On the Complicated Questions Around Writing About Travel
"Travel was and will always be about exclusion."
March 2, 2020
Jakarta, 1994: I wanted to write a story about magic slippers that would take me anywhere. I ended up writing a novel about demonic red shoes as an adult, with more complex reasons than fulfilling my simple wish to go to Singapore, but there were times when travel was an unattainable obsession. I thought of Singapore because my imagination as a Third-World 90s teen did not stretch far enough. Japan was too costly, Cambodia was unthinkable, and America only existed on TV. Singapore was the place where my wealthy friends would go shopping, although they also visited other countries. In one girl’s house, I saw a family photo in Dutch costume taken in Volendam, and in another girl’s mansion, photos of family vacation to Disneyland California were hung on the wall. Our friendship lasted long, despite being occasionally haunted by the not-so-ghostly presence of different class. My parents lived in Jakarta as common people, raising two kids who would be common people, doing whatever common people do.
What does it mean to travel? Does writing about it from where I stand make a difference? The question of moving has never ceased to be relevant, and it is, to borrow from Baudelaire, the one “I discuss incessantly with my soul.” “Questions of Travel” is the title of Michelle de Kretser’s novel about travel, home, and belonging, Caren Kaplan’s scholarly book on the modern and postmodern discourses of travel and displacement, and the famous poem by Elizabeth Bishop that both writers allude to. “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” asked Bishop. Questions of travel are many and have become more complicated, especially when we think about the global conditions that shape travel today.
Interrogating the socio-economic and environmental impacts of travel can be challenging because the romanticized images of travel have been sustained in narratives, via literature and the media. Thus here is the first question to begin with: Why do travel stories fascinate us, and why do people keep telling them? We want to know every path, every yellow brick road trodden by our favorite characters, on the pages or screen. What will Dorothy discover when the on-screen image shifts from black and white to technicolor? In The Wizard of Oz, excitement is always somewhere else, somewhere unknown, over the rainbow. Stories of travel speak to us because we, too, desire to venture into the unfamiliar. Perhaps in our journey, our troubles will melt like lemon drops, and we are eager to find out what awaits us. What kind of world is there to see? What souvenirs to bring home? Will we ever return home?
Travel narrative has a long tradition in both Western and Non-Western cultures, from Odysseus, who faces various obstacles and temptations that lure him away from his goal to return home in Homer’s The Odyssey, to the Mahabharata, in which the Pandavas are sent to exile for 12 years after losing a dice game. Stories of exile, return, and conquest have been told many times. Messages are often deeply embedded in the dominant social norms, from ‘see the world and seize the day’ to ‘home is where the heart is,’ and they are both strong and shaky. The mantra “there’s no place like home” in The Wizard of Oz, as Salman Rushdie writes, ambivalently co-exists with the portrayal of Oz as a magnificent place where Dorothy savors her freedom.
History constructs how travel is imagined in my Third World backyard. Indonesian children know the song “My ancestors were sailors” by heart. It is a celebration of travel within the archipelagic imagination—sailing the vast ocean with delight, against the waves, without fear—but here is the irony: Most of us do not travel, or even if we do, stories of our travel are insignificant. We have always been the place traveled, the people written about, the picture painted. We are the bare-breasted Balinese women in paintings, a paradise, a heart of darkness, a perfect setting for a thriller in The Year of Living Dangerously. My hometown Jakarta, despite being less charming than Bali, appeared in Baudelaire’s poem when it was Batavia, described as a tropical beauty wedded to the spirit of Europe. In 1869, certainly this was not the way how we the natives, the half-naked, lazy, and unsophisticated Inlanders, perceived the city. The Grand Tour, the 17th- and 18th-century travel for education, was not part of our tradition. When we Inlanders traveled, we became the exhibits in the colonial expositions.
Questions of travel must consider the unequal power relations that characterize present global encounters and how they are enmeshed in the historical processes in the past. Travel was embedded in the colonial exploitation of Empires, and cosmopolitanism—at least the dominant version of it—has always been capitalist-driven. Knowledge about other cultures has been used to validate colonialism, as we have learned from Edward Said, and to create infrastructure for neo-imperialist market expansion. The traveler has been wearing the colonizer’s cloak since Prospero claimed an island and enslaved the “hag seed.” The Tempest exemplifies travel as a narrative of discovery, and Prospero is not the only one who understands that knowledge is power.