ABlog

My students believe that travel is broadening. More and more frequently I encounter students who want to be “travel writers.” Or they write about travel as a sign of a fictional character’s sensitivity and maturity. Someone sets a story in the Midwest, then has her character spend a summer in Prague. We are told nothing about what Prague is like or what the character experiences in Prague, but we are meant to understand that she is a different and more complex person when she returns to her Midwestern city because she has spent time in Prague, or is the type of person who would spend time in Prague. We are meant to sympathize with the character’s alienation from her generically boring Midwestern existence because, after Prague, how could she feel otherwise?

Perhaps travel is a sort of certificate program? It might be less about the content and more about the fact that the bearer is the sort of person who would bother to undergo the experience. My students are mostly thoroughly American, even the ones with recent family roots elsewhere in the world, and we’ve all seen the statistics about how few American citizens even have a passport, so perhaps in a sense they are right. An American who actually bothers to secure a passport and fly to another continent is a special American.

Are my students confusing travel with tourism? Is there any difference for Americans in today’s world? The child of immigrant parents from a small country in the so-called developing world writes of travel to a Spanish-speaking Caribbean island. He uses the vocabulary of exotic and magical flight from settled routines, of searching for colonial authenticity in the stones of an old city explored on a weekend getaway. There is no discernible irony in his tone as he reflects that this experience, for him, counts as real travel whereas flying across the world to visit his relatives is just another part of the routine.

A few of my students have the critical and theoretical tools, put together with their interpretations of life experiences, to be critical of travel. A few of them have read Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. A few of them have been somewhere and understood something significant, not just about what they were seeing on the beaches and museums, but about who they themselves were in this picture. (Americans, people with money, often but not always white people. Tourists, always tourists.) A few, but very few.

So, my reading for writers class is reading Sarah Schulman’s 1992 novel Empathy. It’s almost all set in New York, among Jews, dykes, psychoanalysts, junkies hanging out on St. Marks Place. But there’s one central chapter in which the protagonist, Anna O., recalls a trip to Indonesia with her lover Lucy. Lucy has lived in Indonesia and wants to go back and visit, so Anna saves up and accompanies her there. On the plane, she is dismayed to find out that Lucy can’t say much about the place, beyond the fact that it’s “hot and very beautiful.” Anna wants to know, “What are the current questions?” but Lucy can’t tell her. Lucy sees everything in general terms: “The people here are so beautiful.” “She’s very kind and very religious,” she says of an Indonesian friend who appears, when Anna O. meets her, to be a grasping social climber. In this novel where certain social traits are purposely drawn with an exaggerated bluntness that permits them to be used to hit the reader over the head, the author taking the role of a Zen master who’s not above a well-aimed blow if that’s what it takes to produce enlightenment in his student, Lucy is a caricature of the Ugly American Tourist. But Anna, whose schtick is the “empathy” of the title, isn’t a whole lot better. When she meets Ansar, she thinks she’s found “someone who knew the truth. Someone with perspective.” Someone she can relate to who isn’t always trying to sell her something or asking for money because she is a rich American, never mind that she has to scramble to pay the rent with a lousy temp job back home. Then Ansar, with his “darker skin and whiter clothes, a Muslim cap and a brighter face,” leans over and says, “You want junk?”

Most of my students had trouble understanding what that chapter was doing in Sarah Schulman’s novel. They didn’t know what it meant when a character in the following chapter commented to Anna O., “You were looking for morality and personal recognition in the heart of serious tourism. That’s very Heart of Darkness of you. I mean, there’s no way to be there and be polite because your presence itself is rude.” One student had been to Indonesia and remembered that it was nothing like the author described.

The next day I opened the newspaper and read this comment by Representative Mike Pence (R-Indiana) after he toured a market called Shorja in Baghdad as part of a Congressional delegation headed by Senator John McCain: “The most deeply moving thing for me was to mix and mingle unfettered.” The article that quoted Representative Pence’s reaction said that the group with Senator McCain was protected by extraordinary security procedures derided by the shopkeepers and vendors who work in the market. “The delegation arrived…with more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees—the equivalent of an entire company—and attack helicopters circled overhead….The soldiers redirected traffic from the area and restricted access to the Americans, witnesses said, and sharpshooters were posted on the roofs. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests throughout their hourlong visit.” (New York Times, Tuesday, April 3, 2007, p. A1) Iraqis pointed out that the high-profile visit increased the likelihood of more attacks on the market in ensuing days, given that facilities showcased by Americans and the Iraqi government as “successes” in the pacification of Iraq are frequently targeted.

“There’s no way to be there and be polite because your presence itself is rude.” That about says it all, when it comes to armed occupation. Some people will say it’s a far cry from Humvees to Lucy’s beach lounging, and in a sense that’s true, but isn’t there an uncanny similarity between the civilian tourist mentality and what the representative finds so “deeply moving”? Does he really not understand the supreme artificiality of his opportunity to “mix and mingle”? Or its consequences to those he “mixes and mingles” with? Or is he just pretending? Is there a difference?

Rather uncannily, Schulman’s Empathy ends with a scene at the start of what we now call the First Gulf War.


Quotations from Empathy by Sarah Schulman, reissued by Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver, Canada, 2006.