COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING) (ONLINE ISSN 2278-9650 | PRINT ISSN 2278-9642)
NO. IX | JAN ’14 | 3(1)
ED. ARUP K CHATTERJEE
COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING)
COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING)
| POETRY – RESEARCH PAPERS – NONFICTION |
NO. IX | JAN ’14 | 3(1)
ED. ARUP K CHATTERJEE
COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAVEL WRITING)
| POETRY – RESEARCH PAPERS – NONFICTION |
Coldnoon envisions travel not as flux but instead as gaps in travelling itself, from which derives its theory of travelogy. Coldnoon means a shadowed instant in time when the inertia of motion of images, thoughts and spectacles, comes to rest upon a still and cold moment. Our travels are not of trade and imagining communities; they are towards the reporting of purposeless and unselfconscious narratives the human mind experiences when left in a vacuum between terminals of travel.
First published in New Delhi India in 2014 Online ISSN 2278-9650 | Print ISSN 2278-9650 Cover Photograph, Saswata Bhattacharya Cover Design, Arup K Chatterjee Typeset in Arno Pro & Open Sans Editor, Arup K Chatterjee Assistant Editor, Amrita Ajay Technical Editor, Sumandro Chattopadhyay Contributing Editors: K. Satchidanandan, Lisa Thatcher, Sudeep Sen, G.J.V. Prasad, Sébastien Doubinsky Advisory Editors: Ian Duncan, Thea Pitman, John Zilcosky, Julia Kuehn, Kristi Siegel, Lydia Wevers Copyright © Coldnoon 2014. Individual Works © Authors 2014. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or copied for commercial use, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent acquirer. All rights belong to the individual authors, and photographer. Copyright:
Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (Jan ’14 | 3.1) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi 110067 India www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Contents
CONTENTS
Introduction
1
Poetry
5
Six Poems – Kanchan Chatterjee Six Poems – Fern G. Z. Carr Five Poems – J. D. Isip Desperate Seeker – Gary Beck Three Poems – Ko Ko Thett Four Poems – Srajana Kaikini Three Poems – John Thieme Four Poems – Tasha Golden Five Poems – Soheb Niazi Southern Canto – K. Satchidanandan
6 14 24 32 38 45 53 59 64 71
80
Essay Socio-ecological Perspective on Walking – Marta Anna Zurawik Jewish Merchants, Wives and Widows: Mobility and Travel in the Middle Ages – Juliana Ossa Martinez Tour De Cookery: Food on the Grand Tour, or A Journey from London to Italy and Back, Through Parmezant Cheese, Garlick, and Macaroni– E. Sunny Allaire-Graham
81 99
111
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Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Contents
Trac(k)ing Identity: Naipaul’s Travel Narratives on India – Bhupen Chutia Reader, Tourist, and Psychogeography Today: A Categorical Imperative of Travel – Arup K Chatterjee
133 152
Contributors
175
Editorial Board
180
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Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Contents
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Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Introduction
INTRODUCTION
Citation: Chatterjee, Arup K. “Introduction.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.1 (2014): 1-4. Copyright:
“Introduction” (by Arup K Chatterjee) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Introduction
INTRODUCTION
Dear Reader, Reading to travel, anticipating travel, anticipating reading and pure anticipation occupy the interstices of all our lives, as they do the pages of this new issue of Coldnoon: Travel Poetics. Particularly, this one, dwells in a dialectics of the domestic and the subversive, between ennui and creation. When we talk of travel in this academic manner, we always unconsciously refer to so many histories and so many tenses of the present that we should always be wary of any form of complacency in ourselves. This advisably diverse approach to travel can broaden, and enliven our minds to a larger than life approach to things that otherwise seem to be fixed, even in spite of travelling subjects. These fixities may be accorded to tradition, languages, food cultures and even bodily sensations to given climates. However, that something occupies a greater travelogic potential in a certain sociolect cannot merely be the reason we stop to question the fixities of traditions, languages, food cultures, and even sensations, the last of which follow such a passionate flux that it is empirically indeterminable to build any more an important tradition of travel, over and against it. Travel has always been seen as the instrument of knowledge and therefore travel writing has faced severe criticism in the Post-Saidian years because much of it has sought to fabricate knowledge. In fact, today it is absolutely impossible to envision travel or its writing from outside the postcolonial paradigm. When we read about travel, and if simultaneously we are talking and feeling desire, we are never short of falling prey to the imperialistic desire of inscribing our power over the other terrain. The traveller is not merely a colonial adventurer unto his own ends, isolated from us.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Introduction
Instead we draw our psychogeographical succour, our discoveries from him. The eye of this discoverer comes to represent the reader’s eye, and his terrain marks the limits of the reader’s, as Stephen Greenblatt points out in his Marvellous Possessions: The discoverer sees only a fragment and then imagines the rest in the act of appropriation. The supplement that imagination brings to vision expands the perceptual field, encompassing the distant hills and valleys or the whole of an island or an entire continent, and the bit that has actually been seen becomes by metonymy a representation of the whole. That representation is in turn conveyed, reported to an audience elsewhere, and seeing turns into witnessing. The person who witnesses becomes the point of contact, the mediator between ‘ourselves’ and what is out there beyond our sight (122).
Or, we are guilty of our embarrassing position that we cannot travel, have never travelled, and will never be able to, like those whose works we read. Therefore, travel writing has been, since the late 1970s the most preferred text for postcolonial theory to unleash its academic vengeance upon. However, this current issue presents one more set of new perspectives whereby one need not be ever already hateful of the institution of travel but can feel enabled to embrace it as part of the daily chores of existence. Instead of the grand travel we choose to address here the seemingly more quotidian concerns of the spaces by which we abide, and provide insights into a rather topophilic appreciation of this individual space so as to preclude all imminent possibilities of spatial alienation. To write and rewrite space in order to make it a homeworthy is the purpose of travelogy. The works that follow are exercises in the celebration and the critique of this elusive idea. Editor New Delhi January, 2014
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Introduction
References Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. University of Chicago Press, 1991.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1)
POETRY
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Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Six Poems | Kanchan Chatterjee
SIX POEMS
Kanchan Chatterjee Citation: Chatterjee, Kanchan “Six Poems.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.1 (2014): 6-13. Copyright:
“Six Poems” (by Kanchan Chatterjee) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Six Poems | Kanchan Chatterjee
SIX POEMS
Kanchan Chatterjee
At About 7 pm the stoplight turns into green once more and the roaring traffic leaps out the block they’re so sure of themselves as if they’re god or something
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Six Poems | Kanchan Chatterjee
Satori she puts the car on first gets out into the open...fast this time she’s damn sure
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Six Poems | Kanchan Chatterjee
NH 33 we finished the dull dinner quietly then went up to the half-asleep man at the front desk took the keys her eyes following me all the while a few more trucks went past furiously
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Six Poems | Kanchan Chatterjee
I Know as the bus takes the left turn by the old church I look at the watch it’s 2 am the road will be uphill for a few hundred miles almost nine hundred miles down there she’s turning over her bed one more time. . . I know
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Six Poems | Kanchan Chatterjee
This Almost unnamed place, and these people sitting sleeping yawning laughing eating listening to their I-pods, watching movies in their laptops munching two days old packs of potato-chips and stale coffee inside this suffocating, cool AC compartment would never ever understand, how I felt when we’d got down to this unnamed nondescript godforsaken place that day when the sun was dipping fast and it was cold and you were shivering and you’d said
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Six Poems | Kanchan Chatterjee
‘let’s get out of this place fast’
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Six Poems | Kanchan Chatterjee
Route # 122 she brushes against my knees goes ahead, distant eyes searching for a place to sit the lady in the next seat shuffles, looks at me, whispers something to another old lady sitting next to her they both laugh softly
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Six Poems | Fern G. Z. Carr
SIX POEMS
Fern G. Z. Carr Citation: Carr, Fern G. Z “Six Poems.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.1 (2014): 14-23. Copyright:
“Six Poems” (by Fern G. Z. Carr) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Six Poems | Fern G. Z. Carr
SIX POEMS
Fern G. Z. Carr
Snapshots Submissive. Out of focus; background imagery camouflaged by misplaced arms in contrived poses snatching attention with bombastic swagger and the braggadocio of corncob rows of bleached teeth mugging behind artificially parted lips ventriloquist-like speaking in goudas, bries, emmenthals and gruyères, oblivious to our iconoclasm — our omnipresence in the travel photos of strangers.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Six Poems | Fern G. Z. Carr
Under Cerulean Skies Precursors of the Punic Wars, phallic Phoenician pillars guard the ruins at Carthage overlooking palm trees and azure waters under cerulean skies in a land where history is etched into its walkways and labyrinths of hewn stone where turkey-like birds strut amidst antiquity under cerulean skies while the neighbouring Sidi Bou Said flaunts its white buildings with blue wrought iron latticework, blue doors and blue trim under cerulean skies near a medina where muezzins summon the devout to prayer — ingress by keyhole-shaped doorways in minaret-topped mosques
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Six Poems | Fern G. Z. Carr
under cerulean skies and bazaar merchants flog their wares: trinkets, slippers, perfume, jewellery and Persian rugs woven by hijab-clad women at their looms in protective enclaves under cerulean skies where inscrutable men draw deeply on their hookahs, the smoke snaking up to the rooftop of the souk under cerulean skies where the babel below evanesces into archways and walls awash with patterned ceramic tiles — under cerulean skies resplendent in their golds, greens, whites and blues glistening in the glory of the African sun under cerulean skies
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Six Poems | Fern G. Z. Carr
in this, the land of medinas, mosques and minarets; in this, the land that is Tunisia.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Six Poems | Fern G. Z. Carr
Belugas and Dorsal Fins Taxiing away from Heathrow, airbus rolling along tarmac passing 747s with white beluga-shaped foreheads sliding by parallel rows of jets stationed beside each other hidden from view except for sleek dorsal tail fins exposed as they back out of their stalls navigating towards the runway — thoughts of belugas and dorsal fins during preparation for take-off
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Six Poems | Fern G. Z. Carr
Along for the Ride Frenetic sirens screech with a Doppler shift in pitch as they race to the crest of a hill where a parka and gloves had been walking the dog at nine in the morning oblivious to the diminished coefficient of friction between tires and icy streets when a swerving Ford Pickup no longer grabbed the road and took two lives along for the ride.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Six Poems | Fern G. Z. Carr
Driving the Coquihalla Cradled by conifers, deciduous trees cannot camouflage their fiery yellows and oranges cascading down mountain slopes. Morning sunshine teases distant mountains, crowning their stubborn, snowy crags with saintly halos as ghostly fog from a roiling cauldron in the valley below obscures patches of land and sky, suspending bits of hillside in mid-air — the sun just giggles and plays tag with the clouds shimmering in its sweat. Trees on tall toothpick trunks, some propped against each other, wait patiently as logging trucks dutifully cart bundles of timber to the mill. Man makes his presence known by telephone poles, chain link fence and guardrails protecting his fragility from the canyons below;
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Six Poems | Fern G. Z. Carr
he passes toll booths where horror stories about sudden snowfalls on “the Coke” are briefly shared. Signs warn him to watch out for wildlife too wise in the ways of the world to venture out of their camouflaged shelter; instead, construction areas are marked by orange and white-striped barrels with pylon tails that suddenly leap out onto the road known as the Coquihalla
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Six Poems | Fern G. Z. Carr
Shipwrecked
Disjointed memories — a wounded ship lists, creaking and moaning as SOS distress calls pulse into the silent deep; the nimble scramble onto life rafts cast adrift like flotsam – pinpoint specks atop a watery a b y s s, bobbing farther and farther away from an invisible shore; days melt into one another under a sun that bastes already-blistered skin and blindingly reflects an infinity of saltwater to tease parched lips; eventually flung ashore by a bored sea, most are too weak to help themselves – doomed to fall prey to the bugs and beasts waiting to feast on their withered bodies.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Five Poems | J. D. Isip
FIVE POEMS
J. D. Isip Citation: Isip, J. D. “Five Poems.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.1 (2014): 24-31. Copyright:
“Five Poems” (by J. D. Isip) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Five Poems | J. D. Isip
FIVE POEMS
J. D. Isip
Listening Night outside of Vegas, a soft desert sways in the Nevada heat and sun sets in divine purple and orange as a burning bush or blind sight God — there in slivered clouds, desperate awe of Sin City’s outsider, alone and looking to this sky for answers from above and below the land is dry and empty Why? Shouted. A question, a plea cracked against desert’s night — God black against the glitz of The Strip down the highway. Why? Again. Silence The desert’s dry floor absorbs the sweat and frustration that drips in the heat on the brow of the prodigal, laid prostrate before a God that is mute Like the kit fox and the desert brown owl that watch in wonder at the man screaming in the wind for God’s voice
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Five Poems | J. D. Isip
they had heard before he came.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Five Poems | J. D. Isip
Business Trip, San Antonio Can’t help gorging on The Alamo Buffet waffles and eggs any way you like them, hating Last Stand City and “Everything is Bigger” on every SUV, and “y’all” (creeping into my presentation voice, “Y’all, this new effin’ widget will Change your life!”). Can’t help giving in and giving up, getting lost in the elevated language of fevers “No, I’m not married (I don’t care if you are… I don’t care). Are you?” “Take your time, take away time — hours in cold jet cabins reading Widget Monthly — yeah, that’s it… Change my life!” Can’t help But stay the course, of course It’s the American way — to plod along the Riverwalk, conjure heroes holding off inevitable… Blackberry: “Widget Industries downsizing. Meeting with shareholders not good. Sorry.” Consider the dark green waters, release,
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Five Poems | J. D. Isip
a way to change this life.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Five Poems | J. D. Isip
Bat Warnings Across New Mexico, on my way to my new home, when sixteen hours of drive sunk into a blue-orange twilight and a haze of indifference, a road sign snapped its polygonal finger at me “Watch for Bats” As if the road caught my disbelief — a “city boy” wrapped in his Hyndai Elantra and a whole life of seeing the creatures safe behind glass — it threw up another sign “Watch for Bats” I did. I slowed to a 45mph crawl across clay dirt yucca, shrubs, and yellow grass content in their barrenness and the beauty of already given enough like old love letters and pressed corsages But I never saw one or a pack if that’s how they travel. The dread of the encounter was enough to imagine ever-larger wing spans and eyes in the desert dark that saw everything I missed.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Five Poems | J. D. Isip
Sandy Tells Me about Wichita Falls Driving to the end, where the main street met the tiny suburban homes, the folks next door had a small yard that hugged the corner of ours — everything touched Our house was $12,000 in 1949, a beginner start of some boy and some girl some Texas story that blooms in a place with a Main Street that runs right up to the business district — not the strip mall, long stucco-type, but the separate buildings and all of those hanging signs that somehow touch more than these thin walls that split the new dentist from the tanning salon from the insurance place that used to be a repair shop for vacuums (or was it televisions?) It all kneeled down to another $12,000 government check in 1972 and sweeping highway wings that flattened the Main to four lanes — more room to connect Town to town, road to road, everything that only touched a few years before
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Five Poems | J. D. Isip
Rijksmuseum, 2012 Cornered in one frame is a study of falling Phaethon and Icarus in various angles making the same plunge Reached because they wanted sight past horizon where wiser eyes, wiser hearts tether us to the seen Yet an ounce of god-blood or will would rather crash into the impossible than live plodding the probable Cupid, where the winding staircase ends, holds a finger to his smiling lips “This will be your master” He says of the arrows at his fingertips. Feeling like this is a picture moment, with no one to take the picture, I know Something of all the various angles of falling, why painters, and sculptors, and poets are always pocketing feathers
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Desperate Seeker | Gary Beck
DESPERATE SEEKER
Gary Beck Citation: Beck, Gary. “Desperate Seeker.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.1 (2014): 32-37. Copyright:
“Desperate Seeker” (by Gary Beck) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Desperate Seeker | Gary Beck
DESPERATE SEEKER
Gary Beck
Grown Up Abandoned parents mostly unprepared for isolation once the young depart lose purpose, leaving them unequipped for new consolation blandly awaiting death, the final resolution of insufficient choices.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Desperate Seeker | Gary Beck
Travel Time Tourists flock to New York like tourists everywhere do not care about our problems, seeking entertainment. Familiar with our culture from movies, music videos, tv, they look for celebrities, titillating violence as long as it doesn’t hurt them, any experience so they can take pictures to show folks at home.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Desperate Seeker | Gary Beck
Travel II Tourists pass through Bryant Park en route to entertainment pause to take pictures of nondescript statues of they know not who, an oasis for wanderers, a small patch of green, a brief rest from concrete.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Desperate Seeker | Gary Beck
Street People Mentally ill homeless shuffle along city streets virtual zombies lost to humanity, I know not why. The stench of abandonment insures isolation, deprived of medication thought process unravels sufficient resources to seek assistance, last traces of function minimally applied for food and shelter.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Desperate Seeker | Gary Beck
City Specters Soon-to-be ghosts walk city streets, pass invisibly the surging life around them, concealed in cast-off clothing that keeps them warm, unnoticed by those intent on destinations not awaiting the final summons.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Three Poems | Ko Ko Thett
THREE POEMS
Ko Ko Thett Citation: Thett, Ko Ko. “Three Poems.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.1 (2014): 38-44. Copyright:
“Three Poems” (by Ko Ko Thett) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Three Poems | Ko Ko Thett
THREE POEMS
Ko Ko Thett
A Few Ways to Eat a City Raw when you end up somewhere you don’t want to be eat it like a durian eat it like someone who’d puke at the mere mention of ‘durian’ you are marooned on durian island you despise both its shape and its soldier-socks stench you will wait until you can’t wait any longer eat or die, now you can be the primate you’ve always been smash open the thorny husk against a rock dig your digits deep into the succulent pulp you don’t want to look at it, you don’t want to smell it hold your breath or block your nose shove the flesh down your throat you will get used to it
when you are in transit eat it walking like you would a box of noodles it takes better psychomotor skills than piloting a jet your fingers have to know your chopsticks your feet have to know your walk
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Three Poems | Ko Ko Thett
your mouths have to know your eat you have to know your way zebra crossings, red lights, green lights, yellow lights, dogs being walked, bicycles wheezing by, policewomen, window displays, functionalist buildings, fashionable locals … only humans, and a few other species of aliens, can eat on their feet radar a bin when your sticks get close to the bottom of the box trash the empty box, walk on
when you end up in a remote location with your lover who has bought you the tickets behind your spouse’s back you know the scenario the most pleasurable trip you’ve got it gratis you cherish both the journey and the destination now you must be a slow tourist you don’t want to hurry and finish your paid annual leave you won’t share it with anyone you don’t want it gone, you don’t want it dognapped by the big bully at home you must be discreet if you fail, you’ll become an insufferable social outcast if you succeed, you’re a lifelong prisoner of your own secret
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Three Poems | Ko Ko Thett
when you aren’t sure why you are there in the first place eat it like a fish who just nibbles around, but won’t bite the bait tempting is the bloody piece of the earthworm unless you want to understand the worm’s agony you don’t want to snatch him you might as well be generous for once let others have a go first see how tightly hooked your snack is see the line, see the knot, see the float, see the sun size up the angler through the rippled shadow of his lure weight in this scenario you may be fed, but you won’t be filled
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Three Poems | Ko Ko Thett
Neue Donau (The New Danube) in the past you could have purified yourself every ten miles down the road whenever you tripped you always managed to improvise a roll-over baby titanoboas did’t need a passport until they were seventy thousand years old now you are a river for want of a bigger boat if not for your bends, you would have been the most celebrated night-crosser they’d ever known the most august tale of the rustic to the rags a fuller on a double-edged sword a snail trail down a windowpane a royal ballet soloist or a forewoman at a paper mill a twelve-hour shift en pointe work calories for maintenance calories just another pasture for leisured goats they will probe your depths and shallows they will slow your swifts they will widen your defiles don’t flinch, you must remain in your quietude they just want to make you feel home their home this, they insist, is for your own good from your black forest source to your black sea mouth they will want to know how many iron gates you’ve lowered yourself through how can you be so perfectly bruised so imperfectly youthful
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Three Poems | Ko Ko Thett
Akdeniz (The White Sea) to a worm’s eyes you are the wavy mountains of Ararat to a vulture in the sky you are a camel carcass drifting past the pillars of Heracles I get shell-shocked on your turquoise coasts I get chest-trapped by your hammam I get whip-creamed by your nazar socks I get willing-wasted on your new vieux port Marcian had no regal pretension he has been crowned by chance and chance alone Cleopatra at the temple of Hathor the wail of your children trapped in a catacomb a wreath of olive leaves for a laurel forest a piece of naïve art on a Latin skin a Stradivarius with spider silk strings she sings in the sunny key of Palermo your butchers licensed for the road your physicians licensed for the press your commanders licensed for the parliament your belly-dance skirt gathers dust your miniskirt gathers ghosts your ‘no’ sounds ‘maybe’ your ‘maybe’ sounds ‘yes’ your ‘yes’ sounds ‘no’ if there is no venom left
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Three Poems | Ko Ko Thett
departure is your ultimate weapon the fairy chimneys of Anatolia they no longer smoke
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Four Poems | Srajana Kaikini
FOUR POEMS
Srajana Kaikini Citation: Kaikini, Srajana. “Four Poems.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.1 (2014): 45-52. Copyright:
“Four Poems” (by Srajana Kaikini) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Four Poems | Srajana Kaikini
FOUR POEMS
Srajana Kaikini
Dachau The phone line from home never made it to this cold turf. Noor un Nisa Inayat Khan Stares back at me From a sepia toned photograph Printed on vinyl hard board With neat print in Arial font. The print talks about her death. A spy of the Allies, Caught and shot Dead amidst the living dead. Grey ice, cold stone, crunch and grate between my teeth. Dachau is like a tattered blanket, Full of blanks and pockets of breathless air. In the centre are two symmetric lines in the landscape. A pervert solace of trees. Long, far and standing despite their will. The house with the incinerators stands like a helpless fossil of its history. If given a choice it would go into exile. But someone made a museum of these In which they have but no option But to stay open mouthed,
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Four Poems | Srajana Kaikini
Smelling foul of ash and guilt, And face numb onlookers Just like that dream when you found yourself naked amidst a bustling crowd of kin. Naked are the walls of this little chimneyed house , Having rubbed off their scum into the garden spout in the backyard, Tired like Lady Macbeth staring at her stained hands. The house has lulled itself into somnolence Listening to the babbling brook by the garden So it wouldn’t mind this naked nightmare anymore So that sedation can help its taut nerves. The ovens lie gaping within the belly Of this desolate chimneyed house, Like deep dark wound sores, Left to fend their own conscience. The spaceship is no longer able To bear the darkness of its own shadow.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Four Poems | Srajana Kaikini
Cave travel Why name a cave after an animal? Perhaps because, You move into the cave And come out a fox, an owl, a bear, a raccoon. Somewhere between finding your way through that cave The fox-you appeared. And I turned into an owl. Now to enter a shrine, a home, a basement, a womb.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Four Poems | Srajana Kaikini
Last Hour at Marienberg Little man, Thank you for your introduction. You came here long ago, Your mother from China, Your grandfather from Java, You, a man from this land Are far away from both. Here, I am a visitor of history, There are centuries in between us. But I can assure you, My friend, That sometime once upon a time, I had a sister who must have met And shook hands with your grandmother As they both bent down in Synchronised rhythm Harvesting sugarcane Here at Marienberg. Soda bottle caps, You show me as a souvenir Of their currency. I click a picture Of your crusty palms turned towards the sky, With little metal medallions Robbed of all the clink that rang In your first love’s anklets As she sat by the mammoth steam engine That pumped the machines in this shed, Her gaze lingering on the workers turning the gears,
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Four Poems | Srajana Kaikini
Each turn, moving a cogwheel of history Each heave of the lungs, turning time and churning a hope Secret and severe, Of freedom And nostalgia. The plantation stands now a fossil, A ruin and a forest. The rail tracks are buried now. Around the lone lever that changed the tracks, Have grown two trees. Like a fork in the narrative, The train tracks stopped somewhere in the 70’s And decided to grow into these twin trees, Massive and different Yet conjoined like Siamese twins. Old man of Marienberg , You explain with a glinting eye, How this factory made sugar once. Its megalithic machines and boilers Now mere pencil diagrams in your little tattered notebook. You talk of five languages And of kite-flying as a child. It is evening, and dogs stray in. I shall look again at your crusty palms Carrying calluses from your grandmother’s hands In this last hour at Marienberg.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Four Poems | Srajana Kaikini
(Marienberg is one of the last standing sugar plantations in Suriname near the FrenchGuyana border and today stands as a ruin and testament to Suriname’s colonial past)
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Four Poems | Srajana Kaikini
Driftwood Woman in vermillion and red sings. In her satchel is the morning, rain and little green kites hopping amidst tadpoles. Bamboo and palm reeds by the walkway blur in a reasonless rhythm. Raag yaman. Tarana. Little footsteps. Anklets that ring with the water dripping from a red monsoon puddle. Moist and black, some tired soil sleeping in between silver toe-rings. Here. A honey eyed spotted dog on an armchair. See how fur shivers on her hind left leg in tune to the dream curled within her belly. Sleepily, she looks at me out of the corner of her eye. Steel plates clink. Bamboo shoots soaking in salted water Smell helpless like the last bangles breaking from a widow’s wrist. Look. Little earthworms leave a trail of exigent burrows. A minefield of miniature hopes and a truckload of red wet earth left twisted and upturned on the curb of the road that leads to my mother’s favourite place. A tree hidden amidst others. A tree that never shows itself. So enormous you can never lose sight of it and yet only lose sight of, after you have clasped it tight within your palm. One that shelters deep crevices that darken the dusk’s exit into the wings. Hear. Its leaves ringing of a fight between two sisters Who stopped to rest under this tree, While carrying driftwood from the sea to make a forest fire.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Three Poems | John Thieme
THREE POEMS
John Thieme Citation: Thieme, John. “Three Poems.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.1 (2014): 53-58. Copyright:
“Three Poems” (by John Thieme) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Three Poems | John Thieme
THREE POEMS
John Thieme
Paco’s Atlas There are many stories in the flattened maps of Paco’s Atlas: Tales of altitudes, temperatures and empires. Paco loves the undulating greens of the book’s topography, The scorching reds of its tropic heat and the glacial blues of its arctic cold, But he detests those pages that speak of wars and politics. Paco is terrorized by bold primary colours that assert possession, And maps that hide human histories of love and loss and lassitude. Paco wakes in the night, screaming at Mercator’s madness And the visions of Heaven and Hell in medieval mappae mundi. He seeks solace in Ptolemy, and ibn-Hawqal’s map of earth, With Mecca at the centre and the south on top. Paco is reassured to see spaces populated with humour And to know that west and north are neither here nor there, But anywhere one cares to put them. Paco laughs himself to sleep. Paco wakes in the morning, tetchy and tense again. He deserts his Atlas to go in search of the ultimate projection, A map of earth that is neither round nor flat, But, scratched on stone, spreads lazy rumours of watercourses, Unseen mountain passes and cryptic routes across the sea. Paco kicks up pebbles, but does not discover the stone he seeks.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Three Poems | John Thieme
He finds a boulder that shows the faded outline of a warrior’s spear, Thrusting itself into the body of an enemy, Or is this just a farmer threshing corn? Defeated in his quest, Paco goes home to his Atlas, Turning its pages with the fervour of a man condemned to hang at dusk. He shreds every section that supports the claims of other explorers; He annihilates stories of navigation, settlement and greed, Until the Atlas is slimmed down to four blank endpapers. On the temporary reprieve of this tabula rasa, Paco begins to draw his own cloth of the world, With Maseratis, toothpicks, Buddhas and eggs in the cartouche. Paco reinvents Sumatra and Mauritius in the shape of dogs; Chile becomes plump and purple, with an Atlantic coast And smiling arms that stretch towards the Bight of Benin. Paco’s Atlas recreates the earth, and the stories begin again.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Three Poems | John Thieme
The Slaughter I: Text They say that history is written by the victors, But deep in Amazonis, there lived a tribe Who won every battle, yet never learned to write. They exterminated their neighbours, Apart from a sole survivor, who escaped to Bahia. And wrote his epic, O abate. It is our only record of these events, A saga of his people’s countless victories, Written in blood red on rolled parchment scrolls. Today his manuscript is curated under glass, A prize exhibit in a national library. Copies are read in Taiwan, Tunisia and Trinidad. Os vencedores have lived to tell no tales. History is written …
II: Testimonio “Do you have your notebook — OK your keypad — Ready to record my words? It happened like this, Exactly as I am going to tell you. Listen carefully. Transcribe me accurately.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Three Poems | John Thieme
There was an ambuscade, they used dirty tricks. We were surprised from trees and bushes. They had arrows, blowpipes, cutlasses. But Macunaima favoured our cause, Knowing us to be pure in heart. He made rain to swell the rivers, And wash away their boats. We regrouped, we fought, And we won this battle, like all the others. Just one of their vermin escaped in a canoe. He disappeared forever. Did you get all that down, exactly as I said it? Tell the world, this is how it happened.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Three Poems | John Thieme
Couple Marco’s spices seduced many Christian palates in the West, But tired of telling tales about the Orient He travelled East again — to Cathay, where he’d found his second home. His mistress eased herself down on him, Silently demanding her pound of flesh. So he told her tales of an amphibious city by the Adriatic, Its rainbow fish, the hunchback bridges of Dorsoduro, And the beak-nosed boats of the thousand and two canals That wind their sinuous courses within its boggy lagoon. Satisfied at length, she uncoupled herself From his body and his stories And crossed the room, to reclaim the clothes She had strewn on the floor in her haste to meet his skin again. She turned towards the couch, where Marco dribbled on. “I am,” she said, “a credulous woman, unlike your knowing countrymen. So please take these garments to them, As proof of my nakedness when I am with you; And let them hear the stories you have told me, So they can judge both whether you possessed me And whether, like me, they too may be real. Let them wear my clothes, Marco, but first let me come again. Be silent, while I invent you as a figment of my dreams, And keep your stories for the waterfolk.”
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Four Poems | Tasha Golden
FOUR POEMS
Tasha Golden Citation: Golden, Tasha. “Four Poems.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.1 (2014): 59-63. Copyright:
“Four Poems” (by Tasha Golden) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Four Poems | Tasha Golden
FOUR POEMS
Tasha Golden
Hialeah, 1966 Pageantry and sand curled in the Hialeah coastline in the space between her toes in the lining of her panties, in her headdress. Queen Bathsheba: poor reluctant queen, her knees both bared in Florida heat, would brush the hands of boys like flies swarmed up and underneath her skirts. And every month, her blood drained like a soft, dense mea culpa: for the fever at her lips, behind the zippers of their slacks, and in their fingers. Sixteen, browned: her back arced over Psalms, she prayed to God: the God of women, God of breasts, the God of bones, the God who left her in the care of devils, Davids, boys, and men.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Four Poems | Tasha Golden
How it is After you’ve Gone. The latch clicks back at home and there is silence, and a window. It’s dark. Out between the branches streetlights. Yellow stars. And inside the refrigerator snaps into a hum: consecrated, dutiful, three minutes then a break. So that the absence of it gnaws at our ears. They weep for sound. In the window, headlights arcing. Swept again out of the frame. Of no use anymore to us — those lights, that arc. And inside there’s a shifting: muscle lifting bone. A creaking from the shoulder nearly mute, and shuffled cotton. The hum again, the window, yellow stars. The branches blacken and it’s later, and the door is still shut fast. The table’s blank — an invitation. Nothing is set down. There’s a film on our clothes, our skin, our eyes adjusting to the dark. We hold our things, scared if we set them down you’ll disappear. We dare not brush them off or brush against each other. Yellow flickers as the trees move. They make shadows. Now the hum is gone again. We’ve all been swallowing. We’re swallowing and listening. No one turns on the light.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Four Poems | Tasha Golden
Jesus the Infertile Lord, if you’d show me the rod in your left hand the sword in your right, your legs lit and manned like the gate of the sun the gate of the moon If you’d cry, enter, enter!, let anyone in, if prayers were anything but moths circling our own dim lights Then I could tell the barren and the maidens, and the men whose bellies echo with the absence of the blood and body; tell the girls who’ve only felt you moving like a serpent, felt your spirit like a speculum in the purple of their skirts I could tell them something may yet quiver up behind the heavens tell them their groping in forgotten passageways may yet yield a king
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Four Poems | Tasha Golden
A Folk Song for Politicking Two ships went to war and three will come home, three will build the summer home for bald indulgence, three will pitch a tent for kings, will finger sacred texts. Body in and body out, they’ll say, the flesh yields what it will. Two ships went to war and three will come home, three will parse the stiff bones of their countrymen, will curl their lips and make them sing. It’s how the head drops back, they’ll harmonize, that made us bite our tongues. Two ships went to war and three will come home, three will pour the drinks and come in sheets and sand and wash their hands behind the altar. Three will say, It’s what we did before, will dim the lights and close the door.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Five Poems | Soheb Niazi
FIVE POEMS
Soheb Niazi Citation: Niazi, Soheb. “Five Poems.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.1 (2014): 64-70. Copyright:
“Five Poems” (by Soheb Niazi) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Five Poems | Soheb Niazi
FIVE POEMS
Soheb Niazi
To a River time to escape, travel to escape time in a train, strange timeless rage escapes every break side lower berth lonesome traveller, is Kerouac page to page old thick spectacled grandmother pleads for a coin or two, she craves the young boys gaze, so brave to be alone already, so much unfazed across hinterlands, across plains onwards to a river, the river serene without any sun’s rays, crystal and pristine the river, a metaphor for our escape those from dry lands thirsty for some praise so that when it begins to rain it signals the setting of a dream stage swimming in drowning paddy fields
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Five Poems | Soheb Niazi
on impulse, waving past station after station, wet snack after snack, passengers ever dyingly hungry for every talk that must be ever talked for which every journey but this is short who is the lonesome traveller why is he travelling with no purpose no soul silent, numb, without words to utter unlike the blind man selling soaps who stutters lonesome traveller observes intently empty space hanging by the gate, puffing cigarettes away what if he jumps as his mind is astray eye him, tie him, cold stern long gaze, unfold fury foretold, words he scribbles in his diary untold
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Five Poems | Soheb Niazi
Betwa Retreat bliss conquered at the top of the temple rain drizzling, pouring, now bouncing off the surface plunging into holy water, across the groves the green groves across the Betwa numb and ticklish go the inner veins of my feet glasses wet with drops that leak haze formed upon every leaf cow, holy, soft sinew, idles in the temple ruin shelter across the river blue crowds as cough stricken old men grew refuge failing, falling short hands drip of rain and shiver pilgrim after pilgrim dips into chaste chill river temple after temple ruined moss that quivers retreating monsoon chants a lilting rhyme away with it blows bliss like a bird in flight away
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Five Poems | Soheb Niazi
A Honeymoon Plea (For N.Y.) dear, not to make you jealous but to share extreme loneliness at its thickest best at the banks of the Betwa — where you when younger smelt the empty civilization’s reek — the river’s mad gushing waves an inch below my feet rocks hiding me, invisible, drunk, pitch dark slowly, patiently haze forms bubbles on the surface of water no human in sight, can I dance naked all night, but for some animals some animals I might encounter on my way back the forest path to my hotel room, but you know I could stay here too, all night, if both sight and weather permit I wake up in bed, midnight or quarter to three are you asleep? in dreams it is easier to make believe dried blood on my scraped knees all these letters I write furiously to you on a spree are invitations without a stamp or an expiry lease my pen’s ink is betraying me, be quick be free, be ready in time for next to flee
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Five Poems | Soheb Niazi
Carved In Stone I missed the train to Khajuraho missing sex carved eroticism in stone like always in anxiety, whether skin or bone I took the train back from Gwalior taking unnecessary deep thought out detours like always in denial, if only time could soak some more tucked in comfortable bed sheets now, I write of the family I assume to be migrating to unreserved uncomfortable shores sweeping off as a sepia tone, out to be bought for a lucrative lore I have been told, time and again, for time and again it had to be, but I do remember now “you must take an idea and guide it through, time and again, be the fuck you be, a cobbler, a king or a peasant queen but in entirety, be the truest fuck that is yet to be seen” oh how I missed the train to Khajuraho missing the Mexican lady I lost at the station too like always ever lurking, whether back or forth oh how I took the train back from Gwalior taking lust as lying filth on the floor like always mistaken, if only signs would reappear once more
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) Five Poems | Soheb Niazi
Overlooking Orchha off season tourism spilled calm after storm messy rain filth clinging like thickened glue flushing all the blue under the river anew light shade lamps atop the temple glowed thick black clouds torn were ready to sew finally the sun glistens off the river gleam tree silhouettes floating disjointed upstream temples still stand still backdrop screen wind beckons winter with wide embraced arms an island between two rivers; solitude spent in charm
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) The Southern Canto | K. Satchidanandan
THE SOUTHERN CANTO
K. Satchidanandan Citation: Satchidanandan, K. “The Southern Canto.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.1 (2014): 71-79. Copyright:
“The Southern Canto” (by K. Satchidanandan) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) The Southern Canto | K. Satchidanandan
THE SOUTHERN CANTO
K. Satchidanandan
Congo-Congo (For Gabriel Okoundji, poet from Congo) From the forest of metaphors, crossing the river of images, turning his body into a sky with his starry spots, with the tempest’s long strides, his gaze trained on his prey, his clan’s striped memories on his tail, the roar of the wild fire inside his entrails and the vow of steel in his heart comes Congo’s poetry.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) The Southern Canto | K. Satchidanandan
The Walk (For Tenure Ojaide, poet from Nigeria) Walking together we take the turn, and there he comes on horseback, Simon Bolivar. Not different from his pictures: a warrior by birth. ‘No motherland is final’, he said, ‘Borders keep getting redrawn. Guevera knew this too. But human beings have a common motherland: Liberty.’ Turning back he again became a statue and stood, his eyes on the far horizon, at the centre of the park: when someone was filing at the prison-bars in darkness.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) The Southern Canto | K. Satchidanandan
The Tree (For Thiago de Mello) While winding up the mountain path to Tittiribi, a tree with a long grey beard: like the archetype of all trees. Its seed was carried from Heaven in a meteor. Earth’s first bird flew it from the peak to this valley. It put up shoots and grew, drenched In the primal rains, along with the planet’s saga, witness to the first mammal, the first human being. This prophet is not yet deaf. It can already hear the sound of the earth born of water burn down in fire, like the crackling and the sizzle we hear from a funeral pyre.
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First Published in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics (International Journal of Travel Writing) ISSN 2278-9642 | E-ISSN 2278-9650 | www.coldnoon.com
Jan ’14 | 3(1) The Southern Canto | K. Satchidanandan
The Malayali Mass for Gabo1 (For Fernando Rendon) O, Lord of open veins, The one who lifts up the woman doing the laundry straight to Heaven, and lets the rainstorm drop the aged angel with enormous wings to earth in a rainstorm, guardian of dead women with growing hair, flying Martha’s god, the anti-Shiva with the Tarantula with a woman’s head for his vehicle, we Malayalis, your devotees drenched and blossomed in Macondo’s monsoon, forget for a while our caste, our religion and our political parties so dear to us to pray en masse: Let the magic of all your tales together cure your fatal illness and redeem you of amnesia! We who are certain Kerala is derived from Comala, who instead of just salt add Neruda’s Ode to Salt to our curry, who chant in one breath BorgesLlosaAmadoCortazarBolano when thunder and lightning scare us, who sell our carpets to buy a Carpentier, 1 Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The references are to his works and to his contemporaries in Latin America.
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) The Southern Canto | K. Satchidanandan
we who have come from the rivers we have sucked dry of sand, from the forests we have felled to the last tree, from the sliding lands and eroding soil, from the stark nakedness of mirrors and of the facebook, from the Spanish evenings of the bars that we throng in one mind setting aside our greed for gold and woman, from the dawns of the blogs that turn crow’s quills into peacock feathers, to pray as a single body with many heads and limbs: for your safe return from your refuge in the land of Sunstone and Inca gods, for your new novel that they say , you have written, not yet written and may never write. Till then, dear Gabo, our flags will be flowers, our polemics prayers and our slogans magic chants. This is our vow, our vow, our vow.
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) The Southern Canto | K. Satchidanandan
Dancing in Odessa (To Ilya Kaminsky, Russian poet in Exile in the US) Meet Ilya Kaminsky: the one who dances in sleep, travels through language without overturning any memory like the blind man running along rooms without disturbing the furniture, one who, being deaf, can see voices, who counted the doves on his courtyard, dialled the number on the telephone and declared his love to the ear on the other side. His aunt wrote odes to barbershops. His grandpa who used to take the clouds’ census with tomatoes in his coat pockets was shot dead by the army as he danced naked on the table. His gran’ma was raped by the public prosecutor who inserted a pen in her vagina and sentenced a whole land to life-imprisonment. This man has seen a school crying in 347 voices, seen a house burn in every laugh of the dictator, seen the blood of innocents spread on the whole of Russian language. No wonder he loves Paul Celan And Osip Mandelstam
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Now he is inventing a new language for refugees, a new kind of silence, as he is no Mayakovsky.
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) The Southern Canto | K. Satchidanandan
The Obese (To Fernando Botero, Scuptor and painter) There is space for one question to pass between your obese men and angels. And space for one answer to sit Between your woman under the banana tree and your soldier on the roof top. I can hear Modigliani pleading with you for the lean. and you reply: The reason for some being obese and some, lean needs not necessarily be class; it can well be the eyes of the beholder. His fluidity questions your solidity, Still your rotund bodies love his lean hands. There is space for the obese too on earth, for a little while more
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Jan ’14 | 3(1)
ESSAY
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) Socio-ecological Perspective on Walking | Marta Anna Zurawik
SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON WALKING
Marta Anna Zurawik Citation: Zurawik, Marta Anna. “Socio-ecological Perspective on Walking.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.1 (2014): 81-98. Abstract: Walking is the most common form of physical activity. It is inexpensive, safe, accessible and sociable activity. It does not require specialist skills or equipment and can be performed at any time and in various environments: urban and rural. The concept of walking is complex as the activity can be viewed from various perspectives. This piece introduces a notion of walking associated with physical, social and cultural environments and ideologies we live by which influence our decisions to walk. The paper begins with a brief description of importance of walking in people’s social and cultural lives. Next, it presents a brief history of walking by drawing attention to the changes in human lifestyles throughout centuries, which have led to decline of total daily physical activity levels including walking. Subsequently, the socioecological model of health behaviour and physical activity is explored. The premises of the socio- ecological perspective offer an insight into personal, social and environmental determinants that contribute or prevent participation in walking. The barriers to walking are linked to the concept of “hierarchy of walking needs,” which determine individual engagement in walking behaviour. According to the socio-ecological perspective and hierarchy of walking needs, walking practice does not depend only on individual beliefs and attitudes; it also depends on characteristics of local environment, social context and relationships. The piece concludes with presenting body of research which use socio-ecological perspectives to prove that walking behaviour is influenced by individual, social, physical and policy environments. Furthermore, the combination of all those factors impacts likelihood of individual regular participation in walking. Keywords: Walking, Socio-ecological perspective, History of walking, Walking environments.
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“Socio-ecological Perspective on Walking” (by Marta Anna Zurawik) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON WALKING
Marta Anna Zurawik
alking is the nearest activity to perfect exercise (Morris, Hardman 1997, Tolley 2003) as it is effortless and simple for healthy humans. It is the most common form of a daily activity ideal for everyone and can be regularly undertaken, intentionally, when walking for leisure or not when playing golf or shopping. However, walking as an activity is hardly noticeable, mainly because it is very easily performed. The concept of walking is complex as the activity can be viewed from many perspectives. From a physiological standpoint, walking is an aerobic exercise that uses large muscle-groups, it is a weight-bearing and can be practiced at various intensity levels (Tolley). From a sociological point of view, Mike Oliver regards walking not only as a capacity of biological organism. It is a rule-following behaviour, a system of communication which is specific and unique for everyone. In other words, walking is a biological experience for people to move around but also a way of displaying and communicating various moral, gendered, sexual, age, ethnic and subcultural identities (Green, 2009). Walking-education starts very early and never ends. “(…) we work toward being active from birth, learning how to sit up, to crawl, to walk, and then, for most people, to be active in (a) range of ways” (Tolley, 402). Throughout life, people practice different types of walking appropriate for various social and cultural circumstances. Walking patterns are also regulated by time and characteristics of particular spaces. People walk differently in busy streets, shopping-malls, parks, beaches and in various times of day, weather or
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season. Good examples of how walking rhythm depends on place and time are daily routines: people rush to work, children hurry to school, women surge in shops and elderly either stroll leisurely or wander slowly around towns.
A Brief History of Walking Human bodies have evolved in order to live a physically active life. From the prehistoric era people led nomadic lifestyles as hunters and gatherers, in which the only way to survive was walking for food and shelter. This particular active lifestyle required a high total energy expenditure and high level of exertion to which human bodies were adapted by having “abundance of muscle fibres with high oxygen capacity, and little body hair and numerous sweat glands to allow efficient dissipation of heat from the body” (Blair, Brill et al., 25). 10,000 years ago people began to settle in relatively more fecund geographic areas, develop agriculture, domesticate animals and grow plants. This settled lifestyle provided regular food supply and with further consequences, enabled to establish towns and cities. The early agriculturalists still were physically active, as most of the power needed for manufacturing and farming was supplied by humans and animals. However, due to development of a more sedentary lifestyle, walking was no longer the main daily physical activity. Major changes in society took place during the Industrial Revolution, in the 18th century, when the steam engine was developed. This invention instantly helped to supply energy for manufacturing and transportation as engines increased the capacity of production, and caused a dramatic drop in the levels of physical exertion across populations. With further advances in means of transport, labour-saving devices at work and home, and the increase of urbanisation, the active lifestyle, which involved walking, spectacularly decreased in favour of sedentary behaviours. During the industrial period (1800-1945), the levels of physical activity, including walking, continued decreasing in populations in the developed societies. After World War II, scientific and technological progress has been even faster and more extensive, what further induced physical inactivity. Nowadays, in industrialized societies, people lead inactive lifestyles,
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in which high levels of job-related exertion has almost disappeared due to machines performing the work. Labour-saving devices are everywhere and have changed work-lives, home activities and people’s lifestyles forever (Gauvin, Wall et al.). In present times, western societies, on an average, live over 70 years, which is double of the life expectancy in pre-industrial times, and medical statistics claim that the modern populations’ health and lifespan are superior to any previous societies. However, the sudden change in lifestyle from active to sedentary, where food is easily available and the car is the dominant mode of transport, is responsible for the hypokinetic diseases or health problems related to inactive behaviours, such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, coronary heart disease, low back pain and some types of cancer (Biddle, Mutrie ; Tolley).
Walking as a Social Activity Walking is one of the primary examples of activity by which society educates individuals in physical movement to become a part of the social group. Walking education starts very early and most children are able to walk by the first 12 months. Since the minute people start walking, intentionally or not, they devote all life to practice and master different modes of it, appropriating it for various social and cultural circumstances, as walking is undeniably a social and cultural activity which is learned, regulated, stylized; it is communicative and productive of culturally oriented experiences (Edensor). Walking is embedded in cultural norms, habits and conventions which regulate social life, time and space (ibid). The walking “dressage” regulates its rhythms and paces so that people can walk properly according to social and cultural circumstances. Furthermore, through walking people indicate their social and cultural identities, and more importantly the positions or rankings in the society, and the network of relations which can be noticed within particular environments such as schools, hospitals, army and sub-cultured groups (Green). The rhythms and styles of walking vary from non-competitive and sociability modes such as sauntering, ambling, strolling, plodding,
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promenading, wandering and roaming to competitive, strenuous modes associated with sports, such as marching, trail-walking, trekking, hiking, hillwalking, yomping and peak-bagging (Edensor). Walking as a non-competitive mode is often chosen as a leisure-time physical activity. Leisure walking is a goal itself — the experience of consciousness and a slower, more relaxed way of life. Walkers, such as ramblers and pilgrims enjoy the experience of moving outdoors in attractive environments to achieve healthy physical and spiritual sensations (Green). The pleasure of walking is the main reason why the popularity of leisure walks appear to be growing as the number of British walks increased by 10% between 2006 and 2008 (Ramblers' Association, 2010).
Socio-Ecological Perspective The word ecology originated in biological science and refers to the interactions between organisms and their environments (Sallis, Owen et al., 2008) . Those ecological analyses of relationships between plant and animal populations and their natural habitats were later extended to the study of human communities and environments within the fields of sociology, psychology and public health. Explorations of the correlation between humans and their environments introduced the concept of social ecology in mid 1960s and early 1970s. Social ecology brought an attention to the social, institutional and cultural contexts of people — environment relations (Stokols, 1996). It also integrated person-focused effort to modify persons’ health behaviour with environment-focused interventions to enhance their physical and social surroundings (ibid) and reduce serious and prevalent health problems (Sallis, Owen et al. 2008) . Since 1970s there has been an increasing interest in ecological perspectives due to their comprehensive approaches for understanding multiple and interacting determinants of health behaviours, including physical-activity behaviour. The socio-ecological model has been developed by many researchers for instance; McLeroy created an ecological model of health behaviour that demonstrated multiple levels of influences: intrapersonal (knowledge, attitudes, beliefs), interpersonal (family, friends,
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peers), institutional (rules, regulations, informal structures), community (formal and informal social networks, norms and standards) and policy (laws that regulate or support healthy actions); these are independent (Spence, Lee), however they interact across the levels to achieve positive changes in health behaviours. (Eddy, Donahue et al.; McLeroy, Bibeau et al.; King, Stokols et al. 2002).
Policy
Community
Institutional
Interpersonal
Intrapersonal
Fig I: Ecological model of health behaviour. Adapted from Mc Leroy (1988)
Intrapersonal factors explore the personal characteristics which influence health behaviour. They were adapted from social cognitive theories such as the health belief model, the Fishbein theory of reasoned actions, social learning theories, attribution theories, models of decision making and others. Interpersonal factors include relationship with family, friends, neighbours, and contacts at school and work which are essential aspects of social identity and health related decisions. They provide emotional support, information and
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assistance in fulfilling social responsibilities and health related changes. Organizational factors influence changes in health behaviour since they provide economic and social resources through work groups, socialization and organizational cultures people exist in. Community level shapes personal social and cultural identity. Communities, which people live in, provide emotional support and assistance in fulfilling social responsibilities and health related changes. The last level of influences is policy which includes public awareness about health issues. Public advocacy engages people into participating in political processes through voting, lobbying and monitoring the implementation of health policies. Policy analysis includes providing policy makers, general public and target populations with policy options, and promoting public input into policy making process (McLeroy, Bibeau et al.) Based on McLeory’s socio-ecological model of health behaviour, Stokols created a social-ecological model of health promotion which integrates many concepts derived from systems theory to understand dynamics and mutual influences between individuals and their environments. In other words, our health decisions are influenced by multiple factors of physical and social environment as well as personal attributes and behavioural patterns. The socio-ecological model of health promotion provides deeper understanding of the complexity of human environments which can be described as having actual (objective) and subjective (perceived) qualities. Furthermore, environments are characterised as set of individual attributes or combination of individual features (Stokols).
Socio-Ecological Perspective on Physical Activity and Walking Research has recognised the importance of environmental influences on physical activity (McLeroy, Bibeau et al.; Stokols; Darker, Larkin et al.). Stokols’ socio-ecological model helps to identify opportunities to promote
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participation in physical activity by recognising multiple factors that influence its promotion or create barriers for individual engagement in physical activity, including walking. The socio-ecological framework provides the structure to understand how those factors affect leisure-walking behaviour (Zurawik) as it offers a comprehensive theoretical explanation or dynamic interactions between personal, behavioural and environmental correlations (Stokols; Stokols; Alfonzo; Moudon, Lee et al.). The prime role in determining levels of physical activity plays as personal, social and environmental factors (Cerin, Leslie et al.). Within the socioecological framework many studies have focused on individual attributes which influence walking behaviour: personality has a strong influence on participation in physical activity as extraversion and conscientiousness are positively correlated with physical activity (Rhodes, Brown et al. 2006; McEachan, Sutton et al.; Rhodes, Courneya et al. 2007). Furthermore, age (Sport England, 2011; Ramblers' Association, 2010; Kavanagh, Bentley), income (Edwards, Day; Rhodes, Courneya et al. 2007; Green; Kitchen, Williams et al.; Blacklock, Rhodes et al.), and gender (Agrawal, Schimek) are strongly associated with walking behaviour: many people from low income groups walk more for transportation than leisure; women, negatively associated with leisure walking, however spend considerably more time walking than men which is associated with other, mostly domestic works and responsibilities. On the other hand men’s walking increases with age and by 65 years men are tend to walk more than women. Walking behaviour is also influenced by physical and social environment. Leisure walking is associated with aesthetical character of natural and built environment, convenience, accessibility and safety (Hovell, Hofstetter et al. 1992; Hovell, Sallis et al. 1989; Ball, Timperio et al.; Giles-Corti, Donovan 2002; Humpel, Owen et al. 2004; Owen, Humpel et al. 2004; Addy, Wilson et al. 2004, Granner, Sharpe et al.; Saelens, Handy; Stokols). Adults are more likely to become active and maintain active lifestyle if they have an adequate social support as well as opportunity to interact and communicate with others (Cerin, Leslie et al.; Caperchione, Mummery et al.). Policy level positively influences participation
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in physical activity by creating and managing many health programmes and movements on both national and local levels. The socio-ecological approach was recognized and utilised in many national and international policies and strategies. The approach was first advocated in Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (WHO, 1986) . The charter recognizes the influence of individual, social, economic and environmental factors in physical activity, health and well-being and different opportunities for interventions on individual and community levels. Consequently, the socio-ecological approach was promoted by WHO in “Health for All” (WHO, 1998) initiative.
Policy
Physical Environ‐ment
Social Environ‐ ment
Individual attributes
Fig. II: The socio-ecological model. Adapted from Stokols (1996)
The socio-ecological framework also demonstrates barriers which prevent engaging in walking behaviour, as human behaviour is a product of dynamic personal, behavioural and environmental interactions. Individuals adapt or vary their behaviour or characteristics in response to available or changing influences in the environment which may create conditions that are
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favourable for some individuals, and less favourable for others (Spence, Lee). These barriers are linked to the concept of “walking needs,” which are presented in Fig II. The hierarchy of walking needs is based on Maslow’s motivational theory and organizes needs into five levels of prominence (Maslow; Alfonzo) — feasibility, accessibility, safety, comfort and pleasurability.
PLEASURABILITY URBAN FORMS COMFORT
SAFETY
ACCESSIBILITY LIMITS
FEASIBILITY
Fig III: Hierarchy of walking needs. (Adapted from Alfonzo M, 2005)
Feasibility is the most basic level of needs within the hierarchy and refers to the viability of walking. At this level lack of enjoyment, lack of time, poor health, occupational duties, low income and self-efficiency (Cerin, Leslie et al.) may prevent engagements in the walking activity. Accessibility refers to patterns, quantity, quality, and variety. It considers presence of pavements, paths, trails or barriers (ibid). Individuals’ safety levels vary and depend on urban forms and presence of certain threatening groups or individuals. Comfort is THE next level of need and it refers to individual convenience and happiness.
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Satisfaction with walking may be affected by environmental qualities that make the exercise more comfortable and less distressing. Pleasurability refers to diversity, complexity, liveliness and aesthetic appeal that environments provide, with regard to walking experience (Saelens, Handy; Addy, Wilson et al.; Granner, Sharpe et al.; Owen, Humpel et al. 2004). It is worth noticing that in this hierarchical structure, the higher needs are not to be satisfied if the basic needs are not met. However, the levels of needs in the hierarchy might not always proceed in the correct order, or the order might be reversed for some levels, for example when people are deprived of the need for long time, they might exclude it from hierarchy and satisfy the higher needs. Besides, walking might be motivated by several needs from different levels of hierarchy (Alfonzo). According to the socio-ecological perspective and hierarchy of walking needs, engaging in walking does not depend only on individual beliefs and attitudes; it also depends on characteristics of the local environment, the social context, and social relationships. There is a body of growing body of evidence on correlations between physical activity including walking and social and physical environments. Several research studies acknowledged the importance of natural environment in individual’s decision to be physically active and the fact that various weather characteristics may affect outdoor activity levels. For example, heat and humidity interfere with body’s natural cooling process and increases the risk of dehydration, heat exhaustion and heat stroke. On the other hand, cold weather causes construction of surfaces blood vessels which elevates blood pressure, causing more strain on the heart and decreased muscle power. Moreover, precipitation, wind, and a number of daylight hours are often weather related environmental factors that may affect physical activity. Moreover, the frequency and duration of leisure time physical activity decreases during winter months compared to warmer months due to changes in monthly temperature, daylight and precipitation. The degree of area hilliness affects outdoor activity by increasing intensity of physical activity, which leads to avoidance of walking, jogging and cycling in those areas (McGinn, Evenson et al.).
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Corti and Donovan (2002) examined environmental and individual determinants of physical activity in Western Australia. The study results suggested that access to supportive physical environment is necessary but may be an insufficient determinant to increase levels of physical activity, as complex strategies are required to influence both individual and social environmental factors to enhance recreational physical activity in communities. Several studies found strong positive correlations, since friend and family support have been found to influence participation in physical activity across wide range of populations (Stahl, Rutten et al.; Granner, Sharpe et al.). By contrast, lack of social support from family and friends is associated with lower levels of physical activity especially for women (Stahl, Rutten et al.). These findings suggest that promotion of physical activity needs to focus on making activity more socially accepted among wider population groups.
Conclusion Walking is a part of everyday life and every person creates their own styles and paces according to their roles and positions in society. However, walking does not only depend on personal attitudes and motives; it is associated with networks of social groups people live in and their local environments. The socio-ecological perspective is very popular approach among researches and offers a comprehensive theoretical background for leisure studies. Socioecological perspectives together with the theory of human motivation, suggest that psychological, sociological and cultural attributes towards walking and environmental characteristics encourage people to engage in walking behaviour. A key strength of the socio-ecological perspective is a focus on multiple levels of influences on health decisions on the other hand the lack of specification about the most important influences may be considered as a weakness for some. Nevertheless, the socio- ecological model is not to demonstrate the supremacy of some influences over others; it is to show the
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balanced relationship between those influences and the interactions between the parameters that govern the ideologies of the walk.
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McGinn, Aileen, et al. “The Relationship between Leisure, Walking, and Transportation Activity with the Natural Environment.” Health & Place 13.3 (2007): 588-602. McLeroy, Kenneth, et al. “An Ecological Perspective on Health Promotion Programs.” Health Education Quarterly 15.4 (1988): 351-77. Morris, J. N., and A. E. Hardman. “Walking to Health.” Sports Medicine 23.5 (1997): 306-32. Moudon, Anne Vernez, et al. “Attributes of Environments Supporting Walking.” American Journal of Health Promotion 21.5 (2007): 448-59. Oliver, M. J. “What's Wonderful about Walking? Inaugural Professorial Lecture.” University of Greenwich, 1993. Owen, Neville, et al. “Understanding Environmental Influences on Walking: Review and Research Agenda.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 27.1 (2004): 6776. Ramblers' Association. Walking Facts and Figures 2: Participation in Walking. Ramblers' Association, 2010. Rhodes, Ryan, Shane Brown, and Carolyn McIntyre. “Integrating the Perceived Neighborhood Environment and the Theory of Planned Behavior when Predicting Walking in a Canadian Adult Sample.” American Journal of Health Promotion 21.2 (2006): 110-18. Rhodes, Ryan, et al. “Prediction of Leisure-Time Walking: An Integration of Social Cognitive, Perceived Environmental, and Personality Factors.” International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity 4 (2007): 51. Saelens, Brian, and Susan Handy. “Built Environment Correlates of Walking: A Review.” Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 40.7 (2008): 550-66. Sallis, James, Neville Owen, and Edwin Fisher. “Ecological Models of Health Behavior.” Health Behavior and Health Education: Theory, Research, and Practice. Eds. Karen Glanz, Barbara Rimer, and Kasisomayajula Viswanath. 4, illustrated ed.John Wiley & Sons, 2008. 245-85. Spence, John, and Rebecca Lee. “Toward a Comprehensive Model of Physical Activity.” Psychology of Sport and Exercise 4.1 (2003): 7-24. Sport England. 3x30 Sports Participation Indicator. Active People Survey 5 Vol. , 2011. Stahl, T., et al. “The Importance of the Social Environment for Physically Active Lifestyle - Results from an International Study.” Social Science and Medicine 52.1 (2001): 1-10.
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Stokols, Daniel. “Establishing and Maintaining Healthy Environments: Toward a Social Ecology of Health Promotion.” American Psychologist 47.1 (1992): 6-22.
–––,“Translating Social Ecological Theory into Guidelines for Community Health Promotion.” American Journal of Health Promotion 10.4 (1996): 282-98. Tolley, Rodney. Sustainable Transport : Planning for Walking and Cycling in Urban Environments. Cambridge: Woodhead, 2003. WHO. Health 21: An Introduction to the Health for all Policy Framework for the WHO European Region. European Health for All Series; No. 5 Vol. World Health Organisation, 1998.
–––,Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion. WHO/HPR/HEP/95.1 Vol. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization, 1986. Zurawik, M. “Nordic Walking and Well-being of Senior Walkers”. Salford postgraduate annual research conference (SPARC) 2012 proceedings. May 2012.
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) Mobility and Travel in the Middle Ages | Juliana Ossa Martinez
JEWISH MERCHANTS, WIVES AND WIDOWS: MOBILITY AND TRAVEL IN THE MIDDLE AGES Juliana Ossa Martinez Citation: Martinez, Juliana Ossa. “Jewish Merchants, Wives and Widows: Mobility and Travel in the Middle Ages.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.1 (2014): 99-110. Abstract: Human mobility has led to the production and reproduction of new identities, ideologies, practices and languages, and therefore, travel and mobility constitute rich fields of study for scholars concerned with the history and evolution humanity. The Jews have traveled around the world as pilgrims, nomads, settlers, fugitives, merchants, teachers and conquerors. Even in circumstances of forced migration, travel and mobility have enabled the transmission and survival of Jewish cultural and religious values. With this in mind, this paper explores the situation of Jewish women in Christian Europe and the Muslim world, paying special attention to the ways in which dynamics of displacement affected their daily lives during the middle ages. Most of the information about Jewish life in the Muslim world and the Mediterranean during this period comes from letters, court records, contracts and other legal documents from the Cairo Geniza. Likewise, rabbinical responsa literature provides information about the lives of Jewish women in northern Europe. The content of these documents proves that in both contexts Jewish women were highly mobile, and provide the reasons for their travels, marriage and business being the most popular ones. In spite of being written by men, these documents attest to situations that had a direct impact on the lives of Jewish women. Thus, in the absence of primary sources produced by women, this paper shows that the study female travel is a lens through which the history of women can be observed. Keywords: Jewish travel, Medieval travel, Cairo Geniza, Rabbinical responsa, Female travel, Jewish capitalism, Exile.
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Copyright:
“Jewish Merchants, Wives and Widows: Mobility and Travel in the Middle Ages” (by Juliana Ossa Martinez) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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JEWISH MERCHANTS, WIVES AND WIDOWS: MOBILITY AND TRAVEL IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Juliana Ossa Martinez
eographical movement stands at the core of the origins and evolution of our species. In the same way, it is central in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim versions of human origins. Soon after God creates the first human, he is banished from the Garden of Eden: The Lord banished him from the Garden of Eden, to till the soil from which he was taken. He drove the man (and woman) out, and stationed east of the Garden of Eden the cherubim and the fiery ever-turning sword, to guard the way to the tree of life (Genesis 3:23-24, Sarna, 30).
As members of the human species, we are the product of our ancestors’ migrations. Through the study of travel, researchers are able to observe the history of humanity. Human mobility has led to the production and reproduction of new identities, ideologies, practices and languages contributing to their transformation and enabling their transportation. It has also been a key aspect in the development of economic-systems, facilitating the flourishing of certain societies while destroying entire civilizations of others. An example of this is the “discovery” of the New World and the relation of this event to the development of an Industrial European society. In short, travel and movement have shaped civilizations and for this reason, their study is substantial to the understanding of the past and of the present.
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The Jews have traveled around the world under many different circumstances: as pilgrims, as nomads, as settlers, as fugitives and as conquerors. They have been in exile and they have colonized lands. They have transported goods as merchants, and knowledge as scholars (Adler, ix). Further, migration and mobility, even when forced, has enabled the survival of the Jewish people. With this in mind, this paper will explore the situation of Jewish women in the middle ages, in the Muslim world and in Christian Europe, paying special attention travel and mobility and the ways in which these shaped their daily lives. The High Middle Ages (969-1250) was a period of “profound and lasting changes in the Mediterranean scene…of relatively free trade, of growing activities of exchange between the nations and of the prominence of a mercantile middle class” (Goiten, 1978: 29). Most of the evidence about Jewish life in the Muslim world during this period comes from primary documents from the Cairo Geniza. A geniza is a storeroom where unusable sacred writings are placed in order to preserve them from desecration. The Cairo Geniza is an archive that in addition to discarded writings, on which the name of God was or might have been written, stored hundreds of documents of a secular nature. The contents of the geniza comprise business and private letters, court records, contracts and other legal documents (Goiten, 1973: 3). Correspondence between members of Jewish communities and religious authorities, and between family members and business partners, narrate the events and anxieties of everyday life. In this sense, these documents are invaluable resources for historians and scholars of the past to create a picture of Jewish life in the Medieval Mediterranean. Since short and long distance travel was very common in this context, the contents of the Cairo Geniza provide great insight about the importance of geographical movement in the economic, religious and domestic spheres of Jewish life. The documents “come from almost every country of the IslamicJewish world; most are written in Arabic, the language of Jewish everyday life in this milieu, although texts in Hebrew, Persian, Spanish, Greek and Yiddish also survive. Regardless of their language, virtually all of these texts are written in Hebrew letters” (Baskin, 1998: 102-03). Not only do they reflect that Jewish
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) Mobility and Travel in the Middle Ages | Juliana Ossa Martinez
men from different corners of the world traveled frequently and were often absent for long periods of time; they also reveal that male travel was often a source of discomfort and anxiety for Jewish women. The frequency with which medieval men traveled, and the distress it caused for their wives is best observed in marriage contracts where specific clauses determined the duration of a husband’s absence and/or what to do if he failed to return. Their responsibilities with their wives and their homes while gone on business trips were also stipulated. In this sense, marriage contracts serve as valuable sources that provide insight about male travel and its effects on the lives of Jewish women. The contents of the geniza also convey the different circumstances under which women traveled. Marriage contracts, written accounts by contemporaneous authors, and documents where legal and economic transactions were recorded, provide a record of women’s experience in the middle ages. Letters and pledges speak of impoverished widows who often moved from one place to another seeking charity from members of Jewish communities. Moreover, certain clauses stipulated in marriage contracts indicate that betrothal and marriage were often motives for women’s mobility. Yet, most of this evidence provides male understandings of the female world and therefore, scholars must be careful to treat them as such. Apart from a very few poems, there are no surviving written works by Jewish women during this period (Avraham, 3). Thus, first hand evidence about women’s feelings and experiences, in this context, still remains almost entirely inaccessible to contemporary scholars. Consequently, any claim about what we know with regards to the world of Jewish women in the middle ages, shall not be treated as an absolute truth, but as a partial picture that is still in the process of being developed. The Babylonian Talmud, which was completed and codified in Iraq in the middle of 6th century C. E., provided the model of life to be followed by Jews and included the normative framework for women’s appropriate behavior. Further, local traditions influenced their status and freedom of individuals creating different realities for Jewish women around the world. They were instructed in domestic activities such as sewing, spinning, weaving
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) Mobility and Travel in the Middle Ages | Juliana Ossa Martinez
and cooking as well as they were expected to marry into prestigious or suitable families. Religious scholarship and a knowledge of the Torah were regarded as markers of social status and prestige: “a learned middle class merchant — a rather common phenomenon — ranked as high in society as a rich and powerful supplier of the court” (Goiten, 1978: 9). This was true in the Muslim world, where there were Jewish communities in Egypt, North Africa, the Middle East and Spain, and in Christian Europe, particularly France and Germany, where Jewish populations were smaller (Baskin, 1998: 101). However, female responsibilities were not confined to the roles of women as mothers and wives. Jewish women were “expected to engage in some work in addition to their household chores” (Goiten, 1978: 127). The involvement of women in economic activities is revealed in clauses of marriage contracts that stipulate whether the money earned by their work was to be enjoyed by the wife alone, or allotted to cover household expenses. In the Muslim world, women were often employed as bride combers, professional wailers, midwives and doctors. They had an active role in the textile industry and were responsible for passing on female knowledge to the next generation. Further, while men were active in the production of goods used by women, female brokers were responsible for selling them. Since common norms stated that women’s place was inside the home, their presence in the bazaar or market was regarded with disdain. This gave a role to brokers, who visited different houses collecting and distributing goods from the hands of one woman to another (ibid, 127-29). Contrary to the spirit of relative liberalism and religious toleration of the Fatimid Empire during the 11th and 12th Centuries (Goiten, 1978: 29), the lives of Ashkenazi Jews in Christian Europe were affected by the spirit of the Crusades. By the end of the 11th century in some areas of Europe, Jews began to be barred from virtually any source of livelihood except for money-lending. They were compelled to wear distinctive clothing and badges, and ultimately, towards the end of the middle ages, they were either expelled from where they had longed lived, or forced to live in crowded and unpleasant ghettoes (Baskin, 1998: 109). But, despite living in adverse circumstances, in some areas of Christian Europe, Jews were able to establish autonomous communities:
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) Mobility and Travel in the Middle Ages | Juliana Ossa Martinez
on the main route leading north from the cities of Italy, through the Mosel valley to Mainz and Trier and from there to central France, and north to the Loire and Seine valleys. They also settled along the route that connects the Rhine valley with the Pyrenees, in the direction to Spain: Verdun, Rheims, Meaux, Paris, Orleans, Poitiers and Bordeaux (…) Jewish settlements were also found in relatively small towns located at important crossroads in agricultural areas” (Goldin, 7).
Women from Jewish communities in Christian Europe enjoyed relatively more freedom of movement than those in the Muslim world, where they were expected to limit their activities to the confines of their homes. In contrast, in Christian Europe they were allowed to work outside their homes and to engage in economic endeavors. Like Christian women, some Jewish women achieved literacy and financial skills, and there was no suppression of these activities by the larger community. Aristocratic Jewish women enjoyed great authority and influence in their households and communities. Whether their husbands were absent for prolonged periods or not, they remained in charge of the family businesses (Grossman, 114). In contrast, in the Muslim world, they were passed down to male relatives or business partners of absent husbands, instead of their wives. Although not much work has been done on this subject, “the available primary sources show that medieval women traveled frequently, and for a variety of reasons” (Baskin, 2008). The essay “Mobility and Marriage in Two Medieval Jewish Societies” by Judith R. Baskin explores marriage as one of the most common motives for mobility and migration in the middle ages. Since the social conditions of Jewish women living in France and Germany were different from those living in the Muslim world, scholars depend on different sources of evidence to reconstruct a broader picture of the female Jewish experience during this period. Baskin resorts to evidence from the Cairo Geniza that supports her claims about Jewish women in the medieval Muslim
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) Mobility and Travel in the Middle Ages | Juliana Ossa Martinez
world, while rabbinical responsa literature from the 10th to 13th centuries is used to addressing the experiences of women in Ashkenazi Europe (ibid). Marriage, business and the pleasure of spending time with members of the extended family living elsewhere were some of the motives for female travel. In addition, impoverished widows and abandoned wives also wandered around, seeking charity from the community, or trying to find their long gone husbands. The geniza records contain information about indigent women who moved from one place to another seeking better life conditions. The heads of the Jewish communities they visited often supported these women by giving them charity or letters of recommendation (Goiten, 1978, 341). Christian, Jewish and Muslim women traveled with the purpose of visiting holy shrines or cities. However, for Jewish women, this was not a feature of female mobility in Ashkenazi Europe as it was in the Muslim world. In Judaism, the term “pilgrim” is not employed in the same way as in Islam or Christianity; instead, the term refers to women who journeyed unaccompanied to Jerusalem whereas in Islam and Christianity, a pilgrim is anybody who goes on pilgrimage (ibid, 337). Further, unlike Jewish wives, Christian women often accompanied their husbands on their pilgrimages to the Holy Land. Rabbinical responsa from the middle ages speaks of European women who traveled for business and trading, meeting Jewish and gentile men on their business trips. Since these were times of hostility between religious groups, female travelers had to take certain measures in order to protect themselves from the dangers they would encounter on their journeys. For example, when a woman who was traveling heard of a group of gentiles approaching her, she was permitted to dress in a nun’s attire so that they would refrain from attacking her. And when she heard that there was a group of Jewish ruffians nearby, she was permitted to wear a non-Jewish dress and claim to be a gentile. She was advised to cry out for help from gentiles, even if this entailed that her coreligionists would be attacked (Baskin, 1998: 114). This evidence confirms that women did travel alone, and that the heads of Jewish communities supported them and provided them with the necessary tools for the successful completion of their journeys. Moreover, it reveals tensions between Jews and
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) Mobility and Travel in the Middle Ages | Juliana Ossa Martinez
non-Jews and suggests that female travelers were often at risk of being attacked, regardless of belonging to one religious group or another. From the Cairo Geniza records it can be deduced that even though they sometimes joined their husbands when they found business opportunities elsewhere, medieval Jewish women in the Muslim world were often reluctant to move permanently from one place to another. However, they often traveled to the places of residence of their extended family members and stayed with them for prolonged periods of time (Baskin, 1998: 227). This was common, especially in Jewish holidays, or in cases where a friend or family member needed support or company. For instance, a relative’s illness, childbirth or distresses caused by a hostile environment were some of the motives for female travel. In addition, judges and legal authorities usually lived in capital cities and therefore, when their intervention or opinion was needed to solve a dispute, women had to travel. In the middle ages, it was common for women to travel overseas. These were usually women who accompanied their husbands in their long journeys but there are also accounts of single women who traveled by boat. Married women traveling with or without their husbands had to carry their marriage certificates with them, while: …unmarried girls had the opportunity to brave the dangers of sea travel because overseas marriage was a policy of the mercantile class. Naturally, the girls didn’t travel alone. But men too, on sea and on land normally traveled in the company of friends (Goiten, 1978: 340)
Jewish families in the Muslim world preferred to marry their daughters to people they knew, which often included the extended family. However, overseas marriages were not uncommon. The Cairo Geniza records a number of marriages in which the bride, the daughter of a political and intellectual luminaries, left her home for a distant place. (…) Marriage alliances that enhanced family ties were particularly common among the merchant families
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) Mobility and Travel in the Middle Ages | Juliana Ossa Martinez
already involved in mutually advantageous businesses. (…) Many of such marriages were made between families in Egypt and Tyre in Lebanon, which was engaged in vigorous trade with Cairo (Baskin, 2008: 229)
While marriage contracts in the Cairo Geniza allow us to see the dynamics around mobility and marriage in the Muslim world, rabbinical responsa, based on Talmudic rulings attest to Ashkenazi Europe. Evidence shows that women in the latter context tended to travel between urban settlements within their immediate region, rather than across significant distances. Moreover, according to Talmudic law, “a husband could force his unwilling wife to move from one town to another of approximately the same size, but not to a significantly different environment” (Baskin, 2008: 233). In general, Ashkenazi Jews preferred not to marry their daughters to men from faraway lands. And women were often protected from dwelling in strange environments.
Conclusion This essay has drawn a brief description of the situation of Jewish women in Christian Europe and the Muslim world during the high middle ages, and shown that in both contexts Jewish women were highly mobile. In Ashkenazi Europe they enjoyed more freedom than in the Muslim world, but this does not mean that they traveled less. It only means that they traveled for different reasons. While in Ashkenazi Europe the Jewish women often traveled for business and not so often for marriage, in the Muslim world it was the other way round. And while some women in the Muslim world journeyed to holy shrines and cities, this was not a feature of Jewish travel in the Christian world. This is understandable regarding that most of the holy sites are more accessible from the Mediterranean than from northern or western Europe. Anyhow, Jewish women in the middle ages traveled for reasons, and with ideologies, quite different from those that could produce a recognizable narrative of travel and mapping in the current spectrum of travel literature
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) Mobility and Travel in the Middle Ages | Juliana Ossa Martinez
criticism. Newly wed young women traveled to their new homes overseas, old women journeyed alone or accompanied to visit their families, and wives accompanied their husbands or traveled to the capital to sue them. Pious devotees went on pilgrimages and European businesswomen moved around the world as merchants or traders. Poor women sought charity from the community everywhere they went. In the absence of primary sources produced by women, and of scholarship that focuses on the female versions of the history of the world, it is important for travel writing scholarship to continue exploring women’s travels throughout this male-dominated history of travel or, as it appears, this maleread travel history. Many conclusions about daily life, traditions and practices can be drawn from this kind of scholarship. In addition, the role of women as active members of the economy and their contributions to the Jewish civilization can also be explored through their travels, instead of them becoming mute and picturesque objects of representation, studied as medieval metaphors.
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) Mobility and Travel in the Middle Ages | Juliana Ossa Martinez
References Adler, E. N. Jewish Travelers in The Middle Ages. New York: Dover Publications, 1987. Baskin, Judith Reesa. “Jewish Women in the Middle Ages,” in Judith Reesa Baskin ed. Jewish Women in Historical Perspective. Detroit : Wayne State University Press, 1998; 101-27.
–––, “Mobility and Marriage in Two Medieval Jewish Societies,” in Jewish History, 22.1/2, The Elka Klein Memorial Volume (2008): 223-43. Goiten, S.D. Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
–––, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab world as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza. Vol. I. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Goldin, Simah. Jewish Women in Europe in the Middle Ages. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2011. Grossman, Avraham. Pious and Rebellious: Jewish women in Medieval Europe. Brandeis University Press; University Press of New England, 2004. Sarna, Nahum M. ed. Genesis: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New Jps Translation. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989.
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) Food on the Grand Tour | E. Sunny Allaire-Graham
TOUR DE COOKERY: FOOD ON THE GRAND TOUR OR
A JOURNEY FROM LONDON TO ITALY AND BACK, THROUGH PARMEZANT CHEESE, GARLICK, AND MACARONI E. Sunny Allaire-Graham Citation: Allaire-Graham, E. Sunny. “Tour de Cookery: Food on the Grand Tour, or A Journey from London to Italy and Back, Through Parmezant Cheese, Garlick, and Macaroni.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.1 (2014): 111-32. Abstract: Constant complaints, by British tourists to Italy in the 18th century, of the overwhelming use of garlick and oyl attest to the fact that they often found their polite senses accosted by the exotic cuisine of their mainland counterparts. They complained, sometimes bitterly, of the poor quality of the meats which they were served them, an opinion so widely held that it was parodied in caricatures throughout Britain during this time. Yet, despite complaints about unfamiliar cuisine and untraditional preparation, some British tourists did enjoy their culinary journeys through Europe, or at least parts thereof. Nearly every tourist who wrote about Parma mentions parmezant cheese in their accounts. And while British tourists both lamented and lauded the cuisine of mainland Europe, they played an important role in the transmission of cookery and its related knowledge throughout Europe during this time. According to Theophano, “A culture’s cuisine may be used to mark the complex negotiations groups and individuals undertake in a new land.” This was absolutely the case for the Grand Tourists. Recipes and written travel accounts are evidence of the desire to translate and adapt what was seen on the Grand Tour, when the traveller came home. With a healthy mix of skepticism and enjoyment, many British tourists found themselves on a grand culinary journey that would shape their relationship to food for years to come.
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Keywords: Parmezant, parmesan, Olive oil, Garlick, Lady Miller, Richard Lassels, Pierre Grosley, Giuseppe Baretti, Grand Tour, Culinary travel. Copyright:
“Tour de Cookery: Food on the Grand Tour, or A Journey from London to Italy and Back, Through Parmezant Cheese, Garlick, and Macaroni” (by E. Sunny Allaire-Graham) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) Food on the Grand Tour | E. Sunny Allaire-Graham
TOUR DE COOKERY: FOOD ON THE GRAND TOUR OR
A JOURNEY FROM LONDON TO ITALY AND BACK, THROUGH PARMEZANT CHEESE, GARLICK, AND MACARONI E. Sunny Allaire-Graham
f you were a British tourist to Italy during the 18th century, one of your main concerns while abroad would be eating. A British tourist faced some difficulties during his travels such as the forced observation of lean days with the rest of the Catholic locals, unless he obtained a certificate that allowed him to eat meat in Lent.1 Constant complaints of the overwhelming use of garlick and oyl attest to the fact that British tourists often found their polite senses accosted by the exotic cuisine of their mainland counterparts.2 They complained, sometimes bitterly, of the poor quality of the meats which they were served them, an opinion so widely held that it was parodied in caricatures throughout Britain during this time. Yet, despite complaints about unfamiliar cuisine and untraditional preparation, some British tourists did enjoy their culinary journeys through Europe, or at least parts thereof. Often, they remark on the new and exciting 1 See Jeremy Black’s Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven: Yale University Press); 77. 2 ibid, 77.
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regional varieties of produce, such as broccoli and pears and of course, local wines.3 Nearly every tourist who wrote about Parma mentions parmezant cheese in their accounts. And while British tourists both lamented and lauded the cuisine of mainland Europe, they played an important role in the transmission of cookery and its related knowledge throughout Europe during this time.
Sources This paper begins with a discussion of the sources for our knowledge of food on the Grand Tour. An analysis of the sources is important to understanding the context of these different sources and their varying degrees of reliability, objectivity, and intention of the source based on its context. For the purpose of this paper, the sources are largely letters, journals, written travel accounts, and cookery books and manuals, both published and unpublished. However, it is important to keep in mind that information about food, and people’s reception to it, both at home and abroad, can be gleaned from many sources including paintings and other visual media such as songs, literary references, account ledgers and of course, from the objects that were used to make and keep food during this time. The context and intended audience of the accounts is particularly important when analyzing the comment. The context calls into question issues of reliability and especially intentions. For example, references to food in personal correspondence reflect a greater degree of sincerity than published travel accounts which are intended for the market. Take for example an excerpt from one of the letters of Lady Anna Miller, which were published anonymously in 1776, five years after her Grand Tour. On tasting the food in Genoa, Lady Miller complains:
3 ibid, 78.
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…their constant use of oil (which is seldom good), even sometimes in their soups, is extremely disgusting to us. We may have roast meet if we choose it; but their manner of roasting is thus, after oiling the meat with a feather, they suspend it over a charcoal fire until it is to become dry and brittle as to admit of pulverization. 4
Although Miller was known for her somewhat affected personality, we can assume she was being truthful, if somewhat exaggerated in this response to Genoan cuisine. There is a certain authenticity to the personal letter. Another important source of food knowledge from the Grand Tour comes from published travel accounts and travel guides, beginning with Richard Lassels’ The Voyage of Italy (1670). In discussing Milan, Lassels tells the reader a story about the Milanese cuisine. “This town is famous for excellent Neats tongues and cheese and big as millstones. A gentleman of the town, caused four cheese to be made each one weighing 500 pound weight.” 5 Lassels’ often anecdotal way of referencing local cuisine, and especially local food customs, is a way for him to establish his credentials and exhibit his knowledge and expertise as a seasoned traveler. Although the reader is left unaware of how Lassels acquired his knowledge of this man and the 500 pound cheese, the assumption is that one does not gain this kind of inside knowledge without having an intimate connection with the locals. Unlike accounts from personal letters, guides and accounts prepared for publication are far less in earnest. It is as if by this time, there was an accepted vocabulary through which to comment on food in these written accounts. Although 4 Lady Anna Miller’s Letters From Italy, Describing the Manners, Customs, Antiquities, Paintings, &c. of That Country, In The Years 1770 and 1771, To a Friend Residing in France. (London: Printed for E. and C. Dilly);161. 5 The Voyage Of Italy, Or A Compleat Journey Through Italy: In Two Parts : With the Characters of the People, and the Description of the Chief Towns, Churches, Monasteries, Tombs, Libraries, Pallaces, Villa's, Gardens, Pictures, Statues, and Antiquities. As Also of the Interest, Government, Riches, Force, &c. of All the Princes; With Instructions Concerning Travel, Vol I (London: Starkey, 1670); 134.
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Lassels praises the food, the comment is stale and passive. These excerpts are not part of a larger story about an actual experience, but a generalized statement, as if rehearsed. They are formulaic even: “In ___ town, the ___ is exquisite.” Lassels frequently comments on the local specialty of a town in his accounts in much the same way. On the cuisine of Piacenza he says: “The Countrey round about this Town is very rich in pasturage: Hence their excellent Cheeses and rare Cream.” 6 A few pages later he discusses Parma in nearly the same words: “The Countrey round about the Town is most fertil, and begets such credit to the Cheeses, that Parmesan cheeses are famous over all the world.”7
Complaints about Local Cuisine We were eating a very bad supper, composed of liver and brains (to what animals they had belonged, I do not pretend to decide).8
For many travelers, new and unusual food and preparations was a source of contention.9 It was the use of olive oil and garlic that was of particular dislike for the tourists.10 In 1769 Jean-Pierre Grosley in his New Observations on Italy and its Inhabitants writes thus, of dining in Capua: The preparations consisted in a very foul table-cloth, laid over three boards supported by two benches, with two old bicchieri, or earthen ewers, full of very bad wine. They told us that glasses were not used in that country, but we should drink round in the bichhieri. The repast itself was a leg of an old he-goat, a fricassee with lampoil and a sallad, with bread as bad as the wine. Such fare we could 6 Lassels, 134. 7 ibid, 136. 8 Miller, 41. 9 Black, 76. 10 ibid, 76-77.
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not touch, so we made our supper of some fruit, and this we devoured without bread.11
Grosley’s sensibilities appear so offended by the meal with which he was presented, that he and his company actually seem to have refused the food completely in favor of fruit — a familiar and comfortable food for many of the tourists. In one of Lady Miller’s letters, she veils her nostalgia for home in a criticism of the food of Geneva. I think the trout of this Lake inferior to that common English trout. The victuals here are dressed in the fashion of Geneva, or rather in the old English style, boiled and roasted, with puddings of various sorts, codling-pies, &c. The Genevans and Swiss boast a resemblance in their manner of living to the tables of England, but they are total strangers to the luxuries of our modern repasts — As to what you have heard in regards to their eating cats, if there is any truth in that report, it is not at Geneva that animals is in vogue, but in the more remote and uncivilized parts of Switzerland.12
This passage is particularly rewarding because of Miller’s comments about the practice of eating cats. Like her medieval counterparts who believed in the wild men and exotic beasts, that were said to inhabit the periphery of the world, Miller too does cling to superstitious and xenophobic stereotypes. Rather than become enlightened and experience what the Grand Tour has to offer, we read the letter by Miller as evidence of quite the opposite experience. She has not come into this experience with her eyes open, but with her mind quite made up. While written evidence tells the personal stories of people’s horror at their fare, the visual evidence provides a more widely encompassing story. During this time, caricatures and prints began circulating, that satirized a portion of the returned Grand Tourists who were dubbed “macaronies,” after 11 Grosley, 197. 12 Miller, 14.
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returning home from the tour with Italian affectations. Lassels warns against the dangers of falling too deeply into the customs and ways of other countrymen in his preface to The Voyage of Italy, and artists such as Matthew Darly quickly pick up on this trend. In an etching by Hogarth in 1749 entitled O, the Roast Beef of Old England (Fig. I) the artist depicts one of the Grand Tourists who most frequent complained of the (lack of) quality roast beef in mainland Europe. In the work we see a gluttonous looking monk, and a cook carrying a slab of beef, while French soldiers stand by staring longingly at the meat. It was a scene that many British tourists would have understood fondly, and stands as evidence to the widespread acceptance of food criticism during the Grand Tour.
Fig. I: Hogarth, O, The Roast Beef of Old England, or, The Bridge of Callais, 1776. Image Courtesy ArtStor.org
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Enjoying New Foods Despite the numerous complaints of the English travelers throughout Europe, they often remarked upon the delicious new foods that they encountered. Notorious travel writers like Tobias Smollett had the talent to both praise and criticize the cuisine of a region within a single sentence. On eating in Nice, Smollett notes: The beef which comes from Piedmont, is pretty good, and we have it all the year. In the winter we have likewise excellent pork, and delicate lamb, but the mutton is indifferent. Piedmont, also, affords us delicious capons, fed with maiz ; and this country produces excel lent turkeys, but very few geese. Chickens and pullets are extremely meagre. I have tried to fatten them, without success. In summer they are subject to the pip, and die in great numbers. 13
He also comments on the “delicious” wild boar in Nice, as well as a rare instance of enjoying the use of oil for cooking when he writes that “Nothing can be more delicious than fresh anchovies fried in oil, I prefer them to the smells of the Thames.”14 In her Letter III dated September 25, 1770, Miller compliments the food she has in a small town called Friangean, in the following: They have dressed an elegant little supper, consisting of a fine young turkey, a tongue a la daube, two sallads, one anchovy, the other of lettice; a dessert composed of cheese, biscuits, Maspinerie, almonds in shell, butter churned since our arrival, and very good wine both white and red.”15
13 Tobias Smollett. Travels Through France and Italy, With a Particular Description of the Town, Territory, and Climate of Nice, Vol I (London: R. Baldwin, 1766); 289. 14 ibid, 295. 15 Miller, 18.
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Further, in one of her later letters, Miller devotes an extensive section to describing their dining experience at Pellegrino. The provisions are excellent in every respect, and extraordinarily well dressed. Our host provides us much more than we can eat and drink, dinner and supper, for eleven livers and a half (French) by the day; our firing, lodging and wine included. Our dinner today consisted of a white soup, with vermicelli and fine Parmesan cheese rasped over the surface, half a Bologna hog’s-head admirably dried and dressed, superior to any hog-meat I ever tasted in England; une friture tres recherché, a dish of boullie, a poularde, one of the finest I ever saw; it rivlled those of Git; a forequarter of lamb roasted, a fricando with small navees, spinage dressed the French way, colliflower, fricasseed truffles dressed with butter and anchovy, a dish of mortadello: for dessert the finest white grapes imaginable, white Bury-pears, the best chestnuts and walnuts, being of an uncommon size and sweetness. The wine is exceedingly good here, so is the water, which I think a most material object in the article of luxury. I have given you this detail of our diner, to shew you the great different in respect of eating between one part of Italy and another. Our dinner we mutually agreed was too abundant for two persons only to sit down to; as some of the dishes went away untouched, our host was shocked, fearing we did not like them: I sent for him, and told him we were perfectly satisfied with what he had provided…16
In this excerpt not only does Miller praise her meal, and detail it for the reader, but she also gives a rare example of expressed intent. She is telling us this because she wants the reader to know that dining can vary greatly from place to place. And this would have been the experience for most of the tourists. They may find themselves eating stale bread for breakfast, and then an “exceedingly good” fricando during their supper. Whichever the case, they recorded it with gusto. 16 ibid, 306.
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Dining Practices It was not solely the food itself which warranted comment by British travelers during their Grand Tour. They also frequently wrote about the dining practices of the people with whom they ate. As was the case with their opinions of the cuisine, so too did the tourists both disparage and approve of the varying customs of the locals. In an 18th century painting titled Supper at the Nani House, in the style of Pietro Longhi, the anonymous artist captured a remarkable banqueting scene from Venice (Fig. II). We learn as much from the details of the painting as we do from the extensive inscription below the image. According to the inscription, the “illustrious” banquet is being held in honor of a travelling dignitary, His Royal Highness Clement August, Elector of Cologne on September 9, 1755, at the Palazzo di Ca’ Nanna alla Giudeca. Details of a painting of this sort can reveal information about dining practices during this time that might otherwise be lost. It is however important for the visual information held within a painting to be corroborated by another source, such as a trusted literary source. We find such invaluable evidence in the writings of Richard Lassels. In his introductory remarks to The Voyage of Italy, Lassels describes in vivid detail the dining practices of the Italian people, much of which are depicted directly in the Nani painting. At dinner they serve in the best meats first, and eat backwards, that is, they begin with the second course, and end with boyled meat and pottage. They never present you with salt, or braines of any fowle, least they seem to reproach unto you want of wit. They bring you drink upon a Sottocoppa of silver, with three or four glasses upon it; Two or three of which are strait neck glasses (called there caraffa’s) full of several sorts of wine or water, and one empty drinking glasse, into which you may powr what quantity of wine and water you please to drink, and not stand to the discretion of the waiters as they do in other Countries.17 17 Lassels, 16.
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Fig. III shows a detail of the painting where two anonymous English travelers, identified as Cavalier Inglesse according to the inscription, are being attended to by the waiter. The attendant behind the men holds a silver tray upon which are placed three glasses, two of similar shape, and one smaller. Even the shapes of the glasses are reminiscent of Lassels’ description, as the Longhi painter depicts the straight-necked beakers of wine. Lassels description of dining in Italy is not limited to the order of courses and the serving of drinks. He continues on with the carving of meats and handling of food. At great feasts, not man cuts for himself, but several Carvers, cut up all the meat at a side table, and give to the waiters, to be carryed to the Guests, and everyone hath the very same part of the meat carried unto him, to wit, a wing, and a legg of wild fowl, &c. least anyone take exceptions that others were better used than he. The Carvers never touch the meat with their hands, but only with their knife and fork, and great silver spoon for the sauce. Every man here eats with his fork and knife, and never toucheth anything with his fingers, but his bread, this keeps the linnen neat, and the fingers sweet. If you drink to an Italian, he thanks you, with bending, when you salute him, and lets you drink quietly, without watching (as we do in England) to thank you again when you have drunk; and the first time he drinks after that will be to you, in requital of your former courtesy.18
18 Lassels, 16-17.
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Fig. II: Pietro Longhi’s, Supper at the Nani House, 18th century, Museo del Settecento veneziano. Image Courtesy ArtStor.org
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Fig. III: Detail of Supper at the Nani House — Two Anonymous English Travellers being served wine. Image Courtesy ArtStor.org
As with the drinks, details in the Longhi painting reveal the presence of waiters with trays of cut meat coming in from back rooms and serving the diners directly (Fig. IV). On the far right side of the painting we see an inset “side table” set up from which the drinks are being served (Fig. V). Lassels mentions the use of utensils and the purity of the hands and the linens as a result, all of which are depicted in the Nani painting. The guests hands are seemingly rendered in an atmospheric perspective with illusionistic strokes of white. However, taken in the context of Lassels, one can understand this artistic choice as a reflection of the “neat” and “sweet” nature of Italian dining. Although the painting and literary account are separated by nearly eighty years, it seems that many of the dining practices remained relatively static during the Grand Tour years.
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Fig. IV: Detail of Supper at the Nani House — Carvers or waiters carrying trays of cut meat. Image Courtesy ArtStor.org
Fig. V: Detail of Supper at the Nani House — Wine being served from in inset buffet station. Image Courtesy ArtStor.org
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Bringing the Food Home: Foreign Influences on English Cookbooks Remembering the Grand Tour was nearly as important as experiencing it first hand, for many Britains. And for those nostalgic tourists, recipes were one way to bring the food home with them. In the book, Eat My Words, Janice Theophano discusses the etymological roots of the word “recipe” which comes from the Latin recipere, meaning “exchange.” Recipes and receipts are therefore an extremely appropriate link to the cultural exchange that was the basis for the Grand Tour.19 Theophano also calls attention to the existence of global networks of recipe sharing, going on to say: “The women who exchanged recipes with one another did not necessarily live next door, although they often did; they did not have to be kin, although they often were. In truth, they did not have to know one another at all.” 20 Networks of individuals sharing recipes for both food and medicine from the early modern period onward are beginning to be documented by scholars such as Elaine Leong. It is common sense that recipes would be shared within families, and not surprising to learn that links exist between neighbors and extended friends and family as well. According to Leong’s “Introduction” to the Receipt Books, recipes also feature, sometimes prominently in well-known networks of letters.21 As Leong is the preeminent scholar in this field, a portion of her introduction concerning networks is worth quoting in entirety. Social occasions proved to be sites for recipe exchange. Archdale Palmer, a gentleman from Leicestershire who compiled a recipe collection dating from the 1650s, gathered recipes from all types of social events. Certain entries in his recipe collection betray the fact that dinner guests would contribute to the collection after the meal…He also seemed to have had the habit of extracting recipes 19 Janet Theophano’s Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote. (New York: Palgrave, 2002); 41. 20 ibid, 14. 21 Elaine Leong, “Introduction,” in Receipt Books, c. 1575-1800 .
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out of friends and acquaintances in pubs — several recipes were collected at the Mitre Tavern and others at the Red Lion at Leicester. While Palmer might have been a more than the average enthusiast as far as recipe collecting was concerned, his collection reveals the diverse social occasions and places at which recipes might have been exchanged.”22
Note that Leong mentions travelling as a means of acquiring new receipts. There are various examples of receipts that show evidence of being acquired while Englishmen travelled abroad. Take one from an early modern cookery manuscript, probably penned around 1700 in London. #254, (p. 149) A Receipt (which) Lord Burlington was told of at Rome for the Chollick Take a pint of the Strongest white wine, & put into it the peels of six civill (sic, probably Seville) oranges pared very thin, let all these boyle together till it’s reduced to half a pint, then let the Patient drink it as hot as possible, when the fit is on him. 23
Apart from sources which mention acquiring receipts from Grand Tourists, the evidence of the Grand Tour can also be found within the recipes themselves. In the first edition of Elizabath Raffald’s edition of The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) there is a recipe for “To dress Macaroni with Permasent Cheese” a clear reference to Italian cuisine: To dress Macaroni with Permasent Cheese. Boil four Ounces of Macaroni ’till it be quite tender, and lay it on a Sieve to drain, then put it in a Tosling Pan, with about a Gill of good Cream, a Lump of Butter rolled in Flour, boil it five Minutes, 22 Leong, “Introduction.” 23 Anonymous Manuscript, early 18th century, “A Collection of Choise Receipts,” New York Academy of Medicine.
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pour it on a Plate, lay all over it Permasent Cheese toasted; send it to the Table on a Water Plate, for it soon goes cold. 24
Up to this point, there had been references in English cookbooks to making foods in the French way, but rarely if ever in the Italian way, or with distinctly Italian ingredients in this manner. This fact is corroborated by author of Italy and the Grand Tour, Jeremy Black. According to Black, Italian food was a novelty for many travelers. There were few shops in London during this time that specialized in Italian foods.25
Chefs on the Grand Tour Like the Grand Tourists who use food as a boasting point brag about their travels through their knowledge of local cuisine from abroad, authors of certain cookbooks do the same thing. Robert May is an early and wonderful example of an author of a cookbook who went on his own sort of Grand Tour, akin to that of an artist, and then published about it. May was born in 1588 in England. At the age of ten, May was sent to Paris by Lady Dormer — where he trained for five years to become a chef before he came back to England. He is best known for writing and publishing the 1660 cookbook The Accomplisht Cook, which went through numerous editions that included additions and modifications to the text. He is noteworthy for including images in his book, particularly of pie shapes, and is considered the father of English cookbooks, so to speak. Of interest are the numerous recipes for foods cooked in the “foreign-way,” including a rare illustrated recipe for “other fried Dishes of divers forms, or Stock-Fritters in the Italian Fashion” (Fig. VI).
24 Raffald, 261. 25 Black, 76.
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Fig VI: From, The Accomplisht Cook by Robert May
Despite May’s numerous recipes “in the fashion of,” he does not include any recipe comparable to the macaroni and parmesan cheese that Raffald includes 100 years later, a much more authentic recipe with clear links to specific knowledge of the methods of cooking, etc.
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Conclusion Grand Tourists clearly had ambivalent feelings about the local cuisine and dining customs of the people they visited on their travels. On occasion, their writings turn nostalgic as they express the desire to return to the food of their native country. In A Journey from London to Genoa, Joseph Baretti makes the reverse trip, going home to his native Italy and remarks: about eight I breakfast Anglicé upon tea and toast, or bread and butter: this custom however I intend to break myself of; as soon as I am in Portugal I propose to reassume that of falling early upon grapes, figs, and melons, in order to qualify again for my native country, that I may not be a foreigner at home. 26 Baretti’s concern over changing his appetite in preparation for returning home is similar to the way we might try to prepare for the time zone change. It is however, more intimate than that. Baretti is expressing concern at the fact that he does not want to feel like a foreigner at home. He does not want to come home and be the Italian version of the macaroni. According to Theophano, “A culture’s cuisine may be used to mark the complex negotiations groups and individuals undertake in a new land.” 27 This was absolutely the case for the Grand Tourists. Recipes and written travel accounts are evidence of the desire to translate and adapt what was seen on the Grand Tour, when the traveller came home. With a healthy mix of skepticism and enjoyment, many British tourists found themselves on a grand culinary journey that would shape their relationship to food for years to come.
26 Baretti, A Journey From London to Genoa..Vol. I (London: T. Davies & L. Davies, 1770); 59. 27 Theophano, 50.
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References Anonymous Manuscript, “A Collection of Choise Receipts,” New York Academy of Medicine, Early 18th Century. Black, Jeremy. Italy and the Grand Tour. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Baretti, Giuseppe. A Journey from London to Genoa, Through England, Portugal, Spain, and France, Vol. I. London: T. Davies and L. Davies, 1770. Grosley, Pierre Jean. New Observations on Italy and Its Inhabitants. London: L. Davis and C. Reymers, 1769. Lassels, Richard. The Voyage of Italy, Or, A Compleat Journey Through Italy in Two Parts: With the Characters of the People, and the Description of the Chief Towns, Churches...With Instructions Concerning Travel, Vol. I. London: Starkey, 1670. Leong, Elaine Yuen Tien. Receipt books, c.1575-1800 Part 1, From the Folger Shakespeare Library. Marlborough, Wiltshire, England: Adam Matthew Publications. 2006. May, Robert. The Accomplisht Cook, or, The Art & Mystery of Cookery Wherein The Whole Art is Revealed in a More Easie and Perfect Method Than Hath Been Published In Any Language. London: Obadiah Blagrave, 1685. Miller, Anna Riggs, and Alberto Fortis. Letters from Italy, Describing the Manners, Customs, Antiquities, Paintings, &c. of That Country, In the Years 1770 and 1771, To a Friend Residing in France. London: E. and C. Dilly, 1776. Rabisha, William. The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected, Taught, and Fully Manifested, Methodically, Artificially, and According to the Best Tradition of the English, French, Italian, Dutch, &c., or, A Sympathie Of All…Newest Manner. London: R.W. for Giles Calvert, 1661. Raffald, Elizabeth. The Experienced English House-Keeper for the Use and Ease of Ladies, House-Keepers, Cooks, &c. Wrote Purely from Practice…Consisting of near 800 original receipts, most of which never appeared in print. Manchester: Printed by J. Harrop, for the author, and sold by Messrs. Fletcher and Anderson, London; and by Eliz. Raffald, Confectioner, Manchester, 1769. Smollett, Tobias George. Travels Through France and Italy With a Particular Description of the Town, Territory, and Climate of Nice: To Which is Added, A Register of the Weather, Kept During a Residence of Eighteen Months in That City, Vol I. London: printed for R. Baldwin, 1766.
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Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through The Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave, 2002.
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) Naipaul’s Travel Narratives on India | Bhupen Chutia
TRAC(K)ING IDENTITY: NAIPAUL’S TRAVEL NARRATIVES ON INDIA
Bhupen Chutia Citation: Chutia, Bhupen. “Trac(k)ing Identity: Naipaul’s Travel Narratives on India.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.1 (2014): 133-51. Abstract: V.S. Naipaul’s travel writing evokes, among many others, questions of (re)iterating the tales of identity/identification and difference/differentiation. That is, Naipaul, the travel writer, is seen travelling to areas that roughly constitute the memories of his identity. Especially his narratives on his Indian travels make a curious reading in the sense that they can be seen as attempts at coming to terms with his problematic sense of colonial/postcolonial identity. These narratives are often marked for dwelling on the memories of the traumatic displacements under European and even the earlier (colonial) forces. While they have succeeded in displeasing many Indian readers for his rather unflattering remarks on some of their habits, it has to be admitted that these accounts of his encounter with contemporary India raise some pertinent questions about subjective identi(ty)fication. It is proposed, in this paper, to read them as attempts at tracing and tracking the routes of the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial travels, both literal and figurative, by a member of the Indian Diaspora. It argues that these travels perform the function of a re-tour through the routes of colonial travel, and the narratives, thereby trac(k)ing and erasing the marks of those travels. That is, these narratives can be seen as acts of writing and putting under erasure the marks, traces, footprints and even the stains of the years of displacements, disruption and destructions. Putting on an identity for the travelling self is not only deferred indefinitely but also doomed to remain unfulfilled as something impossible to achieve. Key Words: Colonial/Postcolonial identity, Travel Narratives, Diaspora, Memory, Displacement.
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) Naipaul’s Travel Narratives on India | Bhupen Chutia
TRAC(K)ING IDENTITY: NAIPAUL’S TRAVEL NARRATIVES ON INDIA
Bhupen Chutia
Thinking historically is a process of locating oneself in space and time. And a location…is an itinerary rather than a bounded site — a series of encounters and translations (Clifford, 11).
ames Clifford’s theorization of travel deals with its problematic relation with the politics of identity. His role can hardly be exaggerated in the consolidation of the position that travel in general, and its postcolonial pedigrees in particular, are inseparable from the quest for identity or the desire for identification. Narratives of postcolonial travels often bear testimony to the problematic of identifying with the memories of the past and the conditions of the present. They also show how unsatisfactory a project of travelling down the lanes of memories as well as back to the areas of the past can be. At the same time theories of memories have demonstrated how most of the projects of postcolonial identification can lead only to unpacking of unending layers of traces of identities that, in turn, lead to the realisation that no origin is available. In other words, the acts of looking back at the traces of the colonial displacement, or rather their trac(k)ing reveal that the question of “origin” has to be deferred indefinitely, and can at best be answered only in terms of its absence. What are visible, then, are the traces — the tracks. The travels can, thus, be seen as acts of re-tracing the areas and societies linked across the colonial history of displacement and transplantation. Travel narratives are, then, nothing but the reiteration of the encounters with these traces that lead only to earlier traces of origin, and these origins of the very traces as identity.
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With these assumptions this paper aims to reread the narratives of V. S. Naipaul, on his Indian travels, as acts that problematize the very idea of postcolonial identity and identification. I call it rereading because the works of this “pioneer” of postcolonial travel writing have already “enjoyed” simply too many casual critical encounters in the postcolonial academia, and as such readers will be rather puzzled to hear of yet another reading of the same. I plan to look for the “ambivalence” that often seems to elude most readers in Naipual’s Indian trilogy — An Area of Darkness: Discovery of India (1964), India: A Wounded Civilization (1977) and India: Million Mutinies Now (1990). It goes without saying that India is the only part of the subcontinent that remains as part of the “supposed” areas of the original “homeland” of the colonial population of Indian descent in the West Indies. And naturally, the colonial and postcolonial geopolitical history of the Indian subcontinent matters most to an estranged (colonial) Indian like Naipaul while attempting to relate to, and engage with his own sense of identity. The narratives of these travels, written over a period of almost thirty years, deal with the first fifty years of post-independence Indian history, and address the questions pertaining not only to those who presently “dwell” in the nation state called India but also to the descendants of the scattered, erstwhile Indian nationals. As the title suggests, this paper will try to make a rather belated appropriation of the concept of the “trace” of Jacques Derrida’s, which attracted Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak so much that eventually she appears to have practiced this term more than Derrida himself. However, I shall be content to assume that my appropriation of Derrida’s trace is rather limited: I am not going to attempt a deconstructive reading of Naipaul. Rather, my endeavour will be limited to exploring the possibility of tracking a postmodern Naipaul in modernist garb, in his obsession with dislocation, translation and desires for dissolution and chaos. At the same time Clifford’s expansion of the connotations of the term “travel” will also be appropriated to formulate the subject positions of Naipaul — the (post)colonial — which appear in his travel narratives in most complex hues. To invoke the idea of trace formulated by Derrida is not without tracking the traces pointed out by his followers, most notably Spivak. The “trace” is
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more palpable in the long “Translator’s Preface,” which is much more than just an introduction to her translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Spivak explains how going one step further of Heidegger’s crossing out the possibility of a “being” Derrida proposes the term “trace,” along with, of course, other alternatives like “arche-writing” or “difference” — as a term that “can not be a master word, that presents itself as the mark of an anterior presence, origin, master”. Heidegger’s “being” is translated into a “transcendental signified” by Derrida which he gleefully deconstructs into a mere “sign” the structure of which “determined the trace or track of that other which is forever absent”. Spivak quotes Derrida thus: The trace is not only the disappearance of origin,...it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin. From then on, to wrench the concept of the trace from the classical scheme which would make of it derive from a presence or from an originary non-trace and which would make of it an empirical mark, one must indeed speak of an originary trace or arche-trace. (1974: xviii)
Spivak makes it simple by asserting that “Derrida’s trace is the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent present, of the lack at the origin that is the condition of thought and experience” (xvii). It is this simple or simplified concept of trace as origin that, it is assumed, can be profitably used in reading Naipaul’s travel narratives on India, which constitute the problematized engagement with the past and contemporary history of India, as means of his coming to terms with a fluid postcolonial identity. It is proposed here, accordingly, to examine if India appears, in Naipaul, as the traces of an absence, of travels/displacements of the past, of histories untold, ignored or unacknowledged. The lines of Clifford above, reflect precisely this concern — the desire on the part of Naipaul to engage with his “colonial” self in a historical perspective that presupposes a clubbing of time and space. It also presupposes locating
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himself not only in the past travels (i.e., colonial displacement), but also in assuming the role of an incessant traveller. From this one can easily see why Naipaul’s favourite job would be to perform the role of a travelling writer, desperately looking for “materials” for his next book — which often takes the form of narrating the predicament of understanding his postcolonial identity, which itself depends upon his ability to historicise the narratives of the Indian past. I use the term “role” in order to bring home the fact that being not-somuch-of-an-innocent traveller, Naipaul would appear, as this paper develops, as much carrying the burden of practising the theories of (post)colonialism, as experiencing once again the centuries-old displacement within his own lifespan. Perhaps it is for this very reason that he is often noticed displaying his desire for a rather dramatic and often problematic engagement with the dominant historical narratives of India. And the focus of our endeavour will be on this “quarrel” with the Indian narratives of its past which, as he claims, often refuse to acknowledge the interventionist nature of the British and pre-British period of history, which leave no space for the tales of those lesser Indians who are neither mentioned in most of the “national” narratives of modern India, nor are they considered as Indians in the “national” sense — those displaced by the colonial transplantation, such as the girmitiyars. He would appear as one of the harshest critics of the national narratives of India — and my contention is that the major points of his critique rest on the ground that there are distinct gaps between the deceptions of a people about the “return” to the pre-colonial days after independence, and the narrator’s awareness of the irreversible nature of the colonial intervention in the postcolonial societies. The narratives on his travels to India are, thus, often fraught with the problematic of identifying the sameness and differences with these national narratives: they very often raise the uneasy question of the impossibility of returning to the past for the erstwhile colonial. This question is raised in the very first of his Indian trilogies, An Area of Darkness. “Return” is the major issue when Naipaul narrates his maiden Indian adventure in 1964, one and half decades after India’s independence. This journey, taken as a kind of pilgrimage to the ancient holy land of the Ramayana and Mahabharata as learnt in his childhood, held many surprises and shocks
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for him as well as his readers, especially the Indians. The narrative can be seen as a dramatization of the distance the colonial subjects like Naipaul have travelled from the “originary” home of the Indian subcontinent under the displacing and disturbing agency of British colonialism. It is therefore, a dramatization of the attempts of an estranged Indian to come to terms with the contemporary version of the long abandoned “homeland,” and the inevitable but painful realization of the impossibility of a project of “going home.” The narrative begins with the uneasy feeling Naipaul feels as he draws near India — in spite of his education in London, his childhood dreams of the mythical India comes as a disturbing memory. A half-hearted expectation, despite the possibility of getting disheartened, plays hide and seek. And the unfolding of a poor, ugly India shocks the visitor beyond his control. But in spite of knowledge, this seemed ordinary and inappropriate! Perhaps all lands of myth were like this: dazzling with light, familiar to drabness, the margins of the sea unremarkably littered, until the moment of departure. (1964: 39).
The moment of arrival at his destination becomes the moment of panic for the impending loss of the dream version of the land, and of his own innocence. The immensity of the very act of relating himself to a country that had never been his, except in the mythical versions of the colonial memory which remained significant to his sense of a growing self itself, was there to add to this panic. The predicament of assuming this estranged Indian self is revealed in his nervous outburst at the fear of being faceless in the Indian crowds at Bombay. Becoming indistinct in the “sameness” with the Indians, his strangeness denied, Naipaul finds himself “invisible.” For the first time his Indianness threatens to overwhelm his individuality. He notes, “I had been made by Trinidad and England; recognition of my difference was necessary to me, I felt the need to impose myself, and didn’t know how” (39). The enigma of appearing in the “sameness” makes him long for “difference.” The moment of
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arriving at a sense of Indian identity is deferred as he realises that this is not what he wants. This deferral is not only from his Indianness to something nonIndian; it is also a deferral from identification in terms of race, religion and culture to the assertion of its unsuitability or inadequacy. The colonial-Indian-Hindu identity that Naipaul assumes for himself is based not on continuity and, in the chapter “Fantasy and Ruins,” Naipaul’s colonial hybridity reveals more of its menacing mimicry. The reminders of the British rule in India “laid bare” the fantasy Naipaul had been nurturing of the India of his childhood imagination. This confirmation (of complete British possession of India) laid bare a small area of self-deception which, below knowledge and self-knowledge, had survived in that part of my mind which held as a possibility of the existence of the white Himalayan cones against a cold blue sky, as in the religious pictures in my grandmother’s house (1964:199).
An idea of India as a “whole” had been the source of respite in the alienness, in West Indies. Only in his writing now, in the midst of Indian despair, he finds the hollowness of his earlier fantasy of an Indian self. But the present act of writing up of his “Indianness” only can separate him from that past. It is precisely this predicament of the disillusionment of the colonial traveller that brings Naipaul to a conflict with India, or its Indians. Here, the colonial is critical not only of the imperial project of the British in India, but also of the Indians themselves who act as the inheritors of the colonizers and continue with the colonial fantasy. While experiencing the receding images of his childhood memories of an Indian community life in Trinidad, his exposure to the attitudes of the newly liberated Indians leads to serious doubts about the very validity of the same: he demands an explanation. In Routes: Travel and Translation in the late Twentieth Century Clifford makes a bold remark when he says: “when travel…becomes a kind of norm, dwelling demands explanation” (5). An Area is notorious precisely for the demands for an explanation from the people, “dwelling” at home, for their so-called “return to the pre-colonial past”
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after liberation from British rule. An Area narrates the difficult encounter of Naipaul with the supposed complacency, national pride or to be precise, postcolonial exultation. Often the narrative digs at the willful erasure of memories of colonial translation of the people inhabiting contemporary India in the face of the remains of the vast colonial apparatus, including the inherited bureaucracy which was as cumbersome, inefficient and degrading as the earlier caste-system used to be. In fact, Naipaul recognizes the traces of Indian “slavery,” — casteism — in contemporary stratified bureaucracy. What is particularly more irritating, for Naipaul, is the presence of British architecture displaying the remains of the vainglorious mythical colonial grandeur in the midst of widespread poverty, degradation and the ruins of earlier royal structures. It will be pertinent to refer to the ambivalence that Naipaul nurtures vis a vis his cultural memory, in spite of his difference: I had rejected tradition; yet how can I explain my feeling when I heard that in Bombay they used candles and electric bulbs for the Diwali festival, and not the rustic clay lamps, of immemorial design, which in Trinidad we still used? (1964: 31)
While it would be too naive to look for the nostalgic outburst in these words, it will be equally fallacious to assume that Naipaul finds the Indians totally cleansed of the past. On the contrary, he questions the rather unproblematic acceptance of the colonial and pre-colonial history. Their “inheritance” of the imposed grandeur of the British Raj, their claims to have made a return to the pre-British past against their spectacular blindness to the othered Indians within — the untouchables, the poor, the unhygienic living conditions — these were sufficient enough for Naipaul to express his strong disagreement with much of India. However, he finds at least one Indian — Gandhi — worth praising for his new vision of India, whom Naipaul considers as someone who had learned to see himself as the other — different from the mythical self. Against this backdrop, one particular dramatic action on the part of Naipaul is worth mentioning. It is the refusal to witness one of the “symbols” of
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the Indian (Hindu) myths that every Indian carries or remembers — the lingam of Amarnath Cave. Every year, during a particular period, thousands of Hindus make their pilgrimages to the mountains of Kashmir, to see the natural ice-structure symbolizing the lingam (phallus) of Shiva, the Hindu God of Destruction. Naipaul finds himself taking part in that annual pilgrimage accompanied by his Muslim aide, Aziz. Naipaul, apparently due to the physical awkwardness associated with the entry into the cave, decides not to go inside too see the lingam allowing, instead, Aziz to do so. Put as a dramatic relief, Aziz comes out to tell him that he could not see any lingam — apparently it had not formed that year. While the absence of the mythical symbol can be explained away as co-incidental, Naipaul’s refusal to enter the cave to witness the origin of that symbol, and be gratified, is what attracts our attention. It is a deliberate choice to refuse identity — to let myth remain as myth, the trace of an absence. At the same time he is pricked by the explanations from a fellow pilgrim: “You don’t come for the lingam, it’s the spirit of the thing” (1964: 182). He is less than amused by the desire for the symbol of a symbol. While An Area dramatizes the predicament of the colonial Hindu at the loss of the dream version of his India in the Indian reality, Wounded Civilization begins, however, with his rather uncertain relation with the country: India is for me a difficult country. It isn’t my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far. (1977: x)
The ambivalence is more than apparent when he clarifies: It has taken me much time to come to terms with the strangeness of India, to define what separates me from the country; and to understand how far the “Indian” attitudes of someone like myself, a member of a small and remote community in the New World, has diverged from the attitudes of people to whom India is still whole. (1977: 9)
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The statement can only remind us of Clifford’s notes on disaporic articulation that are characterised by “unresolved historical dialogues between continuity and disruption, essence and positionality, homogeneity and differences” (36). At the same time, travelling to India can also be a part of his desire for “selfknowledge,” of his fractured identity: An enquiry about India…has to be an enquiry about Indian attitudes; it has to be an enquiry about the civilization itself as it is. And though in India I am a stranger, the starting point of this inquiry — more than might appear in these pages — has been myself. . . (1977: xi)
The enquiry of the land begins with an enquiry of his own “strangeness.” Differences, the half traces, are the very basis of his identification. Again, he writes: In India I know I am a stranger; but increasingly I understand that my Indian memories, the memories of that India which lived on into my childhood in Trinidad, are like trapdoors into a bottomless past (1977: 10).
These “trapdoors” are again contrasted with a supposed wholeness: India in the late twentieth century still seems so much itself, so rooted in its own civilization, it takes time to understand that its independence has meant more than the going away of the British; that the India to which Independence came was a land of far older defeat; that the purely Indian past died a long time ago (1977: 9).
What he does this time is to see the literal ruins of the pre-British past that lay scattered all over the land. While most Indian writers savour the idea that in spite of the repeated destruction “India will go on,” Naipaul finds, on the other hand, that this is not a proper historical view. It fails to notice the traces, the cracks, and more importantly, it will mean inability to learn any lesson from the past. But he is not all that pessimistic:
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With independence and growth, chaos and loss of faith, India was awakening to its distress and the cruelties that had always lain below...Not everyone now was content simply to have his being (1977: 48).
It was the emergence of such a sense of history that allows space for the silenced “others within” that might appear, for some, as disturbances, a sense of doom. More than the Indians housed in blindness to the traces of these histories, Naipaul is hopeful to see the “millions, this unknown India on the move” (1977: 53) It is with these millions that Naipaul begins his third book on the land, Million Mutinies. This time around Naipaul focuses on the fact that “in the torrent of India…people needed to hold on to smaller ideas of who and what they were; they found stability in the smaller groupings of region, clan, caste, family”(1990: 8). He is reassured by many traces that lead to many identities that can be more meaningful than a pan-Indian identity. He is now content to see how “people could be made by conditions in which they lived…People who lived in the little spaces of Bombay dwellings got used to…the communal life of those spaces” (1990: 60). Hence, he focuses on the declaration of new identities like saffron clothing and crossed swords of the Shiv Sena, a right wing regional political party, the rabid communal politics that had segregated the Bombay society. His vision of Bombay begins to change: the poor are acquiring new individuality and begin to stake their own claim to the city: “pity (or rage at their condition, or disgust) was no longer a sufficient response” (1990: 48). The subtitle of the last chapter of Million Mutinies is a curious one — “A Return to India” — which reminds us of his first travels; it is more significant in the sense that he takes the same routes of his earlier visits, and re-narrates the same topics he was preoccupied with. And this travel is a kind of return journey to his own understanding of his Hindu/Indian self. He writes:
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In 27 years I had succeeded in making a kind of return journey, shedding my Indian nerves, abolishing the darkness that separated me from my ancestral past…I had carried in my bones that idea of abjectness and defeat and shame. It was the idea I had taken to India on that slow journey by train and ship in 1962; it was the source of my nerves. (1990: 516)
Against his declaration in An Area of sealing of his entry into India as his home, in Million Mutinies Naipaul declares his return to the country, which appears, at least initially, as a strange move from his well-known acceptance of the role of a perennial traveller. His obsession with his Hindu past, his refusal to read history as anything but one of displacements and ruptures — all these seem to testify to the fact that there is still a desire for a return to that imagined homeland of the past. But this desire must be seen in the light of his latest discovery of an India that has become the land of million mutinies, in the declarations of separateness; not one of order and unity. In fact, the India he appears to be happy with is the one most troubled, threatened with dissolution and chaos. His identification with the “camp followers” mentioned by the colonial traveller William Howard Russell in his book, My Diary in India in the Years 1858-9, leads to rather unexpected desire to share those half traces that are normally ignored in official accounts. But, he notes: The liberation of spirit that has come to India could not come as release alone. In India, with its layer below layer of distress and cruelty, it had come as disturbance. It had come as rage and revolt. India was now a country of a million mutinies (1990: 517).
What might seem to be “disturbances” for the middle class Indians appear, for Naipaul, as the “mutinies” which, again, as a curious reading of the first struggle for Indian independence, might reveal the rather layered nature of the Indian history and social fabric. Further he adds: A million mutinies, supported by twenty kinds of group excess, sectarian excess, religious excess: the beginnings of self awareness,
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it would seem, the beginnings of an intellectual life, already negated by old anarchy and disorder (1990: 518).
These disturbances are “part of the beginning of a new way for many millions, part of India’s growth, part of its restoration.” The Indian State is made up of these mutinies, not their absence. And they are now bolstered by “a central will, a central intellect, a national idea.” It is this India where Naipaul appears to find the possibility for a “return” for colonial/ex-colonial subjects like himself in the sense that even the most settled Indians have started recognizing, in the words of Amitav Ghosh, that “every man in it was a traveller” (135). It is the return of the right to narrate their own versions of India for those who are used to remain excluded for so long from the dominant narratives of Indian history. These narratives, then, appear to have dramatized the desire of the colonials for a return to some originary homeland, and the inherent impossibility of fulfilment of such a desire. His repeated travels to India appear to have played this “drama” of colonial return, the impossibility of which needs to be replayed again and again. These mutinies can be seen as the million minor narratives that have sprung all over India from beneath the Indian grand narrative. In other words, Naipaul now finds millions of counter-narratives erasing the “totalizing boundaries” of the grand but simplified narrative, not only of independent India but also of the myth of a golden past. With the rise of these million mutinies, Naipaul finds it convenient to identify himself with India in its demystified, particularized state. This identification masks the desire to subvert and destroy the self, and negates any possibility of an independent self, but rather exposes the many shreds of half-forgotten selves. Hereat, we must draft a summary of Naipaul’s Indian narratives, which appear, by now, as interventions from the outside, or from the margins, consisting of tales of those who had experienced history as a wound, an ache, not as achievements — as accidents, disruptions, ruins, destruction and plunder, as against the raising of monuments of national pride. In brief, Naipaul is seen looking for the fissures of that history rather than the homogenized and nationalist versions. Even the pre-independence history of
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India, for him, is not necessarily of the nationalist movements taking pure oppositional stances but also of those camp followers who, for generations, had to rely on the conquerors for survival, of those who had managed to survive under the shadows of the foreign rulers. It is a history of discontinuity, displacement and dislocation; of travellers who have crossed the black sea never to return. These disruptions in the national discourse of Indian history can be read as a scene where particularities stand against the fall of a “general” Indian history. One more point of departure. It is often noted that Naipaul’s history of India is, unlike the nationalist/state history, of course not a secular one. In fact, he seems to be of the opinion that India cannot be understood without the numerous religions that are still professed jealously by most Indians. It is, then, one of conflicts and contests of forces with different religious allegiances. But that does not prove, as is often criticised, that it is a religious or Hindu history. Perhaps few other writers have criticised Hinduism and the ancient Hindu kingdoms as unsparingly as Naipaul has done. Both An Area and Wounded Civilization testify to this fact. And in Million Mutinies Hinduism is shown as decentred, more of differences than of unity, less dogmatic, adapting to changes and challenges. If this is to be called a Hindu history, it is the history of the opening up or dissolution of Hinduism. If some elements of understanding and sympathy are to be found, these are less for a central authority within Hinduism than its recent recognition of its other traces. On the other hand, Naipaul finds enough time to understand the other major religions like Jainism, Sikhism, Islam etc. and their role in preparing the adherents for a new India that has learnt to take cognizance of the numerous traces of the past, to adapt and accommodate the marginal voices. These numerous religions have given India the most heterogeneous appearance, never allowing any space for claims of insularity and purity. The positive note of the Million Mutinies can be attributed to the appearance, of the mood of acceptance, among the Indians, of the inherent complexities, inconsistencies, contestations, and particularities that make India understandable only in the plural. It can be surmised, then, that Naipaul’s subversive reading of Indian history leads to a simultaneous deferral of his desire to identify with the Hindu
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India in view of the fact that India itself is not a Hindu state. Or, for that matter, the imagined “homeland” of the Hindus of the past is by no means the shrunken, multi-religious and secular India of contemporary times. Naipaul appears to have reconciled, while demystifying the idea of the golden Hindu past, to the fact that in order to understand the idea of an Indian civilization one needs to understand the very moments and traces of its plunders, colonization, disruptions, diffusions and defacements not only in India proper, but also in areas that belong to the Muslim world, like, for example, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and even Iran to some extent. The ultimate contention of this paper is that in Naipaul’s travel narratives one can notice a constant shifting of focus from the present moment to the past that, alongside the repeated travels to the same spaces over time, takes the readers to detours full of pain and agony of colonial and historic displacement, instead of telling a soothing tale of a happy return to an undisturbed home. These travels can be seen as his retour through the circuits of the colonial itinerary, as an act of mapping the traces and fragments of the hybridized colonial self. That is, Naipaul’s travels can be read as travels unto the self and the unflattering narratives that result from them are the dissolution of the possibility of finding a unified identity for the traveller as well as the perceived, which are indistinguishable anyway. The passionate outbursts of the traveller, the cruel denial of a happy union with the interlocutors, the dismissals of the pretensions of completeness or wholeness of the interlocutors, and the delight at dissolutions of the accepted notions of national identity, racial purity, religious insularity — all these are indicative of only the self-destructive desire of the postcolonial traveller/writer to sacrifice his own subject of knowledge. Even the ultimate narrative is never satisfactory, never complete, always needing revisions, and repeated travels to the same sites. The tracking of the traces of the same itself can be suggested as the predicament and politics of Naipaul’s identity. It will be pertinent to conclude with a curious observation that I have made in the endings of all the three books. A very interesting common ground makes these three narratives more meaningful. Naipaul has a habit of ending
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his books with something outside the main text. An Area ended with the narration of a dream he had had about a tricky piece of cloth that had neither a beginning nor an ending, which makes him conclude: The world is illusion, the Hindus say. We talk of despair, but true despair lies too deep for formulation. It was only now, as my experience of India defined itself more properly against my own homelessness, that I saw how close in the past year I had been to the total Indian negation, how much it had become the basis of thought and feeling. And already, with this awareness, in a world where illusion could only be a concept and not something felt in the bones, it was slipping away from me. I felt it as something true which I could never adequately express and never seize again (1964:290).
The Indian experience as an illusion, that defies memory and expression, finds place again in Wounded Civilization. While commenting on the political instability that the country was facing at the time of his travel, he writes: The stability of Gandhian was an illusion; and India will not be stable again for a long time. But in the present uncertainty and emptiness there is the possibility of a true new beginning, of the emergence in India of mind, after the long spiritual night. “The crisis of India is not political; this is only the view from Delhi. Dictatorship or rule by the army will change nothing. Nor is the crisis only economic. These are only aspects of the larger crisis, which is that of a decaying civilization, where the only hope lies in further swift decay.” I wrote that in 1977: and that seemed to me a blacker time. (1990:290)
These concluding lines are but the re-presentation, despite the differences of circumstances, of some remarks he had made earlier. But Million Mutinies concludes with the description of another Indian illusion: the world of the movies. He narrates the experiences of Paritosh, the man from the Indian film industry who is back after living in the “make-believe” dwelling
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places — the film set — which are meant to shoot the illusory, make-believe world of movies. It is worth noting that the Hindi film industry is presently supposed to showcase Indian culture and identity — a very popular mode of entertainment providing a sense of Indianness to the Indian Diaspora. The film is made in the fake dwelling places that themselves were constructed from the photographs taken of real places. Is this not a work of playing roles, of a life we know to be unreal, made out of and meant to represent some illusory reality? What is more interesting is the “Acknowledgements” that comes at the end of the book. It is refreshing to know from it that the book is meant to be a make-believe travel text — real names and circumstances changed for “obvious reasons” — resulting in a fictitious narrative. Literally speaking, the narrative is not to be read literally. One can rest assured that there is no literal sense in Naipaul’s travel narratives where reality is always already crossed out.
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References Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the late Twentieth Century.Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: Harvard University Press, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1974. Edwards, Justin D. and Rune Graulund. Eds. Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations. Great Britain: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Ghosh, Amitav. “The Imam and the Indian.” Granta 20 (1986): 135-146. Naipaul, V. S. An Area of Darkness. London: André Deutsch, 1964: 2002.
–––, India: a Wounded Civilization. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. London: Picador, 2002.
–––, India: A Million Mutinies Now. London: William Heinemann, 1990. London: Vintage, 1998. Robertson, George, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis and Tim Putnam. Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement. London and New York: Routledge, 1994
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READER, TOURIST, AND PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY TODAY: A CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE OF TRAVEL
Arup K Chatterjee Citation: Chatterjee, Arup K. “Reader, Tourist, and Psychogeography Today: A Categorical Imperative of Travel.” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.1 (2014): 152-74. Abstract: With the death of the author — whose intention is otherwise the chief anchor of the text, according to Knapp and Michaels — reading risks being led into the culture of mere interpretation, instead of reading as a wholesome experience of the rewriting of the spatial text. This gaze of the interpreter can be equated with tourist gaze given the theoretical analogy that the paper draws between reading and travelling. Considering Barthes’ notions of jouissance and dérive in the reading practice is seen as a subversive, even perverse, and a travelling act at once. It must preserve the site of jouissance from all forms of reconnaissance and interpretation by another. Given the appropriation of Barthes by architectural thought, particularly Tschumi, and the treatment of the text as a metaphor for the city, the paper goes on to identify the aesthetic of delinquency in the spaces that English writers such as Blake, De Quincey and Conan Doyle have created, thus observing a parallel between the delinquency of the marginal figures occupying this spatial text and the reader’s own. In this psychogeographical adoption of the delinquent persona the reader becomes one with the spatial text, thereby acquiring the agency to create his own culture of sociolects based on the text. Psychogeographical practices in reading are thus never far from the corrupting influence of the touristic-gaze — if such a thing could exist in the reading practice — creating a class of its own, based on its appropriation of the space and the architecture of the text, into one’s lived experiences. This adoption of delinquency from the spatial text is prone to create a new other zone of marginals and delinquents in the lived society, which the reading-traveller should be wary of, and absolutely hospitable towards, while being hospitable to the other landscape of the text. The paper concludes thus by posing a situation in which the reader can be a tourist in his own text, and how this can be observed as a categorical imperative of travel.
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Keywords: Psychogeography, Situationism, Flânerie, London, Debord, De Quincey, Barthes, dérive, Absolute Hospitality, Categorical Imperative. Copyright:
“Reader, Tourist, and Psychogeography Today: A Categorical Imperative of Travel” (by Arup K Chatterjee) by Coldnoon: Travel Poetics is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.coldnoon.com.
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READER, TOURIST, AND PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY TODAY: A CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE OF TRAVEL
Arup K Chatterjee
Consider the approach: Dear Reader… f course it does not imply the reader is alive, or dear. The very purpose of this approach has classically been not to endear but distance the reader, from the centre: the meaning, or the intention. Can there be one without another? 1 And, is the reader alive, in any case? What do I mean by questioning the existence of the reader? I must mean at least 1 Referring to E.D. Hirsch’s Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Conn., 1967), Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels note that meaning without (authorial) intention is a theoretical impossibility: The fact that what a text means is what its author intends is clearly stated by E. D. Hirsch when he writes that the meaning of a text “is, and can be, nothing other than the author's meaning” and “is determined once and for all by the character of the speaker's intention.” Having defined meaning as the author's intended meaning, Hirsch goes on to argue that all literary interpretation “must stress a reconstruction of the author’s aims and attitudes in order to evolve guides and norms for construing the meaning of his text” (725).
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three things. Firstly, I presume the possibility of his life or death as something either phenomenologically perceivable or scientifically controllable. Secondarily, I have already (as imminent always) hinted at the possibility of his locatability, for I have referred to my approach. As I approach, he is located, for he that imbibes me — the author — gives up himself to himself. And thirdly, I have conceived his existentiality — living or dead — in situ. Hence, the idea I would like to begin with is, reading is culturally forced to becoming immobile as though it were interpretation. But, is the reader, capable of reading any more than interpreting, or must merely stop at it? The phrase “tourist gaze,” now considerably commonplace, is not left to tourism alone. Tourism does not exist outside of human behaviour and culture. Therefore, that part of culture which responds to the spectacles of tourism must respond with corresponding measures of consumption to institutions even apart from tourism. The purpose of this investigation is to draw a parallel between the tourist and the reader. If the tourist gaze is configured by “representations” digitally proliferated by the tourism industry (Selby, Hayllar and Griffin, 186), can the reader’s gaze said to be manufactured by the publishing industry, or some such social agency? Or, even more sweepingly, pose a thesis in imitation of Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author”: the reader enters into his own death, tourism begins…?2 This manner of questioning would however deviate from the seriousness of the issue at hand. So, let us grant this one serious and sustaining question to our digressing minds: can we be the tourist in our own text? This is quite the same as asking can we go so far away from our own world as to come back only to an unfamiliar one, or to transgress the world so much as to lose one’s transgressibility. This notion of transgression is a whole, as whose constituent reading follows. Henceforth, whatever be the deviation in our line of interrogation, we must bear fidelity to the above question. The question of reading is never divorced from the reading of space. It should therefore be needless to differentiate anymore the reading of a text from the reading of culture, which in turn belongs to a space. There may be 2 Barthes’ famous utterance: “...the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins” (1989: 49).
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one industry promoting tourism, another cinema, and yet another literature. There is also no need to demarcate one industry from another, not at least in this investigation, as it does not concern the specificities of industrial economics. What is under scrutiny here is what subversive potential, if at all any, is left in the reader. The question presupposes a crisis in the activity or discipline of reading today, by anticipating the possibility of tourist-like features interrupting the relatively immobile and seemingly individual act of reading. The idea is not to provide a messianic revelation of — nor an answer to — the perils of the reading community. It is, instead to foreclose a looming symptom of touristic-reading before it reaches a malignant stage. In this endeavour I have no empirical evidence of any kind of declining readership of one or another genre of literature. In fact, I am not even concerned formally with literature alone. I am only concerned with the literary text, the hypothetical Foucauldian text3 that pervades everything, or of which we are a part, which always contains a set of signs referring back to the author, whose role we in turn usurp. With a generation of elders casting moral aspersions on the reading habits of their youngers, more than ever now, it is time — as it always was — to revitalize the literary text with the spatial text, and understand the behavioural responses of the reader to one with reference to another. Anyhow, this series of doubts does not, at any cost, overrule the interjections: has reading changed at all, or does this culture of touristic-reading belong strictly to our times? We must, at the outset, distinguish reading from interpreting. Interpretation is the translation of available codes into a cultural script; reading is the founding of new cultures. In interpretation we decipher the text. The author is very much alive; or, we can never supplant the author while interpreting. It might be argued: interpretation has no author. That is precisely the point. The author, or the intention, is so well concealed that he is never distant. Also, the interpreter can never transgress this immune authorial 3 See Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?” in Donald F. Bouchard ed. Michel Foucault’s Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Cornell University Press, 1980); 113-38.
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spectre, for he is everywhere. He is embodied, and dispersed in the society of interpretation. And, any interpretation then is solidly furnished with the “final signified” (Barthes, 1989: 53). So, interpretation is the upholding of ideology; reading to interpret is passivity towards a pre-existing ideology. The exactitude of interpretation is determined by ideological intentions. It is not the “exactitude” that Barthes talks of, for instance, as an alteration of codes. This exactitude is in fact the very culture that he defines his exactitude against: the painstakingly and increasingly well detailed representation of language to outfit a certain cultural standard (1975: 26). Interpretation is the reaffirmation of what Barthes calls “sociolects.” So, in interpretation, the intention of the discourse apprehends individual intention. In reading this intention is nurtured, contradicted, interspersed or transgressed, but not wielded. There is no centre, or whole; there is no structure of the text, at least none exterior to the reader. The text, or the reader, does not move toward one another. There is no question of the approach towards the reader after he has imbibed the approacher’s sensibility and authority. What I have so unaffectedly called “subversive” is described equally wonderfully by Barthes as jouissance, which for problems of translation can only read in English as “bliss”: If I read this sentence, this story, or this word with pleasure, it is because they were written in pleasure (such pleasure does not contradict the writer's complaints). But the opposite? Does writing in pleasure guarantee — guarantee me, the writer — my reader's pleasure? Not at all. I must seek out this reader (must “cruise” him) without knowing where he is. A site of bliss is then created. It is not the reader's “person” that is necessary to me, it is this site: the possibility of a dialectics of desire, of an unpredictability of bliss: the bets are not placed, there can still be a game (1975: 4).
The text, or this Barthesian “site,” is the lived experience of the space, which is a product of this reading. The dialectics of desire in reading is also the dialectics of space. The reader must not only adopt the writer, even at the cost of himself, but also produce a space outside of an ideology that represses desire. Moreover, this site must be in the realm of the unknowable, a personal, even
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perverse discourse, rather than one in the public. The reader, like a nomad, avoids the striated spaces knowable to the sovereign, invigilated by this sovereign’s mass, and yet roams those very streets like a character, himself. The reader, the writer, and his (their?) site is all in one complex: it is then not just dialectical, but trialectical. Does the reader still accept this site as his own, and allow the contests of his desire, therein? Does he still travel towards it, daydream within it as though it were his home? Or does he remain on the outside, or at best the fringes and leave after interpreting? Or worse still, leave it after a reconnaissance of this site of pleasure, or the orgy of language? Critics, who talk of travel writing today with regard to the paucity of spaces to travel, are mistaken. Or, to be fair to them, they talk of a rather grandiose and masculine form of travel, whereas the Benjaminian flâneur has for nearly hundred years been offering — paradoxically (since it is somewhat feminine, and spatially confined) — a virile traveller of metropolitan spaces. His (or her) spectrum of travel features not only of architecture but also the deluge of extra-architectural features such as advertising boards, traffic rhythms, distribution of commodities, and the city noises gushing past our apertures. They leave us always ahead but forced to look behind, after and vacillate. They impose on us the behaviour of the reader with the Oedipal instinct to “denude,” the structure of this arcade: to know “the origin and the end” (Barthes, 1975: 10). The city arcade is like a great classic that produces spaces of consumption that are active and passive. Within the arcade, there are passages — like passages in a classic text such as Dickens or the authors that Barthes mentions — which we often skip. The arcade allows for this flexibility wherein we sieve out what is useful to our secret pleasure from that which is useless. And, as Barthes notes: “we never skip the same passages” (ibid, 11). In this imposition of delight, bliss is compromised, and apprehended by this selfregulatory structure of the metropolitan spatial-text. What is the function of the culture of speed at which we overtake the huge columns of commodities? Is it to really take us past them, or to circumvent that site of bliss? Nevertheless, there are so many spaces to travel now: that is, if travel were some kind of interpretation, if space were a text, interpretable and re-writable. Every space that has been discovered, is mapped, and marked by the striations
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of human knowability. Without this understanding we have never travelled at all. It is well known that there exists something called literary tourism, but can there exist a way of reading that is touristic? The romanticism — or necromanticism4 — over a literary author overflows into the spaces that tourists wish to travel to. Can similarly, the romance of a space overflow into the texts one is made to desire to read? If such a phenomenon is to be real the romance does not remain transcendental, but succumbs to the world of the spectacle. What are we when we take just a glance, a peek at a written space, on the worldwideweb or a book at a bookshop, but tourists? And, if we are suddenly, by the landscape of these texts, reminded of a space uncannily familiar or familial, do we not tend to set up a temporary home? We do at least travel back in time to our oneiric home of the past. This going back is purely psychogeographic. Try traversing the exact distance between your ground and that very home it reminded you of. The concrete geographies you cross shall not be the same as your psychogeography. The question is: does the reader have a psychogeography? Or, can reading and/or interpretation be a psychogeographical process? But, first one must understand what psychogeography is. According to the succinct explanation by Merlin Coverley psychogeography is the intersection of psychology and geography (13). However, it does not merely end there, for this small limit works to merely relegate the idea to just another coinage, stripped entirely of its subversive potential. Psychogeography seeks to free the world of its urban and spectacular banality, by imagining an alternative geography to urban landscape that unconceals the “mystery” (ibid) behind its capitalist architecture and monotonous symbolisms of advertism, cosmopolitanism and the multi-storey. Psychogeography is not necessarily a moral idea of reversing the Satanism of the metropolitan mass-consuming city, as it might be misunderstood. It should neither be seen as a rigorous and scholarly inquiry into the makes and 4 See Paul Westover’s Necromanticism: Traveling to Meet the Dead, 1750-1860 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
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masks of the capitalist city. No, that it doesn’t do; at least that is not the germ it is born out of. In the words of Guy Debord, who claimed psychogeography as his brainchild it is the “study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals” (5). The rationale behind psychogeography is to create an easier world, where perception and reading does not stop at interpretation, where the world is internal, and at the same time lies outside the geography where the dominant sociolects of the tourist-culture prevail. It is the acknowledgement of the fact that the given metropolitan-geography is too complex to understand. Instead of the rigorously scientific method of making meaning in the lived world psychogeography tries to do something as the following: Unfold a street map of London, place a glass, rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw round its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city, and walk the circle, keeping as close as you can to the curve. Record the experience as you go, in whatever medium you favour: film, photograph, manuscript, tape. Catch the textual runoff of the streets; the graffiti, the branded litter, the snatches of conversation. Cut for sign. Log the data-stream. Be alert to the happenstance of metaphors, watch for visual rhymes, coincidences, analogies, family resemblances, the changing moods of the street. Complete the circle, and the record ends. Walking makes for content; footage for footage. (Robert MacFarlane, qtd. in Coverley, 9)
As clear in the above, there is more work to do in psychogeography; yet it is a short cut. It is not a study of a work that is the city-space but a replacement of its geography, often operating as a complete mockery of it, both comical and grave. So, when I talk of the absence of rigour in psychogeography as a discipline, I do so to avoid already sounding like a prejudiced author, taken in by the versatility of the project. In fact, Situationism, or the 1960s avant garde urban movement of creating urban situations, is indeed rigorous and very queerly so. According to Adrian Forty, Situationism was “an opposition to the process of reification, of the tendency of capitalist culture to turn ideas and
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relationships into things whose fixity obscures reality.” Therefore, in its critique and re-envisioning of space Situationism sought to penetrate the hidden forms of social stratification built into urban geography. Jonathan Hill in his book Actions of Architecture retells a situationist scenario as described by the NATO architect Villanueva Brandt. A situation was set up consisting of a 24-hour intervention in a public space, Leicester Square. The author inhabited the square with chair and table, creating his own space, and communicated exclusively by means of a typewriter. All social exchanges were carried out through writing, all institutional exchanges and confrontations were also carried out through writing. Observations, narratives and the author’s dialogue were typed in lower case and all external dialogues or contributions were typed in the upper case. The beginning and end of the text was determined by the 24-hour cycle (68)
However, this queer experimentality of psychogeography is not as new as the global sixties. It has shaped a lot of the Dickensian squalor of London, although not with as modern methods as the situationists used. In literary history this subversive element of psychogeography is best observed in the nocturnal trysts of William Blake, Thomas De Quincey, or Sherlock Holmes with the vagrants of London. While Blake is described by Iain Sinclair as the “Godfather of Psychogeography,” (Coverley, 39-40) De Quincey, supplies the finest experiments in the psychogeography of the marginalized and criminalized sections of London in his opiated revelries, accumulating the mysteries of the “urban Gothic”; in this De Quincey behaves as a prototype of the modern situationist, (Coverley, 17) in his Confessions. Phil Baker associates this psychogeographical history of London closely with “the deviant, and sordid, or antiquarianism with crime and lowlife” (325). He also goes on to trace Situationism back to de Quincey (326), who sought to provide a grotesque urban counterpart to the otherwise idyllic countryside of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (Coverley, 43). The Confessions available to most reader-tourists as a book on addiction and drugs has a misleading title. The
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book only “nominally concerned with addiction” and even then without any legal violation at the time it was published (ibid). The opiated de Quincey is instead a metaphor for the psychogeographer taking an remarkably imaginary route towards order, in the throes of physical and intellectual hunger (de Quincey, 15; 38). For instance, note the following description of his rambles: Some of these rambles led me to great distances: for an opiumeater is too happy to observe the motion of time. And sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the polestar, and seeking ambitiously for a northwest passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen. I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae, and doubted, whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London. For all this, however, I paid a heavy price in distant years, when the human face tyrannized over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back and haunted my sleep, with the feeling of perplexities moral or intellectual, that brought confusion to the reason, or anguish and remorse to the conscience (111).
But even psychogeography is not free of travel writing’s novelty-seeking approach; nevertheless, its novelties lie frequently among the low-lives, not in an exotic but a derisory capacity. Especially in the case of Holmes, the most powerful reason for his popularity was the repugnantly Gothic geography of London — its noir-styled vigilant streets — which is still a delight in erstwhile colonies of the Empire. For delight, strictly read consumption. So, what was, even partially, subversive when Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in the late 1800s, remains as delightful today owing to those terrors having being tamed or made picturesque over time. One does not fall for the land that is England but the
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landscape “as landscape rather than land is all the rage” (Urry, 21). What the most recent TV series of Sherlock does is to consume the detective into its modern geography. The very idea of making a character ‘sleek’ is to treat him like a device — not unlike the cell-phone that Sherlock uses frequently to send texts — that must follow the updated codes of the generation. Neither the text, nor the landscape it represents subverts anything anymore except what was subversive. Yet, the question persists: can reading or interpreting the character and its geography, in all its varying degrees be akin to psychogeography? It can be when one houses within oneself a culture that does not severely overlap with the culture without. This is to say we can have a culture within so that we are already always different from the cultural space we inhabit; we are agonistic or antagonistic to this inhabited culture. However, the certainty, or even optimism, of this agonism or antagonism seems hugely suspect when one encounters the example: “‘Wow, that’s so postcard’ (visitor seeing Victoria Falls)” (qtd. in Osborne, 79). The culture within, therefore, while always in cultivation, is always endangered of being an image — the image of the spectacle. When this happens one stops housing, or even being part of a culture; one becomes a tourist of it. 5 Consciousness of the written or real landscape is seen through the lens of the camera, focussed from the balcony looking comfortably down upon the terrific and the sublime (Urry, 20).The spectacle belonging to an external agency mediates between us and the interpretation. The Victoria Falls belongs elsewhere even when one is right in front of it; it belongs in the postcard. Its legitimacy, and certitude of interpretation, is drawn from the spectacle of the postcard that has the potential to unite masses across continents. It has already been consumed visually by the reader, whose persona is dead by the time of visiting the actual landscape; this is when the tourist has already taken over. Contrary to this example of controllable interpretation, reading is uncontrollable and 5 Buzard in his The Beaten Track (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) talks of the possibility when “the beginning of modernity…(is) a time when one stops belonging to a culture and can only tour it” (27).
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immediate. It is an act of penetrating into the “inhospitable” land (ibid), and waging a war (Barthes calls language a “warrior topos”) 6 instead of consuming the readily available landscape. This drifting or dérive has undergone a greater rarefaction with the death of the author, or so it would seem. I say this in utmost consistency with Barthes. He makes room amply for the dériveur: My pleasure can very well take the form of a drift. Drifting occurs whenever I do not respect the whole, and whenever, by dint of seeming driven about by language's illusions, seductions, and intimidations, like a cork on the waves, I remain motionless, pivoting on the intractable bliss that binds me to the text (to the world). Drifting occurs whenever social language, the sociolect, fails me (as we say: my courage fails me). Thus another name for drifting would be: the Intractable…(1975, 1819)
While Barthes argues for the dérive by dislodging the author, my basic difference of articulation with him is that the death of the author of the city is like imposing a very foreign book upon a xenophobic reader. That is to say, while it is possible for us to pay no heed to the author in the reading of a text, the dérive is not as surely liberating and pleasure causing when one is drifting within the confines of city architecture. As Hill remarks: “cities are different from books. It is possible, but not necessary, to physically rearrange a book” (69). In the same vein, it is necessary but not as possible to rearrange the city, unless one draws a more purposive method. Purportedly, book is supposed to be read, a city is not. It is especially not supposed to be read so as to keep 6 According to Barthes language is infinitely divisible into power-playing rival units, fighting for “hegemony”: …if power is on its side, it spreads everywhere in the general and daily occurrences of social life, it becomes doxa, nature…but even out of power, even when power is against it, the rivalry is reborn, the jargons split and struggle among themselves. A ruthless topic rules the life of language (Barthes, 1975: 28).
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concealed the ideologies of social hierarchy and the disproportion of consumability. Of course, Barthes never specified the city while talking of language, nor does he use the text as a metaphor for the city. But arguably his intention is not consequential. We might as well talk of the city as the text, even in Barthesian terms. Not only that, but also authorizing us is the fact that Barthes did present a paper on the spatial-counterpart of the author/text titled “Semiology and Urbanism.” In this, Ben Highmore sees the possibility of the analogies between the reader and the urban user, and the author and the planner: “the birth of the urban reader must be at the cost of the Planner” (157). Yet, the text that really brings Barthes into the realm of the space and, more specifically the city, is Bernard Tschumi’s “The Pleasure of Architecture” modelled on Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, which has hitherto served as the one of the bedrocks of this paper. According to Tschumi, historically pleasure has risked being called the decadent architect’s vice (81). But, space corresponds to the unconscious, and the pleasure in both of these realms inclines towards “the edge of madness” (84). Space is seen as the absent presence, a void that the user must inevitably rush in to complete, or reconfigure. When Tschumi talks of “architecture” he refers not to the touristic landscape — that is always interpreted as an imitation of the postcard — but to a more usable and re-writable form of space. “The ultimate pleasure of architecture is that impossible moment when an architectural act, brought to excess, reveals both the traces of reason and the immediate experience of space…The architecture of pleasure lies where concept and experience of space abruptly coincide” (89). What Tschumi is trying to represent is a scenario where there is both the immediate invocation of desire and its fulfilment in the reader’s bliss, not within a concealment of the ideology of architecture, but precisely in its unconcealment. Nick Couldry’s essay “On the Actual Street” explores how tourist landscapes have turned from being non-symbolic to over-symbolic spaces. This means, a certain architecture is not confined within its city limits but acts as a “capital of symbolism” as in the case of Disney World (Zutkin, 232). With the extreme inflation in media attention over tourist landscapes it is possible for the architectural desire to be mediated. So, desire is fulfilled at the cost of a
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mass-fulfilment of the same. The spectacle of the landscapes of “shopping malls and theme parks…which are sites of current or historical media production” (Couldry, 60) unites us all as interpreters of a global culture. The instantaneous interpretability of the global landscape on television and the web reduces manifold the consciousness of space outside these media. In fact, our space cannot be outside the mediatized space; as said earlier, no space can be conceived anymore without reference to the urban city. So, something is touristic and produces desire only in difference from the space of the tourist’s home, not as an immediate phenomenon: “we travel abroad to discover in distant lands something whose presence at home has become unrecognizable” (de Certeau, 50). Any case of a lack of literary responsiveness to the local space is the means to the psychological binarization of spaces, domestic and touristic. It also a case of boredom in the Barthesian, sense whereby the state of boredom is the domestic space is also the state of pleasure that has fallen short of its excess; or that which is short of bliss: “Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure” (Barthes, 1975: 26). This controlled distinction between pleasure and bliss is what makes a tourist out of the reader who is unable to respond to the demands of the domicile, and falls prey to an external agency of desire that unites the world of tourism. In simpler terms, this is what also happens in urban alienation. When the Parisian flâneur came on the stage of the urban city, much before the Situationists, s/he was the symptom of the modern cosmopolis and the death of the provincial home (Coverley, 20). Xavier de Maistre’s A Journey Around my Room (Fr. Voyage autour de ma chambre) written as early as 1794 foregrounds a withdrawal from the world of the grand travels of Crusoe and Gulliver into the shelter of his oneiric home. De Maistre’s invitation to the reader to take a tour around his room, comprising six weeks, is what consolidates the idea of the “voyage immobile” proposed by Deleuze and Guattari. It calls for a topophilia absent in the practice of our everyday shortterm travels, a greater awareness and perception of streets that we take, instead of allowing ideological space to invade us. De Maistre does not talk about a utopia out of the world; his belongings and his furniture is replete with constant references to the socio-political space, but his bed acts as his anchor.
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With the coming of the flâneur this armchair method of travelling or tourism became more and more the way to cope with the demonic pace of the city. It can be seen as politically radical owing to its passivity in the process of consumption. It helps neither the economy nor the history of capitalism; it is an aristocracy in defiance of capitalism. A strange nauseating sense of freedom exudes from the revelation of de Certeau: “In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a ‘metaphor’” (115). Our tales, the text of our daily lives, could also take the form of a metaphor which must hereby be considered as “noble” as the vehicles of Athens. Travel becomes the central code of the text of our lives, and our spatial consciousness, in all its vicissitudes, the determinant of its ideology. We are suddenly so free to travel that anything we do cannot stop us from perceiving it as though we were travelling, and legitimizing the entire agency that the practice accumulates. Not only are we so free, we are condemned to travel, or to be tourists — left to us to draw an anthropological space of our own, or thoughtlessly crowd the geometric space of the street. Our texts are born under the supposition that their author is dead. Not only is this an idea, but also one must have to suppose that the author is really dead in order to play an important role in the reading of the text. Else, we shall be perennially subjugated to the author. How far can one go in the reading of the text so it does not ostracize the reader? There is an intractable socioeconomic solidarity between the touristic-readers of the text. These readers are the ones driven by sales of commodities. The stories are constantly driven by a labour that transforms a geometric space to a functional space. This is the drawing room of our apartment: would be conforming to certain geometric parameters of the given culture; between this wall and sofa is a trolley that contains the poems I have written in this year: would be to make that space functional. De Certeau points out that general descriptions of domestic spaces follow codes of the map or the tour. They are either follow knowable static codes of vectors (to the left…or the right…), or imaginable and conditional dynamic codes (if you take that corridor…). The narrator of these spaces overtly follows the touristic persona, according to de Certeau, in the study by C. Linde and W. Labov that he cites. Only three per cent of the corpus of these descriptions
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) A Categorical Imperative of Travel | Arup K Chatterjee
matched the mapping technique (scientific), while the rest were in the order of the tourist (119). There is a certain imposition of an order of knowledge that separates our quotidian geographical practices as a world outside that of scientific exhibits. The industry of tourism — including those spaces of consumption that are the pedestrian hawker-zones or the promenades and shopping malls (since we are talking of practically any space as tourable) — works by mapping desire in the tourist, while these maps as de Certeau says: The map, a totalizing stage on which elements of diverse origin are brought together to form the tableau of a “state” of geographical knowledge, pushes away into its prehistory or into its posterity, as if into the wings, the operations of which it is the result or the necessary condition. It remains alone on the stage. The tour describers have disappeared (121).
It would not be an exaggeration to state that in case of the mapping of space, or desire (in tourism) the routes are always predescribed (de Certeau, 119-121). Any map is an inversion of the “organization” and participation we see in our everyday relations with space, or our “spatial stories,” as de Certeau calls them. These stories are not only of a conflicting or disputable nature, they are also legislative. The history of court proceedings contains a lot of this valuable travel literature as the stories of parties involved in disputes are always of a spatial kind, involving a marking of boundaries around the sites of conflict. Here de Certeau adds: Mr. Mulatier declares that his grandfather planted this apple tree on the edge of his field…Jeanpierre reminds us that Mr. Bouvet maintains a dungheap on a piece of land of which he is supposed to be the joint owner with his brother Andre…”Genealogies of places, legends about territories. Like a critical edition, the judge's narration reconciles these versions. The narration is “established” on the basis of “primary” stories (those of Mr. Mulatier, Jeanpierre, and so many others), stories that already have the function of spatial legislation since they determine rights and divide up lands by
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“acts “ or discourses about actions (planting a tree, maintaining a dungheap, etc.) (122).
Owing to this very classical association of spatial stories with disputes the foundation of this essay calls for serious consideration. The subversion of a grand design of travel and tourism can be amply seen in our daily geographies, or psychogeography, if you will. But subversion is not all one wants. In fact the question of the subversive potential in the examples of De Quincey and the Baker Street Irregulars (or helpers of Holmes) is also the question of the home. There is the primordial weakness of the human heart to reach out for these figures ridden with hunger and homelessness; this weakness is not just for the sentimental and nostalgic elements of history — the clothes they wore, or the tower clocks that kept their hours but also for their unlocatability. This sheer quality is what makes them so exotic. The London that we see in Blake’s heart-rending, or politically radical poem is also exotic because it marks out the space of that which is a foreigner to the bloody “Palace walls.” It marks out the space of the delinquent, that has nowhere to dwell, and that which dwells everywhere. Simultaneously, Blake places the “Marriage hearse” in a no man’s land, outside of legal boundaries. The harlot’s infant is marked out into this nowhere space (Blake, 65); it is provided the endless divergence of space to practice its spatial story, read it and live it at once. The flâneur’s female counterpart, the flâneuse, therefore was often the prostitute, who was the primary source of this intellectual desertification of space. She was not only the source of physical but also geographical pleasure, with the Parisian arcades “repeatedly identified as the haunts of both prostitutes and their clients, amongst them Benjamin and Baudelaire” (Coverley, 72). Typically, by detouring the process of reproduction, the prostituting flâneuse sublimated her potential into the reproduction of space. The codes of fashion have also swung towards the costumes of this performance of prostitution and its clientele. The reader, not only taken in by this inconceivable fantasy of belonging to this nowhere, begins to adopt the lifestyle of the delinquent. For de Certeau delinquency is the form of the God which lives in the desert, or the forest and our homes (129). The reader becomes this wanton God swaying the rules of
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) A Categorical Imperative of Travel | Arup K Chatterjee
space, reproducing the space of the world in his remote locale, then walking the streets of a the outer world, creating the noise of Europe’s bazaars on every oriental gravel beneath his feet. Knowing not whence and why comes this attitude of irreverence to the native, and hospitability to the foreign, the reader and the psychogeographer moves blindly towards an “increasing banalisation of…(the) urban environment (Coverley, 111). The foreign object of desire — seen above as homelessly orphaned — to which the reader’s hospitability is aroused, is itself foreign to the foreigner. This hospitability takes the form of hospitality from which the reader derives the agency of marking his own boundaries. In travel, not only does the traveller receive hospitality, he also provides it to the host. The boundary between the host and the traveller are blurred in “absolute hospitality,” in the way Jacques Derrida describes the concept in Of Hospitality: absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (provided with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc.), but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names. The law of absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right, with law or justice as rights (25).
What this implies is an interchangeability between hospitality and absolute hospitality. Nicola J. Watson in the Literary Tourist describes the now regular ordinary phenomenon of thanatourism in a whole new light. Thanatourism coined by Graham M.S. Dann and A.V. Seaton, is the form of tourism that is concerned with death, and in many cases with the death of the (literary) author. Although thanatourism is a very broad spectrum, it often features tourists travelling to witness spaces where authors (and important personalities) have either died or been buried. It also involves places where legends of hauntings and spectrality are known to prevail. So, in Watson’s
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) A Categorical Imperative of Travel | Arup K Chatterjee
book we have the case of the literary tourist travelling to Poet’s Corner in Westminster abbey of London to hunt for relics from the author’s graves. Watson explains: The touristic impulse to take relics — whether pieces chipped off the monument, artefacts made from the mulberry tree that Shakespeare was supposed to have planted with his own hands or from the crab apple tree under which he was supposed to have slept off a drinking binge, bits of ‘Shakespeare’s chair,’ or, a Victorian preference, sprigs of ivy from the churchyard and elsewhere — marks the emergence of a new model of tourism driven by a desire on the part of the tourist to construct a more intimate and exclusive relationship with the writer than is supposed to be available through mere reading (34).
With the death of the author — commemorated over and over again in this form of thanatourism — not only a very intimate but also a completely new text produced by the reader. And, not only is the author’s grave and its discourse hospitable to the tourist, the latter too provides hospitability to the author’s body, and its relics. This unique case of absolute hospitality as a result of the death of the author reveals the phenomenon of hospitality in the (touristic) reading. In our examples, the bleak poetic image of an orphaned London is what makes it so exotic for the reader; and also, what weakens him towards it, in an effort to adopt it, to be hospitable towards it insofar as making the text his own story. But, this is how the reader desires to himself belong — belong not to the nowhere from which he has adopted his persona, but the London that has created the boundary of the native and the foreign within its own space. So, having received this absolute hospitality by the orphan, having belonged to space of the text, the reader turns his back, creating on his way another wasteland, another foreign space that is a leftover of his desires. Then, to finally take up the question again: can we be the tourist in our own text? I shall answer this by means of answering the other subsequent doubts that I had raised in the beginning of this essay. Does tourism begin with
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Jan ’14 | 3(1) A Categorical Imperative of Travel | Arup K Chatterjee
the death of the reader? It certainly begins with the mapping of the reader’s desire to be guided forth into the author’s realm. And, the reader should always be prepared to die, for the very cause behind the death of the author is that the text belongs to no one. Then what is it that belongs at all? The answer is the notion of home, and its space of private rationality, which is constantly invaded, and quite blissfully so, by the desire to experience the jouissance of the text. The reader desirous of adopting this jouissance hastens towards the end of the Barthesian striptease. We all desire to tame this beast, to home it to our domicile. According to de Certeau the reader is the traveller, and is the first one at that. It is not the reader who imitates the traveller, but the other way round. In this scenario the reader should always be prepared to be the tourist in his own text. That is to say, in spite of adopting the homeless De Quincey, in spite of practising Blake’s psychogeography of exposing the un-chartered streets of London, in spite of guardianing the Baker Street Irregulars, the reader must be prepared not to be the Londoner. In spite of being the flâneur he must be prepared not to walk the Parisian arcades, as all those realms never belonged to the rationale behind London or Paris, or any such establishment. In fact, those spaces were the very oppositions of such a rationale. The condition of absolute hospitality the travelling reader should provide to the text, should be such that does not seize away a home from it; it should be such that bliss does not become a discourse for further travel and readership; it should be such that the reader does not start mapping, as an agent, for himself and for the other the site of his jouissance. The reader should ignore the invocation “Dear reader” lest it accomplish the task of locating him, pinning him down and marking this as a conquest of desire over the reader. Finally, the reader should be prepared to be a tourist—as an other — in his own text, to know how it feels to be the toured. To conclude I would like to draw a parallel with Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law” (30). The categorical imperative that this essay proposes is: read to travel where no one has travelled, at the same time, will that it is another’s home.
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References Baker, Phil. “Secret City: Psychogeography and the End of London,” in Joe Kerr and Andrew Gibson eds. London from Punk to Blair. London: Reaktion Books, 2003; 323-33. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
–––,The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. University of California Press, 1989. Blake, William. “London,” in Songs of Innocence and Experience: with Other Poems. London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1866; 65. Buzard, J. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Couldry, Nick. “On the Actual Street,” in David Crouch, Rhona Jackson and Felix Thompson eds. The Media and the Tourist Imagination: Converging Cultures. London, New York: Routledge, 2005; 60-75. Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2006 Dann, Graham M.S. and A.. V. Seaton eds. Slavery, Contested Heritage, and Thanatourism. Binghamton: Haworth Hospitality Press, 2001. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 1988. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-eater. London: Taylor and Hessey, 1823. Derrida, Jacques and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality: Cultural Memory in the Present. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. California: Stanford University Press, 2000. Forty, Adrian. Words and Building: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000. Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” in Donald F. Bouchard ed. Michel Foucault’s Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Cornell University Press, 1980;113-38. Hill, Jonathan. Actions of Architecture: Architects and Creative User. London, New York: Routledge, 2003. Kant, Immanuel. Ethical Philosophy: The Complete Texts of Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, and Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, Part II of The Metaphysics of Morals, with On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns. Trans. James W. Ellington. Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 1994.
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Knapp, Steven and Walter Benn Michaels. “Against Theory,” in Critical Inquiry 8.4 (1982): 723-42. Osborne, Peter. Travelling Light: Photography, Travel and Visual Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Selby, Martin, Bruce Hayllar and Tony Griffin. “The Tourist Experience of Precincts,” in Martin Selby , Bruce Hayllar and Tony Griffin eds. City Spaces – Tourist Places: Urban Tourism Precincts. Oxford, Burlington: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2008; 183-202. Tschumi, Bernard. “The Pleasure of Architecture,” in Architecture and Disjunction. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1996; 81-97. Urry, John. “The ‘Consuming’ of Place,” in Adam Jaworski and Annette Pritchard eds. Discourse, Communication and Tourism. New York, Ontario: Channel View Publications, 2005; 19-27. Watson Nicola J. The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain. Westover, Paul. Necromanticism: Traveling to Meet the Dead, 1750-1860. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Zukin, Sharon (1991) Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World, Berkeley: University of California Press. Sherlock. Dir. Paul McGuigan, Euros Lyn, Toby Haynes, Colm McCarthy, Nick Hurran, Jeremy Lovering. Created by Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat, based on Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Hartswood Films, BBC Wales, WGBH. TV Series, 2010—.
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CONTRIBUTORS
Kanchan Chatterjee works in the Ministry of Finance, Government of India. His poetry has been published in several International Journals. Fern G. Z. Carr is a member of The League of Canadian Poets, former lawyer and teacher. She composes poetry in five languages and has been published extensively world-wide from Finland to the Seychelles. Some of Carr's poetry was assigned reading for the West Virginia University’s College of Law course entitled “Lawyers, Poets, and Poetry.” The Parliamentary Poet Laureate has chosen her poem, “I Am,” as Poem of the Month for Canada. One of Carr’s haiku is included on a DVD which is being sent to Mars on NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft. J.D. Isip is a doctoral student in English at Texas A&M UniversityCommerce. His academic writings, poetry, plays, and short stories have been published, or are forthcoming in a number of publications including The Louisville Review, Changing English, Revista Aetenea, St. John's Humanities Review, Teaching American Literature, The Citron Review, Poetry Quarterly, Scholars & Rogues, Mused, and The Copperfield Review. Gary Beck has spent most of his life as a theater director. His publications include Remembrance (Origami Condom Press), The Conquest of Somalia (Cervena Barva Press), The Dance of Hate (Calliope Nerve Media), Material Questions (Silkworms Ink), Dispossessed (Medulla Press), Mutilated Girls (Heavy Hands Ink), Pavan and other Poems (Indigo Mosaic), Once in the Bronx
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and Iraq Monologues (Atlantean Press) and Escape to Cyberspace (Writing Knights Press, forthcoming). His collections of poetry feature Days of Destruction (Marie Celeste Press), Expectations (Rogue Scholars Press), Dawn in Cities was (Winter Goose Publishing), Assault on Nature and Songs of a Clerk (Winter Goose Publishing, forthcoming). His novels include Extreme Change (Cogwheel Press) and Acts of Defiance (Artema Press). His story collection A Glimpse of Youth was published by Sweatshoppe Publications. His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway. His poetry and fiction has appeared in hundreds of literary magazines around the world. Ko Ko Thett is a poet, literary translator and anthologist of contemporary Burmese poetry. His work has been extensively published in literary journals worldwide, from World Literature Review to Modern Poetry in Translation. His first anthology Bones will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets (co-ed. James Byrne) is published by Northern Illinois University Press in the US. He writes in both English and Burmese, and studies and works at the Department of Development Studies, University of Vienna. Srajana Kaikini is a writer, curator keen on mapping intersections of crosscultural knowledge pools. She recently spent a year in the de Appel Curatorial Programme 2012/13, at de Appel arts Centre, Amsterdam during which the poems in this issue were written, across her travels through Europe and South America. Kaikini is also trained classical dancer of Odissi. Her recent text “An Ode to Aspiration” appeared in the publication Bourgeois Leftovers, published by de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam. John Thieme is a Senior Fellow at the University of East Anglia. He has held Chairs at the University of Hull and London South Bank University and has also taught at the Universities of Guyana and North London. His books include The Web of Tradition: Uses of Allusion in V. S. Naipaul's Fiction (1987), The Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (1996), Derek Walcott (1999), Post-Colonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon (2001),
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Post-Colonial Studies: The Essential Glossary (2003) and R. K. Narayan (2007). He was Editor of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature from 1992 to 2011 and he is General Editor of the Manchester University Press Contemporary World Writers Series. His creative writing includes the short stories “Himmelstein,” published in The International Literary Quarterly and “The Word.” He has recently finished a novel, provisionally entitled Cabinets of Curiosities. Tasha Golden is the frontwoman and songwriter for the critically-acclaimed band Ellery (http://www.ellerymusic.com). Her songs have been heard in major motion pictures, TV dramas, radio in the US & the UK, and Starbucks stores, and her albums have been featured in publications such as Paste Magazine and M Music. Her poetry and prose have been published, or are forthcoming in The Humanist, Pleiades, Gambling the Aisle, American Atheist, Luvah Journal, and Patrol Magazine. She is a regular blogger for Ploughshares Literary Magazine, where her posts are among the most-viewed and most-shared, and have been featured by Andrew Sullivan's The Dish. Soheb Niazi is a research scholar at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Most recently his poems were published in Le Zaporogue 13, Vayavya, The Ivory Tower and The Bangalore Review. K. Satchidanandan writes in Malayalam, and English. He has established himself as an academician, editor, translator and playwright. He was a Professor of English, the editor of Indian Literature, the journal of the Sahitya Akademi (India's National Academy of Literature), and the executive head of the Sahitya Akademi for a decade (1996–2006). He has to his credit 23 collections of poetry besides many selections, 16 collections of translations of poetry and 21 collections of essays on literature, language and society — three of them in English — besides four plays and three travel narratives. He has 25 collections of his poetry in translation in 17 languages including Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, English, Arabic, French, German and Italian. He has introduced several poets like Garcia Lorca, Alexander Block, Voznesensky, Pablo Neruda,
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Cesar Vallejo, Bertolt Brecht, Paul Celan, Zbignew Herbert, Eugenio Montale, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Mahmoud Darwish and Yehuda Amichai to Malayalam readers through translations and studies, besides a lot of Black, Latin American and Indian poetry. Marta Anna Zurawik is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Research for Health and Wellbeing, University of Bolton, UK. Her research interests are in the fields of Active Leisure, Well-being and Tourism. The key focus of her research is to examine benefits of walking with poles, also known as, Nordic Walking on mental well-being and life satisfaction. It also explores the role of socio-environmental facilitators and barriers that influence participation in regular Nordic walking and overall positive experience Nordic Walking brings. Juliana Ossa Martinez was born and raised in Bogota, Colombia. After finishing high school, she lived in Paris for a year where she studied photography and French literature. She completed B. A. in Montreal, and became passionate about the study of religion. In the past couple of years, she has done extensive research on the history and philosophy of religions. She is currently completing M. A. in Liberal Studies at The New School for Social Research, and writing a memoir about her conversion to Judaism. E. Sunny Allaire-Graham received her M. A degree from the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture (2012. The focus of her work is on the intersection of food and culture, and the networks of recipe sharing in England during the Early Modern period, which was adapted into a talk that was given at the Annual Member’s Symposium for the Culinary Historians of New York (2012). Currently, she is employed by The Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, as a Visitor Services Representative, and as a liaison for the Museum’s Education Department. She lives in New York City.
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Bhupen Chutia is Assistant Professor of English at Lakhimpur Girls’ College, North Lakhimpur, Assam, India. His PhD was on the travel writing of V. S. Naipaul, from Dibrugarh University. His areas of interest include travel writing, postcolonial literature, nature writing and literatures from the North East India. He writes both in English and Assamese. Presently, he is involved in a project on narratives of space from the North East India; he is also associated with a translation project under Tezpur University, Assam. He is a member of the Academic Council, Dibrugarh University. Arup K Chatterjee is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and teaches English at Sri Aurobindo College, University of Delhi.
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EDITORIAL BOARD
Founder-Editor Arup K Chatterjee Poet, Critic and Researcher, Jawaharlal Nehru University Assistant Professor, English, University of Delhi, India
Assistant Editor Amrita Ajay Assistant Professor of English, University of Delhi, India
Technical Editor Sumandro Chattopadhyay ajantriks.net
Contributing Editors K Satchidanandan Poet, and Former Professor of English, University of Calicut Former Editor of Indian Literature (The Journal of Sahitya Akademi) New Delhi, India
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Lisa Thatcher Writer Sydney, Australia Sudeep Sen Poet, and Editor of Atlas Magazine Editorial Director of Aark Arts Publishers New Delhi, India, London UK GJV Prasad Poet, Novelist, and Critic Professor, Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University Vice Chair, Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies Editor of Journal of the School of Languages New Delhi, India Sebastien Doubinsky Poet, Novelist, and Critic Researcher, and Lecturer, Aesthetics and Communication Aarhus University, Denmark
Advisory Editors Ian Duncan Florence Green Bixby Professor Department of English University of California
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Thea Pitman Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies SMLC Postgraduate Tutor School of Modern Languages and Cultures University of Leeds John Zilcosky Professor, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto President, ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory Julia Kuehn Associate Professor of English Associate Dean of Arts (Teaching and Learning) University of Hong Kong Kristi Siegel Professor of English Mount Mary University Milwaukee Lydia Wevers Former Vice-President of the New Zealand Book Council Professor, and Director of the Stout Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington
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