Tag: Chreia

Progym: Chreia

“In the Antigua that I knew, we lived on a street named after an English maritime criminal, Horatio Nelson, and all the other streets around us were named after some other English maritime criminals” (24).

Jamaica Kincaid’s writing in A Small Place provides a brilliantly snarky and firm, though very enlightening, perspective on the post-colonial experience. She describes how during the colonial days Antiguans were taught “good behavior,” meaning submission to an oppressive system, as were other colonial subjects. They were exploited and maltreated, only to be left, stranded, once the colonialists decided they’d had enough of the place. This left the Antiguans, as many others, with only a poor, and continually exploitative framework of a government, and an economy that operated much the same.

Kincaid’s writing serves to provide some contrast to more gentle pieces on the subject, as coming from her firsthand perspective, it packs even more punch. She provides an excellent, gripping analysis of the continual mishandling of her home nation by the government and foreign actors. She describes how tourists and foreigners, arriving by plane and escorted to their seaside hotel palaces, employ a highly selective tourist’s gaze, managing to ignore or even find some sense of quaintness in the island’s troubles. Kincaid strips any tourist or foreigner lens away, providing the most direct and wonderfully sarcastic commentary possible to do so.

In some ways similar to A Small Place, I have previously enjoyed reading Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. Naipaul’s novel, like A Small Place, is a kind of account of post-colonial Africa, in this case from a fictitious first-person perspective, and set in somewhere in Central Africa. However, Naipaul appears to argue somewhat in the favor of the colonizers, saying that post-colonial Africa descended into a kind of Hell, and largely attributing this to the locals. This could be attributed to the protagonist, Salim, being an Indian-African man who is a foreigner in the land he now finds himself in, though the novel still certainly takes a differing stance overall than Kincaid does.

There are innumerous examples to corroborate Kincaid’s argument, from the struggles of post-colonial India to the division of the Middle East to Russia’s many invasions into and long-lasting subjugation of Central Asia. It seems to be the norm, not the exception, that colonized peoples are left with far less than they started with after their colonizers recede. Also, Kincaid’s description of the foreign exploitation of less developed nation is even easier to point out, especially in our now massively globalized world, as well as our ease at overlooking this fact when we buy Bengali-made clothes or travel to stay in luxury resorts built next to shantytowns across the tropical world.

Kincaid has been massively praised for her writing in A Small Place, and in many other works, and is a professor at Harvard University. Her writing is widely applicable, though is also highly specific and personal to Antigua, and her experience there. This makes it both very moving and memorable, and certainly something to ponder on your next voyage to the pink sand and bottle-blue seas of the Caribbean.

Progym: Chreia

Frow’s writing highlights an idea that has seemed to linger at the back of my mind, though I couldn’t ever have put a finger on. Why do we travel? Culturally, I mean. It seems as though we are all in search of something, thinking that each trip should fulfill something within us, that each moment away from home should be a new page of our enlightenment. Frow takes a spin on this, saying that it in fact nostalgia that drives us, be it of a real historical period, or because of some feeling that a location is more wholesome, enlightened, or real.

“Nostalgia for a lost authenticity is a paralyzing structure of historical reflection,”

he writes, and this reflection leads us far and wide to find authenticity (135).

Frow asserts that nostalgia is an essential part of the tourist experience, in large part because it is central to our modernity. He writes that modern society at large, though often not even knowing it, is constantly longing for some lost, fictional past in which things were better. We long for “simpler times” indicated by childhood or happy days, and we think that somehow we have collectively undergone some kind of cultural decline. For example, every election cycle you hear calls that “oh this could never be worse,” or “I’ve never seen something like this,” and people long for the Obama or Reagan or Kennedy years when things were better, easier, or simpler, when in fact you heard the same calls at those times. It is this kind of eternal nostalgia, Frow says, that contributes to our tourist culture.

In his writing, Frow briefly references the popular idea of traveling for exoticism. The idea is very similar to his concept of traveling for nostalgia, in that from both perspectives we are in search of something as travelers. Both, to some extent, seek authenticity: something that is authentically foreign and exotic, or something that is authentic because of its relation to a better era. We may also think of traveling for the exotic as a kind of nostalgia, as we ride the gondolas in Venice or the tuk-tuks in India because they are both foreign and almost from another time from our Western perspective. The two ideas are not contradicting, but rather reinforce each other.

The souvenir, Frow says, is a prime example of nostalgia in travel. He says,

“the souvenir has as its vocation the continual reestablishment of a bridge between origin and trace… it works by establishing a metonymic relation with the moment of origin” (145).

We are so attached to this kind of nostalgia, that not only do we travel to fulfill our desire for it, but we must also buy tokens to remind us of our journeys to do so, to satisfy our following nostalgia for the trip itself. This is almost a kind of cycle of nostalgia, and it is a perfect example of the travel industry capitalizing on this concept. I, for example, traveled to my hometown of Green Bay driven by nostalgia and then bought a t-shirt in anticipation of future nostalgia for that trip; the same can be said of my trip to Germany, I traveled there almost for a kind of cultural nostalgia for the Old World, and I returned with beer-hall coasters.

Frow’s thesis in this piece represents the most convincing argument for why we travel that I have read thus far. Nostalgia is abundant in our culture, and the more I consider it the more I see it around us. It is no doubt then that we would choose our destinations based on nostalgia. Few people choose to travel to brand-new landmarks, because they do not have the cultural history to make them relevant, and many popular new landmarks are built with some kind of historical grandeur in mind. Frow’s argument seems to be the most logical conclusion based upon this. We don’t leave behind our culture of nostalgia when we travel, but rather our travel is one output for this nostalgia.