscape becomes sinisterly primeval; human figures become either hypensensual or abject” (Holland and Huggan 70). The stereotype becomes fortified.
Another consequence of reflexivity’s absence is the development of what Renato Rosaldo has called “imperial nostalgia,” in which Western writers romanticize the former relationship between empire and colonies (Holland and Huggan 29). Such a rhetorical strategy of wistful reminiscence elides the unequal power relationship between the two and smothers history in pastoral, bucolic language. In Dark Star Safari, the American writer Paul Theroux visits Malawi in the early 2000s and the school where he taught forty years earlier when Malawi was known as Nyasaland, when it was still a British colony. As he fondly remembers:
Fearing the draft, I had joined the Peace Corps, in one of the earliest waves of volunteers, and been sent to Nyasaland, an African country not yet independent. I experienced the last gasp of British colonialism, the in-between period of uncertain changeover, and the hopeful assertion of black rule . . . I saw this process at close quarters, and African rule, necessary as it was, was also a tyranny in Malawi from day one. Schoolteaching was perfect for understanding how people lived and what they wanted for themselves. And my work justified my existence in Africa. (311)
In representing his participation in colonialism as a benign teacher to hard-working students, he silences the brutal aspects of the British colonial project. He never seriously critiques colonialism nor does he confront his role in it, as an English teacher, as an instructor of a language whose goal it was to create a more manageable and recognizable workforce. He distances himself from being an agent in domination, a facilitator of cultural upheaval. “Tyranny,” after all, only arrives in Malawi with black rule and the ascendancy of Hastings Banda.
When Theroux sees his old school lying in ruin, his description of it can easily be read as a metaphor for the entire independence project in Malawi:
The school was almost unrecognizable. What had been a group of school buildings in a large grove of trees was a compound of battered buildings in a muddy open field. The trees had been cut, the grass was chest high. At first glance the place was so poorly maintained as to seem abandoned: broken windows, doors ajar, mildewed walls, gashes in the roofs, and only a few people standing around, empty-handed, doing nothing but gaping at me. (315)
For Theroux, the dilapidated school represents colonialism’s unfulfilled promise, its squandered potential, and independent Malawi’s unequivocal failure. The bush has pushed back against civilization’s incursion and has battered its fine institutions meant to lift Africa out of squalor, savagery, and push it sky high. Malawians hang around “doing nothing,” wasting time, being unproductive. Theroux’s paternalism and his unwillingness to analyze the past to understand the present leads him to criticize Africa for its own poverty. Colonialism has disappeared from the equation; history, too, vanishes. His uncritical reflexivity—his arrogance—propels him to make embarrassingly obtuse comments as this one about Tanzania:
Forty years of independent rule and foreign investment, forty years of mind-deadening political rhetoric about ujamma (“familyhood”) and “African socialism,” forty years of nationalization and industrialization and neutrality, and the vast fertile country of twenty million people had achieved a condition of near bankruptcy and had one factory.
Such judgment comes easily when the focus centres on alleged African ineptitude, not the enduring effects of colonialism, on mismanaged economies, not structural adjustment programs. He approaches his subjects already knowing everything. He comes across not as humble or vulnerable but pompous and pedantic. Overall, Theroux’s text pinpoints the dangers in undertaking travel without unpacking previous images and discourses. He says nothing new or perceptive about Africa. He only longs for times passed.
Beyond reflexivity, ethnographers also use dialogic performance—which originates in the theories of linguist Mikhail Baktuin—to encourage more ethical and nuanced representation.[4] Through dialogue, we, as writers, resist one-dimensional and monolithic interpretations and representations; dialogue embraces complexity, diversity, and multiple voices (Madison 128). Self and other come together through conversation so they can debate and question each other. No one side dominates, and trough this dynamism, new meanings and perspectives, hopefully, manifest themselves. Through dialogue, the emphasis shifts from simply observing to listening, which limits the writer’s habit of gazing out at the “other,” objectifying her as a thing without thought or speech.
What is remarkable about three classics of Western African travel literature—Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa (1936), Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937), and Peter Matthiessen’s The Tree Where Man Was Born (1972)—is the lack of genuine dialogue between the writer and the subjects, in this case the Africans themselves. Through their silences, the African subjects become peripheral to their own country and culture. The reader rarely gets her perspective or opinion; she is merely written about. In each case, Africa’s wildness—its glorious yet dangerous animals, its untamed landscape, its romantic allure—attracts the writer, not the people; they become an afterthought. Hemingway has gone to East Africa to hunt big game, and in typical Hemingway fashion, his text is rife with man-against-nature motifs. Danger lurks everywhere, and in such a hostile environment, freed from society’s trappings, a man can become a man: “[you] make yourself responsible only to yourself, you exchange the pleasant, comforting stench of comrades for something you can never feel in any other than by yourself” (148). Africa becomes only a setting for self-exploration, for unveiling a machismo writ large.
Hemingway is in awe of the mammals—the hyena that “skitter[s] on into speed to tumble end over end” (37); the rhino with a “hide like vulcanized rubber,” looking “long-hulked, heavy-sided, and prehistoric” (79); or the “long-legged” buffalo, with “the white stripes and the great, curling, sweeping horns, brown as walnut meats” (231)—and kills most he encounters, often seeking prized, ivory-pointed horns for trophies. Big-game hunting in Africa was rarely about a love of nature or a return to a more rustic or simple mode of existence but was a sport, “in which men white men directed Africans in the mechanized and commercialized conquest of Africa nature … the safari was about colonialism (Keim 115-16).
Hemingway’s hunting party, too, has their African servants who act as gun bearers, drivers, and trackers. They stay silently in the background and blend into the scenery, while they wait on the white hunters’ needs. Hemingway has no interest in learning about their cultures or tradition, beyond their tracking abilities; instead, he and his European companions fill the emptied, African landscape with conversations about European literature. Alone, around the fire, drinking whiskey and soda, under an African sky resplendent with stars, they talk Joyce and Pound and Dos Passos, and Hemingway says he would “like to write something about the county and the animals and what it’s like to someone who knows nothing about it” (194). Yet the focus of his learning remains fastened to the landscape and the animals, for the African remains silent: “The Masai said something else and scratched one leg with the other” (158). What that “something else” is, the reader never knows. The African subject has been silenced.
Though of a different kind, silences also appear in Blixen’s account of her time living on a Kenyan coffee plantation from 1915 to 1931. She writes with far more nuance and intelligence than Hemingway, criticizes colonialism at times (though not her role in it), and has learned to speak Swahili. Living among the Kikuyu and the Maasai, she does develop an appreciation for their cultures and does converse with them. Yet she does so in a Eurocentric manner in which the differences between European and African arise not from different history and cultural practices but are ingrained in each’s being—natural and fixed. In one scene, Blixen discusses Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice with Farah, a Somali. On the surface, this exchange should promote a dialogic performance in which two people from different cultures discuss the meaning behind a well-known European text. And although Farah’s reaction to the play fascinates—he offers a spirited defense of Shylock—Blixen interprets his reaction in a naturalized framework:
All Somalis have in their countenance something exceedingly dramatic. Farah, with the slightest change of mien and carriage, now took on a dangerous aspect, as if he were really in the Court of Venice, putting heart into his friend or partner Shylock, in the face of the crowd of Antonio’s friends, and of the Doge of Venice himself. His eyes flickered up and down the figure of the merchant before him, with the breast bared to the knife. (222)
Farah’s reaction stems from neither his individual interpretation nor his cultural upbringing. Blixen attributes his “dramatic” and emotional response to “all Somalis,” as a trait beyond history and culture, something inevitable, fixed, and permanent. Farah becomes cemented as “other,” forever and irrevocably different from Blixen. Thus, although Blixen listens to Farah and engages with him, his responses do not provoke in her any deeper reflections beyond what she expects, for after all “Natives have in them a strong strain of malice, a shrill delight in things going wrong, which in itself is hurting and revolting to Europeans” (38). For Farah to defend a scoundrel like Shylock, for him to react so emotionally, to imagine so eagerly a knife on a bare breast is for Blixen nothing more than fait accompli. Farah represents all Somalis, in fact all “natives,” and can only speak and say what has already been affixed there. Difference has become naturalized, and genuine dialogue has become impossible.
Peter Matthiessen’s account was published almost forty years after Hemingway’s and Blxen’s texts, and after most of Africa had won independence, yet his book exhibits many of the same characteristics as its predecessors. Matthiessen writes landscape with great detail. Here he describes the areas around Lake Rudolf, now known as Lake Turkana, in northern Kenya:
The region is less hostile than the deserts farther east, and less monotonous. Dry river beds intersect broad dry grass plains broken here and there by sand dunes, brimstone outcrops, and gypsum, and the animals are tame and common, for there is no one here to hunt them. But farther on all creatures vanish, and the arid plain under a gray blowing sky seems more oppressive than bare desert, as if life had been here and had gone. In this wind is the echo of cataclysm: this is how the world will look when man brings all life to an end. (55)
This passage intrigues for its almost post-apocalyptical feeling. The land is beaten and barren, desolate, and devoid of any humanity. Matthiessen presents himself as the last-standing man in a depopulated, dehumanized country. And although this region of Kenya does bare actual similarity to his description, Matthiessen focuses on the land, its geology and form, throughout his text, even when people are present. The land holds his interest more than the people. This obsession with topography and geology runs deep in Hemingway and Blixen as well; the writers stage themselves as travelling or living in empty, gorgeous countryside, isolated and alone, and the Africans they do encounter almost seem to spoil the scenery or ruin the atmosphere, as they remind the writers that people do exist in the green hills and among the sand dunes and deep valleys; Africa is still a place of humanity, of people, history, and culture—part of the world. Mary Louise Pratt has noted that this desire to present the land as empty and vacant was a favourite tactic of early travel writers, since it legitimized their presence as harbingers of civilization.
Matthiessen has opportunities to converse with Africans, yet he forgoes them, blaming his inadequacies in African languages. Yet even if had the language skills, he admits he would still have nothing to say to them.
I would have liked to talk to the Africans, but I spoke no Kamba and very poor Swahili, and even if my Swahili had been excellent, there was no good reason to talk that they would understand: I was full of good will but had nothing to say. Feeling above all impolite, I sat down by the fire with a drink, and listened to the crickets and soft African voices and the hum of the kerosene lamps; there was a moon in the acacias and a dying wind. Even in the camp, wild things were going on about their business. (45)
He has no interest in chatting with the people around him, and as soon as the opportunity passes, either from indifference or ignorance, Matthiessen retreats back into nature and notes the acacias, the wind, and the wild things. The African voices, too, fade into the rhythm of chirping crickets and become indistinguishable from the landscape, only another item he will write about, along with the lions, zebras, and giraffes, the deep craters and evaporating lakes.
When he does write about the various African ethnic groups living in East Africa, he does so from afar, recording their various habits and traditions as a classical anthropologist would. The writing becomes impersonal and rigid, unlike the landscape descriptions, reading more like a checklist than a detailed report. In other parts, he fears what will happen to them in modernizing Africa. He laments how their ways will become sullied, impure, with the growing urban influence, the cities that keep seeping and stretching into the virgin and verdant African countryside. Speaking about the Hadza in Tanzania, Matthiessen writes the following:
This people is acknowledged by all who have met them to be healthy and happy, with no history of epidemic or famine, and able to satisfy all needs in a few hours each day…. The wants of the primitive are few, since he does not envy what he knows nothing of. Poverty and the inferior status that await the acculturated Hadza is no alternative to bush life and the serenity of the old ways, and to take this from him by exposing him to a “progress” he cannot share is to abuse his innocence and do him harm. (216)
Matthiessen mourns for the Hadza—the “primitive” man doomed to disappear from modernity’s poisons. He is capturing their last traces before being swallowed. Although the forces of globalization, its economic and environmental upheavals, have harmed indigenous ways of life, Matthiessen’s concern becomes drowned in his arrogant and romantic assessment of Hadza culture. His representation implies the culture’s unchanging essence and an inability to adapt or cope with fissure; it ignores the group’s history and instead presents the members as an example of purity gone, a requiem for a harmonious time when human beings lived simply and in balance with nature. His romantic vision renders the Hadza without history, a footnote to the greater and nobler Western histories, and writes them as voiceless and without agency—the ability to act, fight, and resist. Throughout his text, the only contemporary Africans who pique Matthiessen’s interest are those who, in his mind, are on the verge of extinction.
The preceding discussion and examples, I hope, have shown how imperative it is for Western writers to adopt an ethnographic sensibility when writing about other cultures. If travel writing is to be redeemed and rescued from its past as a tool for colonizers and imperialists, and used to promote a true multicultural ethos, to decentre the West, or to represent other people in nuanced and complex ways, then we writers must seriously examine our intentions and our biases about those people and places. We must converse, exchange, and dialogue. We must be humble, and we must listen. We must adopt, in the terms of Indigenous researchers, a decolonizing lens—a critical standpoint prioritizing ethical representation and the inclusion of multiple voices.
Interestingly, though somewhat unsurprisingly, most of the critical and ethnographic travel writing has emerged from non-Western writers or from writers living in the West but outside the dominant group or worldview. For as long as Europeans have travelled and have written about their travels, non-Europeans have as well. African and Asian travel writing has a long and rich history that has over often been overlooked in favour of the more famous European counterparts (Edwards et al.). With decolonization, however, and the emergence of postcolonialism, the writers from the former colonies have begun to write back to the metropole, challenging European supremacy and offering counter-narratives. As Tim Youngs explains, “diasporic movement, decolonization, and postcolonialism have undermined in a more concentrated way the claims to universal authority of a white metropolitan standpoint … postcolonial studies of travel writing have grown more nuanced, going beyond crude models of domination to take into account local resistance” (115). In The European Tribe, for example, Caryl Phillips reverses the colonial gaze and passes scathing judgment on European culture and conduct, as the early European travellers had done. He notes ironically that with rising nationalisms and xenophobic violence in Europe, Europeans have begun to exemplify those traits they have long associated, however erroneously, with tribes: inward looking, isolated, and hostile to outsiders. Likewise in A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid, in a wonderfully lyrical diatribe, criticizes those tourists who use her Antigua homeland for rest and relaxation, to cure themselves of the humdrum of their home lives, without reflecting on their privileged positions or on their behaviour on the island. She reminds the reader that Antigua is a place with people, history, and culture—not a beach resort.
Some postcolonial travel texts exist completely outside the boundaries of the West and attempt to resurrect linkages between places predating colonialism. In In an Antique Land, Amitav Ghosh, an Indian, recounts his experience conducting anthropological fieldwork among farmers in rural Egypt. He goes to Egypt expecting to find a settled, sequestered people, but soon realizes that most (the men, at least) have detailed migratory histories working throughout the Gulf States. He immediately questions previous thoughts he had about the community. And because of his non-Western background, especially his Hinduism, many of the locals treat him with suspicion and accuse him of ignorance. In one poignant scene, Ghosh finally loses his patience and becomes embroiled in a heated debate over cremation with a local imam, for whom the act of burning dead epitomizes backwardness. Ghosh counters his claim by arguing that those in the West burn their dead, too. The imam flatly denies this because in the West people are not ignorant, for they have “science, they have guns and tanks and bombs” (235). Ghosh shouts that India as well has these things: “In my country we have all those things too; we have guns and tanks and bombs. And they’re better than anything you’ve got in Egypt.” To which the Imam replies, “Our guns and bombs are much better than theirs. Ours are second only to the West’s” (236). After further shouting, Ghosh is eventually led away.
In response to this exchange, Ghost writes the following, which I quote at length because it reveals travel writing’s radical potential:
At that moment, despite the vast gap that lay between us, we understood each other perfectly. We were both travelling, he and I: we were travelling in the West … for millions and millions of people on the landmasses around us, the West meant only this—science and tanks and guns and bombs . . . it seemed to me that the Imam and I had participated in our own final defeat, in the dissolution of the centuries of dialogue that had linked us: we had demonstrated the irreversible triumph of the language that has usurped all others in which people once discussed their differences. We had acknowledged that it was no longer possible to speak as … one of the thousands of travellers who had crossed the Indian Ocean in the Middle Ages might have done: of things that were right and good … Instead, to make ourselves understood, we had both resorted, I, as a student of the “humane” sciences, and he, an old fashioned village Imam, to very terms that world leaders and statesmen use at great, global conferences, the universal, irresistible metaphysic of modern meaning; he had said to me, in effect: “You ought not to do what you do, because otherwise you will not have guns and tanks and bombs.” It was the only language we had been able to discover in common. (236-37)
In this remarkable passage, Ghosh realizes because of colonialism, he and the imam can now only converse in the West’s language of bombs and guns. They have lost all ability to communicate outside that old colonial relationship. Through this dialogic exchange and his own self-reflection, however, Ghosh begins to reform those connections and conversations predating European expansion and to re-establish linkages between Egypt and India, beyond merely relating to each other as decolonized countries. Through both archival and anthropological work, Ghosh revives “a history of travel that predates European intervention: a history of peopled by pilgrims, scholars, and, above all, itinerant merchants; and one that traces the knowledge they acquired back to a non-European place” (Holland and Huggan 59). In a sense, he recreates the entire Indian Ocean world. In an Antique Land shows the quality of travel writing that can be produced through adopting an ethnographic sensibility.
Ghosh has written elsewhere that good travel writing does not “assume a universal order of reality” or structure the narrative into “teleologies of racial or civilization progress.” The best travel narratives have an “openness to surprise” and acknowledge “the limits of the knowingness of the witness” (qtd. in Edwards and Graulund 4). Travel writers must confront their own limitations, and they must be open to other voices and stories. In other words, they must adopt an ethnographic sensibility.
Endnotes
[1]I have used Shelley Ruth Butler’s Contested Representation: Revisiting Into the Heart of Africa, particularly chapters one and two (7-48), in discussing and critiquing the exhibit.
[2] Because of financial and freedom of movement constrains, only a few Africans have written about their experiences travelling within their own country or to other African countries (Pelu Awofeso and Noo Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria; Kofi Akpabli in Ghana; as well as those in the African nonfiction collection Safe House). The genre of African travel writing remains, unfortunately, almost exclusively a Western one. Although I have read these works for inspiration, along with other African memoirists, my interest lies with Western portrayals of Africa, as I am irrevocably from the West.
[3]Anjan Sundaram was born in India, spent a lot of time in Dubai during adolescence, and attended graduate school in the United States. His account shows non-Western writers are not immune to reusing many of the West’s favourite literary tropes and strategies of representation.
[4]In The Shadow of the Sun, Ryszard Kapuscinski nears the dialogic performance encouraged in this essay. He hints at conversations he had with various Africans about how he is seen as white man, not as Polish, in Africa. This reaction frustrates Kapuscinski because he, as a Pole, understands himself as a victim of colonialism himself—like the Africans he meets—not as one of its perpetrators. They only laugh at him in reaction, as if a white man could be a victim of colonialism. And although Kapuscinski gains a deeper understand of himself as a white man in Africa, he never explores those dialogues in any great detail, only briefly alluding to them. It strikes the reader as a missed opportunity for further self-reflection (40-41).
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How to Write about Africa