"On the Complicated Questions Around Writing About Travel" in THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING 2021

September 20, 2021
Intan Paramaditha

I am delighted that my essay, “On the Complicated Questions Around Writing About Travel,” was selected for inclusion in The Best American Travel Writing 2021. It first appeared on Literary Hub, March 2, 2020.

Many thanks to Padma Laksmi, the guest editor this year, and Jason Wilson, the series editor. The book will be out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (now part of HarperCollins) on October 12, 2021.

“On the Complicated Questions Around Writing About Travel” is a reflection on travel and what it means to write my novel The Wandering as a brown woman who grew up in the ‘Third World.’

“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.”