February 19, 2006
Foreign travel and women
One of my themes in 
Romance on the Road is the power of traveling Western women to improve the lot of foreign women.
Some of this occurs with massive attendant controversy. Scandinavian women who traveled in coastal Spain in the early 1960s had many affairs with young local men, who could not sleep with their fiances. While many would likely condemn the behavior of the Nordic females, in a paradoxical way they eventually brought more freedom to Spanish women.
Similar trends have been noticed in Mexico, Greece and Costa Rica.
Here's more confirmation of the trend in India (albeit not involving romantic contacts with Indian men). In Girl Power in the Land of the Maharajahs, Terry Ward describes staying in a remarkable place, a guesthouse run by women, the first one she'd found in three weeks of traveling in India.
The mother and her two daughters had opened the guest house after the mother's husband died, as making a living selling produce from their fields was difficult after three years of little rainfall. They faced local anger if they hosted male foreigners, or if the daughters walked with male guests, but Mama prayed for the strength to keep their business going despite the criticism.
Ward asked one of the daughters a question:
I asked her how she felt about her mother choosing her husband.“I think your system is the best,” Arachana began. “Here parents try. Better to self try. But Mama knows me, and she knows what kind of boy I am liking.”
“What if you fall in love?” I prodded, too curious to resist a typically Western question.
Arachana cocked her head, a gesture I’d seen many times in India, a slight dip of the forehead with a piercing look that said neither yes nor no. I never knew how to interpret it; this time I figured she didn’t understand the concept. Then she said something that told me she did.
“One time there is a boy staying here, a photographer from Italy. He is taking many photographs of me and Rachana. He is a nice boy,” she said. “But Mama is saying to me, ‘He is not from your caste.’ “ She cocked her head again, and her eyes said it all: Her world was hers and my world was mine.
In sum, contact with Western travelers is bringing this family some measure of their livelihood, and causing the family and neighbors to weigh a lot of cultural values, including how women get married. Rural India may join the list of places drastically transformed by peripatetic women from the West.
***
Speaking of travel writing, don't miss this wonderful piece by Robert Kaplan, Cultivating Loneliness, in the current Columbia Journalism Review.
Reading Kaplan's piece put me in the mind of the years I worked as a graphics editor at the Washington Post. One day I asked older gentleman who served as diplomatic correspondent, who routinely traveled overseas with President Clinton's secretary of state, how often he got to look around the countries he visited. "Never," he replied.
From the article:
Journalism desperately needs a return to terrain, to the kind of firsthand, solitary discovery of local knowledge best associated with old-fashioned travel writing. Travel writing is more important than ever as a means to reveal the vivid reality of places that get lost in the elevator music of 24-hour media reports. In and of itself, travel writing is a low-rent occupation, best suited for the Sunday supplements. But it is also a deft vehicle for filling the void in serious journalism: for example, by rescuing such subjects as art, history, geography, and statecraft from the jargon and obscurantism of academia, for the best travel books have always been about something else.
Here is a valuable difference between the art of the travel writer and that of the journalist -- see especially the sentence I bolded and underlined below. It reminds me of an argument I got into with two journalist companions traveling in Japan, who relentlessly pumped our dinner companion about the bombs dropped on Nagasaki (described in the Japan chapter in 
An Amateur's Guide to the Planet):
Owen Lattimore, while traveling in Inner Mongolia, makes an observation that all journalists should take to heart:There is nothing that shuts off the speech of simple men like the suspicion that they are being pumped for information: while if they get over the feeling of strangeness they will yarn as they do among themselves. Then in their talk there comes out the rich rough ore of what they themselves accept as the truth about their lives and beliefs, not spoiled in trying to refine it unskillfully by suiting the words to the listener.Just listening to people, to their stories — rather than cutting them off to ask probing, impolite questions — forms the essence of these and all other good travel books. I learned this over two decades ago while trying to interview a refugee in Greece who had just escaped from Stalinist Albania. I had a list of questions to ask this refugee, but instead he preferred to tell me the story of his life. It was only after listening to him for several hours that the information I sought began to slip out.
But such a leisurely approach goes against the grain of journalism as it is commonly practiced. Reporting emphasizes the intrusive, tape-recorded interview; travel writing emphasizes the art of good conversation, and the experience of how it comes about in the first place. It has long been a cliché among correspondents that in Africa 10 percent of journalism is doing interviews, and 90 percent is the hassles and adventures of arranging them. But while the former fits within the narrow strictures of daily news articles, it is the latter that tells you so much more about the continent.
The travel writer knows that people are least themselves when being tape-recorded. You’ll never truly understand anybody by asking a direct question, especially someone you don’t know very well. Rather than interrogate strangers, which is essentially what reporters do, the travel writer gets to know people, and reveals them as they reveal themselves. After being with a battalion of marines for several weeks in Iraq, I noticed that they suddenly stopped using profane language when some journalists arrived and turned on their tape recorders. Whatever the marines were in front of the journalists, they were less real than they had been before.
And here is the section of Kaplan's article I truly want to applaud:
If anyone deserves a public service award for peeling back the curtain on distant societies, it is less the publishers of major newspapers and magazines than those of the Lonely Planet Guides and The Rough Guides. These two series combine historical and cultural depth with intrepid, solitary research by young travelers who get to every remote location in a given country; and in the course of informing the reader about where to stay and where to eat, say much about public health, crime, the economy, and politics in a society. In the 1990s, when it was particularly hard to get visas to Iran — and much of the information about that country emerged out of seminars in Washington — the best thing to read on the subject was Iran: A Travel Survival Kit by David St. Vincent, published in the Lonely Planet series.
That was my entire impression traveling in, for example, China in 1985: If you based your impressions of China on mass media coverage of textile imports and politics and so forth, you were utterly, totally unprepared for the Middle Kingdom. Only the Lonely Planet guide might warn you of the hell of hard-seat train travel, or people blowing their nose by covering one nostril and shooting snot into the gutter, or how crowd might gather, their children crying in terror, at the sight of a Westerner (hair and eyes the color of demons) on foot in their cities.
- posted by jbelliveau at 11:55 AM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
