Tourist to Traveler to Transplant

If I offered you an opportunity to move abroad, to live and work in a different culture, surrounded by an unknown language, with only a small cadre of family in tow, would you sell your house, begin language lessons, file paperwork, renew your passport, retrieve medical records, say goodbye to family and friends and pets, and board that plane?

That is the process that I’ve begun. And it’s both overwhelming and captivating. Imagining myself in a different culture for the next few years conjures romantic images of cobblestones and brownstones and Blarney stones. Between diverse escapades, however, exist the toils of daily life:  the commute, the grocery store, bill paying, oil changes, illnesses. The context, fanciful at first, distills into something that looks much more like life. And the context is immensely important. As an adult in a familiar context, I manage daily challenges and pace my self-improvement. Life moves more naturally, my responses more innate in a familiar environment where the context is translatable. In a new context, I expect to feel much more like a child, lacking language to express myself, fumbling through social settings, being chastised subtly for violating norms, moving eventually to a new adult stage. Evolution. Metamorphosis. Reincarnation.

This will be my next life, and while the journey is physical and outward, it is accompanied by a movement inward, an intentional analysis of self and place. Movement matters. Where I come from, where I am going and the rate at which I am getting there implicates both my physical journey and my personal growth (Clifford 17). Yet, to what extent will I feel a need to mythologize the past, the self, in order to preserve it? To what extent will this record, my writing, serve a personal “empire” (Rubies 255)?

Travel writing, from its earliest accounts, expresses “a collective urge to dominate” (Clark 15). Not unlike my bold American roots, the genre permits self-aggrandizement. I admit, I’ll be hedging a little bit abroad, wondering about public perceptions when locals hear my American English. How will that set me up for acceptance or suspicion? Will my perspective be considered valid or self-serving? This is a lack of confidence surfacing, a result of American dominance and disdain for other cultures. Will I need to be an apologist? Or perhaps I’ll feel impelled to present my best self in defense of the good that America represents. Is it possible to shed the context of nationality and merely be a member of the human race?

I will be an outsider whose culture and beliefs will be subjected to different mores, so this record will also be an exercise in ethnography. As a participant, I must acknowledge where I fit, where I can exist to grow. No longer tourist and more than traveler, I will be a transplant, an exotic. My gardening instincts would pluck the offender from a tidy plot, but I will be a persistent transplant, a symbiotic commensalist who benefits from the relationship to place and peoples and hopes to leave both unharmed. I will exist in a “differently centered world,” and my commitment to symbiosis is a commitment to an ethnography that “has privileged relations of dwelling over relations of travel” (Clifford 27, 22). I don’t want the natives to wonder when I’ll leave or how I marginalized or imprinted the place “when the American was here” (Watson 279).

While most often expressed in the positive, travel and travelers have negative connotations, especially when linked to tourism or rootlessness or exile (Clifford 31). But culture and the people who create it are rarely homebodies; culture is not “rooted” but is displaced, interfered, and interacts (Clifford 25). As such, cultures can be reconsidered as “sites of dwelling and travel” (Clifford 31). And a traveler has the privilege to move, to explore, to challenge the pervading consensus, to escape (Clifford 34). But how will my temporal existence in this place impact my present existence? I must be involved in the preservation and conferred respect of place to be legitimate in it. More than observer, I must participate, even though it’s difficult, even though I may not be welcome. I must be more than a “permanent exile,...longing to stay and never staying” (Watson 283).

“Who--what--would I turn into if I stayed?” (Watson 282). This record is mimetic, a written journey about a physical and intellectual journey that reflects the self through humanity. My intention through travel writing it to explore the self/world in its niches and expansive climes. It will be most legitimate when it humbles readers, speaks to humanitarian ideals, and promotes a sense of connection with others, even though our lives may be far apart.

Sources:

Clark, Steve. "Introduction to Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit." Zed Books, London, 1999.

Clifford, James. "Traveling Cultures." Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1997.

Rubies, Joan Pau. "Travel Writing and Ethnography." The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. 242-260.

Watson, Catherine. "Where the Road Diverged." The Best American Travel Writing 2008. Ed. Anthony Bourdain. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2008.