Tag: Travel (page 2 of 12)

I’ve been lucky enough to travel to some pretty interesting destinations over the course of my life so far. Here are some posts from some of the more memorable places I’ve visited.

People standing on a shoreline at sunset — Photo by Vishal Davde on Unsplash.

9 May 2020

Flygskam be damned: my flight-free year

It’s now been over a year since I was last inside an aeroplane. This doesn’t feel like a major milestone at all. Which may have something to do with the fact that most people can’t go inside an aeroplane at the moment either. But I’m writing this post as an act of celebration. Because my flight-free year was an active choice. A choice I’m anything but ashamed of. Flygskam be damned!

Flygskam: pronunciation, definition, translation

You may have heard of a certain buzzword doing the rounds: flygskam. It’s a Swedish word (pronounced fleegh-scamm) that’s often translated as ‘flight-shame’. Not that there’s any real doubt about what it means. But translation can be problematic. Take the Danish word hygge. Something ephemeral gets lost in the English approximation of ‘coziness’.

The same may be true for flygskam. That could be because the specific type of shame alluded to is Swedish in origin. I don’t mean in the way that an IKEA shelf or Stefan Edberg is Swedish in origin. But does shame operate in a peculiar way in Sweden? What does flygskam means to a Swede? And does that matter? As Mette Kahlin Mcveigh points out:

. . . it is not just Swedes who feel guilty about their carbon footprints: the Finnish have invented lentohapea, the Dutch say vliegschaamte, and the Germans use flugscham.
—Mette Kahlin Mcveigh, foreword to Beyond Flygskam

Staffan Lindberg may have coined (paywalled and in Swedish) the term flygskam in 2017. Greta Thunberg has also used the term as part of her worldwide school strike for climate. Last year flygskam began to attract attention in the usual English-language news outlets. In fact, a simple web search returns thousands of articles on the subject. But few interrogate the ‘Swedishness’ of flight shame.

So, as I’m also Swedish—yes, hard to imagine, but true—I figure it’s okay if I try to put into words what flygskam means to me. This may be more useful than arguing about the environmental impacts of air travel. And less stressful than doing so in online, below-the-line forums. Not that I’ve had time to do either of those things now that I’m living in a Zen, post-flygskam paradigm.

The pre-flygskam paradigm: business as usual

This is the part where I run the risk of coming across as either a climate evangelist or a clueless carbon hog. Or both. I’m quite capable of seeing the contradictions in what I’m about to tell you. They no doubt sound familiar to anyone who’s spent a lot of time in crowded departure lounges. Or standing in long security screening queues. Or waiting at baggage carousels.

The thing is, the pre-flygskam me liked to think that the act of flying was a time saver and a great convenience. And in some ways, that’s quite true. It goes without saying that Stockholm–Sydney is a journey that’s quicker by plane. But a whole bunch of other things about that journey tend to go unsaid, too. And if you’ve ever flown, I have no doubt that you know what they are.

The stress of packing. The night without sleep because you were afraid you might not hear your alarm. The one, two, three or five-hours spent getting to the airport. The queue to check in your luggage. The even longer queues in the security screening area. The guard rummaging through your hand luggage. The abomination that is the only route through a duty-free shop.

That’s on a good day. On a bad day you can add the flight delayed by a ‘weather event’, or an ‘engine malfunction’ (never good). The departure time you misread because you were in too much of a hurry. Then the sprint to passport control. The mind-numbing idiocy of passport checks. Arriving at the gate, drenched in sweat. Yet another delayed flight. Your child who defecates at the gate.

Do I sound like I’m whining? Trust me, I’m only getting warmed up. We haven’t even stepped into the plane yet. My point is that I used to think of all this as business as usual. But there’s a problem with that kind of thinking. It discounts or ignores the amount of thinking it takes to get yourself onto that plane. The effort required to not think about how crap it all is.

George Carlin said it better than I ever could. A ‘near miss’ is a near hit!

Interrogating the in-flight ‘experience’

Because the in-flight experience is garbage. If you’re tall, you’ll do things to your legs even a gymnast wouldn’t try. If you’re short, or small, you’ll end up surrounded by extra-tall people who’ll take your space. And if your bum happens to be even one inch wider than the width of the seat, well, good luck with that. Don’t even get me started on hand luggage or overhead bins.

Cramming humans into miniature ‘seats’ is an extension of the business-as-usual approach. It’s another one of those things that go without saying. Which means it still needs saying. Otherwise, why are we even here? What’s the upside of this ‘experience’? The time savings? What is your time even worth? Do you have a personal daily rate, based on your own inherent value?

That coprolitic—but complimentary!—coffee served up by your cheerful cabin attendant? It is not worth your precious time. That in-flight magazine? An advertising fatberg only redeemed by its lack of activity trackers. That plastic-wrapped ‘cookie’ you munched while gazing at the landscape thirty-thousand feet below? Is this what you paid for? Are you enjoying your flight yet?

I’m yet to see the logical end-game of the budget airline philosophy but it can’t be far off. A fuselage interior stripped of all artifice, including seats, overhead bins and toilets. Passengers wearing parachutes, strapped to the walls, watched over by defence force personnel. I’m not sure if it is possible to remove all oxygen from the fuselage, but it would be worth a shot.

In this scenario, there would no longer be any need for the traditional captain’s address. Flight times, atmospheric conditions—irrelevant. Get me to my destination. Make it quick and cheap. Well, you wanted it; you got it. Now, leap out via a side door into the radiant atmosphere, somewhere over central London. Hope to see you again. Thanks for flying with us.

Three abandoned aeroplanes covered with illustrative art. Do they feel flygskam too? — Avion De Los Muertos. Photo by AJ Yorio on Unsplash.

The unseen power of guilt and shame

Here’s another thing that often goes without saying. Shame is a powerful and damaging emotion. Pretty much everyone experiences it at some stage. Quite a few of us also manage to spend a fair bit of time shaming other people during our all-too-brief lifespans. Yeah, shaming is a thing, all right. Flight shaming. Parent shaming. Online shaming. Fat shaming.

When parents travel with babies on planes, this can provoke the first two types of shaming. If that shaming occurs in an online forum, you might call that the shaming trifecta. And if either or both parents’ bums are too big to fit in the Economy Class seats, well, you’ve come away with the quinella. Go you. Recline that seat of yours as far as you can. We’ll be here all night. Screaming.

The thing is, I didn’t feel ashamed about flying at all until I had children. Which seems odd, in hindsight. Because I’d spent the previous decade burning through my lifetime personal carbon allocation. And the allocations of quite a few other people who had not yet had an opportunity to step onto an aeroplane. I didn’t feel bad about it at the time. I like to tell myself I had no idea.

But stepping from the jetway and into a plane with a baby for the first time was a whole new experience. It felt like I was holding a miniature foghorn with no silent mode. Sure, much of the shame I felt was imaginary, or self-inflicted. Why had I even agreed to have this baby in the first place? But as I continued to travel in planes, with one and then two children, that shit started to get real.

Passengers with infants on long-haul flights are already at a disadvantage. They cannot choose where to sit; the airline allocates their seats for them. In this high-pressure environment, shame is only centimetres away at any given time. Those pensioners who thought they were getting a good seat with extra legroom? Oh no, they’re sitting next to a baby. Why weren’t they warned?

It’s the dirty looks. The rolling eyes. Do they have to sit here? The drunk concern-troll ‘congratulating’ you after a 14-hour flight sans screaming. Feel free to foul up the cabin with your complimentary alcohol, mouth-breather! Meanwhile we’re flat out making sure a miniature person doesn’t spoil your ‘journey’. No, don’t thank me. Congratulate me instead. Thank you for flying with us.

Interrogating shame, parenthood and personal responsibility

This is the sort of shame that once made me feel glad about my own decision to stop flying. At the time, that decision had everything to do with feelings of guilt and shame. Guilt that I was contributing to an environmental catastrophe. Shame that I was implicating my children in it. And a dirty combo of guilty shame about having kids at all. I myself was to blame. For everything.

At first, this made it quite easy to honour my commitment to a flight-free year. I consulted online carbon calculators and managed to survive a long train trip. I delved into the train-based travel writings of Paul Theroux. But then my guilt and shame began to wane. In their place, anger and frustration emerged. Two emotions which, if not resolved, can lead to a form of depression.

My anger and frustration stemmed from many issues. Only one of these was the supreme selfishness of my airline travel. But I began to feel that my guilt and shame may not have been necessary or useful at all. Did my emotions lead me to make that decision for the wrong reasons? Why beat myself up about my past actions, when I’d already made a decision to act in a different way?

To be clear: I’ve chosen to have children and to reduce my reliance on air travel. I’m still grappling with the contradictory dynamics of such a choice. Because one aspect of parent shaming is the argument that having kids is bad for the environment. And that it’s much worse than anything else you might ‘do’. In this context, choosing not to travel in aeroplanes becomes irrelevant.

So, what am I trying to say? That I don’t need to feel bad about my personal choices? That merely attempting to justify my own actions absolves me of responsibility? That the world isn’t overpopulated? That there is no climate emergency? That I’m all right Jack, and get off my lawn? Oh, and by the way, screw everybody who doesn’t think the same way as me on any issue?

Well, if you’ve read this far, you’ve also (I hope) realised that I’m not saying any of those things. What I’m saying is that complex notions of shame and guilt have affected a lot of what I do. Not to mention my feelings about a lot of what I cannot undo. I’m not going to continue making personal decisions based on guilt. But to own these decisions I first need to destroy my shame.

People standing on a shoreline at sunset. No flygskam here. — Photo by Vishal Davde on Unsplash.

Flygskam be damned: celebrating a flight-free life

At the beginning of this post I wondered how shame operates in Sweden. I don’t know enough to generalise but I suspect it operates the same here as it does everywhere else. Someone does or says something (or else exists). Someone else responds to that. They don’t like it. They want that first person to know that. Then the first person feels bad. This creates shame, which then circulates.

I’m simplifying, of course. But one could see this process in action on the aningslösa influencers Instagram account. The account (now inactive) called out ‘clueless’ celebrities for their flight emissions. This, of course, generated debate within the Swedish media about the power of shame. In other words, about shame’s usefulness when it comes to changing behaviour.

A lot of this power, as far as I can see, is imaginary. We hold celebrities to standards we’d never apply to ourselves. And celebrities, in turn, use that freedom in bizarre ways. Thus demonstrating how little attention we should be paying to them in the first place. But we humans are strange beasts. We’ll shame anyone as long as we don’t need to interrogate ourselves.

I don’t want to make anyone feel good or bad about the decisions I’ve made in my life. I also don’t appreciate anyone attempting to make me feel bad, based on their own decisions. But shame is such an insidious emotion. Even when people try to make me feel good about myself I’m often unsure whether I should believe them. But there’s an easy way out of that miserable labyrinth.

I’m looking forward to celebrating my flight-free year. I’ll do so in a way that’s appropriate to the scale of the achievement. I plan on not thinking about airlines and flying at all. I don’t need a hashtag to prove I’m right. And when my baby boy—who has never flown on an aeroplane—turns one, I’ll celebrate it all over again. Happy to be, if not grounded, then at the very least on the ground.

Postscript

How I got through over 2,000 words without mentioning Covid-19 is a mystery to me. But it’s one I’m happy not to bother solving. None of what I have written has anything to do with Covid-19. I do feel for the millions of people now forced to interrogate the value of their own air travel. But I’m pretty sure once this is all over most of us won’t give a shit. Even so, thank you for not flying.

4 February 2020 / 4 Comments

The Self in Travel Writing and the discourse of travel

I’m happy to say that I’ve now completed a course at Linnaeus University, called The Self In Travel Writing. Linnaeus has campuses in two small cities in southern Sweden: Växjö and Kalmar. But I’ve been studying from a distance. Oh, and as a mature-age student. More on that shortly.

The course discussed travel writing from the second half of the 20th century until today. It covered the main trends in research on the genre. We analysed travel writing from contextual, stylistic and formal perspectives. But we focused on the construction of a textual Self. All in all, it was a stimulating and interesting course.

I intended this post to be a kind of aide memoire for the course. I thought I could update it every now and then. You know, add notes on the books I was reading and the essays I was writing. But of course, other things tend to happen, and to get in the way. As it turned out, I struggled to finish the third and final essay before the deadline passed last week.

But that’s done and dusted now, and I’ve passed, so there’s no need for me to worry about deadlines any longer.

This post is a reflection on my experience of studying from a distance. It’s also a chance to document the literature I read and discussed in the course. And to try and reach some kind of conclusion about the nature of travel.

The Self in Travel Writing is a course provided by Linnaeus University, which is based in two cities in southern Sweden: Växjö and Kalmar. This image shows Kalmar Slott (castle) from the water. — Kalmar Slott, Sweden. Image by Alexandru Baboş Albabos via Wikimedia Commons.

On returning to the academic study of literature

You could say I’ve been to universities that never shut down. From Sydney, to Melbourne, to Swinburne University of Technology. Doesn’t scan, I know, but whatever. The point is, despite my academic credentials, it’s been a long time since I studied literature.

So, going back to uni as a full-blown mature-age student was nerve-racking, to say the least.

Sure, I’ve read lots of books (although the onset of parenthood has lessened that impulse). And I enjoy discussing writing as much as the next ageing hipster. But applying literary theory to a specific genre (in this case, travel writing)? Coming up with interesting and relevant ways to analyse content and style? This turned out to be more of a challenge than I first expected.

To put it into context, the last time I had to write an essay on a work of literature was during my Honours year in 1993. That’s 27 years ago now.

I understand the world of literary criticism and theory may have moved on since the early 1990s. But, I mean, has it? Analysing literature still involves understanding theory and applying it to a work, right? It remains one of the great unacknowledged skills acquired through a generalist education.

That’s not to say that I myself am particularly good at applying literary theory to anything. Far from it. But at the very least, this wasn’t my first rodeo. Although the value of my own prior rodeo experience was, in hindsight, doubtful. Especially when it came to the lariat.

On returning to the non-academic subject of travelling

I was 17 years old when I started university. I didn’t have a passport. Despite living in several country towns in New South Wales in my childhood, I hadn’t seen much of the world. A trip to Tasmania by plane was the closest I had come to jet-setting. Brisbane was the first big city I ever visited. It was a simpler time. A desperate, ignorant time in my life.

Unlike ‘English’, ‘History’ or ‘Economics’, travel is not a subject you can study at university. This much is obvious. Instead, travel is a bit like life: you learn by doing it, and give thanks for the opportunities you receive.

My first overseas trip was to Thailand and Laos in 1999, at the peak of my morose late-twenties. Since then I’ve travelled a bit more in East Asia, including two stints living in Seoul. I’ve visited a few of the big cities in North America, and even spent a week in Uganda for work.

I’ve lived in Europe now for over a decade. So, most of my travelling experience comes from this continent, of which I have now ‘seen’ a fair chunk. Plus I’ve now been to every state in Australia but who cares about that.

Travel has, for a long time, been a part of the way in which I conceptualize myself, or at least my poetic self. My trip to Thailand and Laos led to my first poetry chapbook, The Happy Farang. Later trips led to further collections influenced by travel. See for example Between Empires, Abendland and Morgenland.

So, why did I enrol in The Self and Travel Writing? Why study travel writing at all? Well, it seemed a natural enough opportunity to pursue the ideas sketched out in my own writing. I am critical of the effects of Western tourism on the developing world. I have explored the ironic, self aware tourist as subject. And I can’t help but view the phenomenon of ‘travel’ as imperialistic.

But the course ended up having precious little to do with my own preoccupations. In fact, I came away from the course with a much more considered view of travel writing, and travel as a discourse. This has left me with some questions for myself as a traveller in the future.

The Self in Travel Writing forced me to reconsider the purpose and effects of my own travel. This is an image from a fjörd near Bergen in Norway, taken in 2019. — Mostraumen fjörd near Bergen in Norway. Image by the author, taken in April 2019.

Three lessons from The Self in Travel Writing

But first, here are some some quick lessons I gleaned from the course. Think of it as advice from one recent mature-age student to, well, myself. And anyone else who happens to have got this far into what is already a long post. Yes, I’m aware of that. And working on it.

Lesson 1: Read the (right) syllabus

As an undergraduate I despised people who read the books for every course. I sneered when they turned up in the first week firing on all literary cylinders. To me, that approach was more suited to high school, where you had no choice. This was university, which was all about freeeeedom, am I right?

I alone would choose the books that I would read, and the manner in which I would read them. Mkai?

Two and a half decades later, that youthful arrogance sure gets old fast. When I signed up for The Self In Travel Writing, I had no job and no other extracurricular activities. But I also had (and still have) three small children, so my time was (and remains) precious. If I was going to study travel literature, I was bloody well going to study it good.

In a fever of activity, I jumped through the necessary administrative hoops. I obtained a university email address: crucial! I registered in Ladok and Moodle (more on that shortly). Then I signed up for the course, downloaded the syllabus and started reading the first book I could get my hands on.

By the time the course started in September last year, I’d read everything. Signed, sealed, delivered, I’m yawwws! Mkai?

But there was one problem. I’d downloaded the previous year’s syllabus. Which contained a bunch of books I didn’t have to read.

In other words, I’d plowed through Richard Wright’s Black Power (1954), Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (1978), NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2014) and Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps (1936) for no reason at all.

Actually, to be honest, I couldn’t finish Journey Without Maps. But that’s irrelevant: I hadn’t needed to start reading it in the first place.

You could argue that reading these texts could do no harm. After all, I’d also read some other books that were on the syllabus. But there was another small problem. We would only be discussing those books in the second part of the course.

So, I spent the first half of the course trying to catch up on the readings I had not already done. And the second half trying to remember the contents of books I had read, like, six months beforehand.

Always read the syllabus, and make sure it’s the right one. The benefits of doing so will more than outweigh the feelgood factor provided by forging ahead and reading everything without thinking. Like some loser with no friends and nothing else to do.

Oh, wait.

Lesson 2: Accept that online courses are not as good as live tutorials, and then move on

Look, I know that some of us would like to live in a kind of Dead Poet’s Society meta world. Where tutorials are intimate and never-ending. Where we’re free to hold lessons outside, in caves, or wherever we like.

But this is 21st-century Sweden. I’m a mature-age student and father of three with no time for flim-flam, so online courses are my only real option.

Having said that, online educational software lacks something in the interaction department. The simple fact is that online interaction is still not as immersive as we’d like to think it is. This suggests that Fredric Jameson was right—that cyberspace is a load of old cobblers. And will remain so for the foreseeable future. But I digress.

And yet. Imagine, even for a millisecond, that I entered the Moodle for The Self In Travel Writing. That I thereby jacked in to some kind of edumacational matrix. And that the thoughts of my fellow students appeared as a 3D strand of DNA I could experience on my own eyeballs.

Would that be too much to ask? Or am I doing a disservice to the makers of a half-arsed piece of software like Moodle? Not to mention the not-entirely-impossible and totally-okay-with-me coupling of DNA and eyeballs?

Well, there comes a point when you have to admit something to yourself. Interacting in Moodle still trumps admiring the brilliance of your own ideas. You know, the ones you communicate to yourself, alone, late at night.

There were only six participants in our course. But that only meant a response took a while to arrive. Sometimes I didn’t get any responses to my posts at all.

In the end, the posts I wrote during the course, and my replies to replies to others’ posts, ended up helping me a lot. For example, when it came to writing the three essays I needed to complete to pass the course.

Which I guess was the whole point.

Make use of the tools available to generate your ideas in writing. Get over yourself. You’re no more special than a bunch of strangers typing away in silence at various other places in the world. You can’t see or hear them. Which makes it impossible to make judgements about anyone in the first place.

Lesson 3: Read the theory first, and the rest as late as you can

The last time I engaged with literary theory in an academic setting was in the early 1990s. Sure, Pierre Bourdieu’s work might have formed a cornerstone of my PhD thesis. But I came away from that one not sure whether I’d written something relevant or a steaming pile of jitches.

So let’s cut to the chase and say I’ve never been good at theory.

To some extent, this is a product of my own high school education. My teachers taught me the value of analysing texts using an array of literary devices. I later learnt that this was a version of the Leavisite approach to textual analysis.

We read and discussed Shakespeare’s plays line by line. I memorized sections of Alexander Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’. I recorded myself reading Emily Dickinson’s poems. And then fell asleep each night with her words blaring out of my Walkman.

I didn’t have time to ponder the death of the author. Or the question of whether Othello forms a discourse. But, again, I digress.

I realized something, one minute into The Self In Travel Writing. I would have been much better off diving into some good old theory before attacking the syllabus. Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?’ may well be a difficult text. But it’s kind of fundamental, isn’t it?

On another level, Masters-level courses assume knowledge of Foucault, Said and Kristeva. To give three not-so-random examples. I’d forgotten about them all. So the supplementary materials were thus rather impenetrable to me.

I should have worked that out a little earlier. And then delayed the act of reading each book until the week before we discussed it in Moodle. Simples.

The Self in Travel Writing syllabus included E. M. Forster's A Passage to India. This image shows a still from David Lean's 1984 film adaptation of the book. — A still from David Lean’s 1984 film adaptation of *A Passage to India*. Via the Internet Archive.

Eight quick takeaways from The Self in Travel Writing

Well, this has been a lot of words, even for me. I came away from The Self in Travel Writing with a more considered view of travel as a discourse. Here are some quick takeaways. Followed by a slow-baked conclusion that may still need some more time in the oven.

E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) is a work within a work. It’s partly concerned with the discourse of women’s travel. In fact, Forster is merciless when it comes to Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested. But it’s also about the real ‘friendship’ between two men, Aziz and Fielding. The fact that the book is silent on their relationship both surprised and shamed me. But David Lean’s 1984 film is more explicit, and well worth watching.
I now understand why I failed to finish Ernest Hemingway’s turgid Green Hills of Africa (1935). It’s because Hemingway equals He-Man and the wildlife of Africa represent Skeletor. Whether Hemingway’s wife, Pauline Marie Pfeiffer, is She-Ra (Princess of Power) is moot.
I read Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy (1977) with a sense of relief. I’d endured the stifled colonial atmosphere of A Passage to India. I’d rolled my eyes at the He-Man narrator of Green Hills of Africa. Sissy’s account of her travels as a Ghanaian in Europe was a real palate-cleanser. Plus, Our Sister Killjoy is a very short book. This is important.
Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009) generated a lot of discussion on Moodle. It struck me as a strange book to include in a course about the self and travel writing. The grand sweep of the narrative is closer to a David Mitchell novel in style. I had a lot of problems with Shamsie’s texts, none of which I’m ready to articulate here.
Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother (2007) came in for some criticism in the course. Some students saw it as too self-absorbed but I found the book quite moving. Like Richard Wright in Black Power, Hartmann ‘passes’ for a Ghanaian but is aware of her difference. Her treatment of the idea of the ‘stranger’ is poignant, contradictory and human.
Caryl Phillips’ The Atlantic Sound (2000) was my favourite book on the syllabus. Phillips describes the travel experience with an unflinching honesty that I found refreshing. But it’s also travel writing at its most cynical. It’s a fine line to tread to skewer human failings without mercy. At the same time, the book’s subversion of traditional narrative forms is fascinating.
Noo Saro Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (2012) was an easy read. But this does not make it simple. The tone is light and self-deprecating. The style is more like a guide book for millennials than an academic treatise on colonialism. While Saro-Wiwa discusses serious issues, she never becomes too self-absorbed. Which is a considerable achievement. After all, the Nigerian regime murdered her father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, in 1995.
By the time we got around to discussing Tom Chesshyre’s A Tourist in the Arab Spring (2013) it had been a year since I read it. But I still felt Chesshyre was protesting a little too much by constructing himself as a tourist. To paraphrase the character of Boromir in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, one does not simply walk into Tunisia. Especially when you work for The Times—an organ of British soft power worldwide. But it did seem fitting to end with another example of British (neo)colonial literature.

Conclusion: Re-evaluating the Self in Travel Writing

Speaking of neo-colonialism. Have I been guilty of travelling in the manner of a privileged Western jerk? This question bothers me a lot more than it should, given that I no longer go anywhere. But in the context of travel in a post-carbon age, it’s worth remembering that travel is a privilege.

I have obtained social and economic advantages via my freedom of movement. I’ve left behind the place and country of my birth, and started a new life on the other side of the world. Millions of people try to do the same thing each year. Most of them never make it.

The so-called European refugee crisis that began in 2015 was a small part of a global phenomenon. All over the world, people are on the move, whether by force or by personal choice. The majority of their stories never make it into travel literature. Their journeys are rarely even considered ‘travel’.

All this points to a possible conclusion. That travel forms a discourse (in the sense that Foucault might use the word). Travel writing, and discussions on travel writing, offer evidence of this discourse’s power.

In its simplest form, this power relates to who gets to travel. It also affects who gets to call a specific type of movement ‘travel’ in the first place. And who gets to be a traveller, as opposed to a tourist. Or a migrant, a refugee, an illegal, an alien.

This doesn’t feel like a conclusion at all. More like the beginning of another post, the post I may have been trying to write when I started drafting this one.

I’m not sure where this line of thought will lead me, but I need to leave it here for now, in the hope that I will return. As ever, comments are more than welcome.

What do you think about the discourse of travel? Is it a question of privilege? Or has the whole act of travel become mundane? What is the distance from which you experience the world? What would your version of The Self in Travel Writing look like?

Are you a traveller, or a tourist, in your own life?

22 October 2019 / 0 Comments

Göteborg Book Fair 2019: Hanguk style

In late September I travelled to the city of Gothenburg (spelt Göteborg in Swedish) to attend Göteborg Book Fair 2019. It’s a three-hour trip to Göteborg by fast train from Stockholm. It seemed as if everyone on the train was heading to the Book Fair. On each seat: a copy of the Swedish Publisher’s Association magazine. The almost toxic smell of printed brochures cloyed our carriage.

I didn’t have any special interest in the Book Fair itself. After all, I’d been to the London and Frankfurt book fairs on several occasions. I’d had my fill of trade-shows and business cards there. I’d also met with printers, editors and developers. Slept in hotel rooms the size of closets. Spent whole days wandering between gigantic pavilions, gripping my lanyard like a talisman.

The Göteborg Book Fair has this trade format in spades. But unlike London and Frankfurt, it also includes a program of seminars and events. In this respect, it’s more like a low-key writers festival. This year’s iteration featured a special guest: the Republic of Korea (South Korea). And it was the Koreans whom I had travelled to Gothenburg to see, hear and read.

My neverending love affair with Korea

I first travelled to South Korea in 2005 as an Asialink resident. It’s no understatement to say that trip changed my life.

Since then, I’ve returned to Korea several times. In 2009 I undertook a second residency hosted by the Language Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea). In 2011, I was part of a delegation of Australian poets who travelled to the country. And in 2013 I spent the first few days of my honeymoon in Seoul.

I’ve written a book of poems about life in Korea. In 2005 I spent many hours in PC Bangs composing prose poems about imaginary cities. Then, in 2011, I published an anthology of Korean and Australian poets in Hangul and English. I’ve also been working, for too many years, on a novel set partly in Korea.

So you could say I have a special interest in South Korea. It verges on the obsessional. If not Orientalist. I can see that now.

Go! Go! Amazing Park, an image of a PC Bang in Seoul, Republic of Korea, which has nothing at all to do with Göteborg Book Fair 2019. — Go! Go! Amazing Park is the name of a PC Bang I photographed while living in Seoul, Republic of Korea, in 2005, and which has absolutely nothing to do with Göteborg Book Fair 2019.

Göteborg Book Fair 2019 Guest of Honour: South Korea

Anyway, enough about me. The point is that I was in Gothenburg for a specific reason. And so were many Korean writers, illustrators, critics, academics and publishers.

It seems that the Göteborg Book Fair invites a special guest of honour each year. Recent guests include Lithuania (2005), Spain (2009) and Brazil (2014). In years without a special guest, the Book Fair responds to a specific theme. This year, we got both.

South Korea was this year’s guest of honour and theme country, with a focus on the theme of ‘Human and Humanity’. There were six key Korean sub-themes: ‘Socio-historical Trauma’, ‘State Violence’, ‘Refugees and Humanism’, ‘Technology and the Posthuman’, ‘Gender and Labor’ and ‘Community of Time’.

The Book Fair’s other general themes for 2019 included Gender Equality and Media and Information Literacy.

Göteborg Book Fair: the logistics

My train arrived at Göteborg Centralstation at around 10.30 am. I walked from the station to the Bökmassan (Gothia Towers, to be exact). Although I could have jumped on a tram, I preferred to stroll down Avenyn through the crisp autumn air.

I arrived to find the whole place abuzz. Quite large crowds streamed in and out. One or two demonstrations wound around Korsvägen, where several tram lines intersect. Activists held out anti-NATO petitions. Police officers wandered about, while less identifiable ‘security’ guards hovered, stuttering menace.

I entered Gothia Towers. A Göteborg Book Fair 2019 attendant directed me upstairs, where I bought a student Gold Pass for a mere 800 SEK. I say ‘mere’ because this is Sweden, where everything is expensive. A day pass for a student cost 450 SEK alone. So, over two days, I was already ahead. And given that the regular Gold Pass cost 3,600 SEK, I felt pretty pleased with myself.

The Gold Pass is also good value because it provides entry to a lounge where you can get free tea and coffee. While Swedish brygkaffe is hardly anything to write home about, I wasn’t complaining. It wasn’t until the next day I realized my pass also entitled me to a choice tote bag.

With my Gold Pass attached to the inevitable lanyard, I entered the melee of the fair. Most of the events in the South Korean program took place at a special stand in one of the large halls at Gothia Towers. A series of seminars—which were the real highlight of the ‘festival’—were held in a smaller room upstairs.

Human and humanity, Hanguk style

I attended three seminars, four author talks and one movie screening over two days at the Göteborg Book Fair. That might not seem like a lot. In truth, I also spent a lot of time walking around. I drank a lot of free coffee, ate a haloumi burger and sat down whenever I could. Then I bought books from the English Bookshop stand (one of the only ones selling English books). At all times, I found it hard to handle the masses of people flowing in and out of the halls. It was pretty tiring.

One thing made the Korean festival-within-a-book-fair untold. The organizers produced three books on Korean literature and distributed them for free. They must have invested some serious won in designing and printing these beauties.

The first, the Human and Humanity program book, contained speaker bios and a running sheet. It also included some fascinating essays on the Korean program sub-themes. Written by Korean academics, they focused on the works of the presenting authors. But they also provided some pretty crucial political and cultural context. I like to think I know quite a bit about Korean politics and history. These essays proved me wrong, time and time again.

The cover image from a 245-page anthology of Korean fiction and poetry produced for Göteborg Book Fair 2019. — The Literature Translation Institute of Korea produced a 245-page anthology of Korean fiction and poetry on the occasion of Göteborg Book Fair 2019. The cover illustration was created by the mysteriously named 0.1. It features an androgynous red-head (possibly Pippi Longstocking), lying on a floor in front of a stack of books propped up by a Hangul letter, while draping their arm over a Dalarna horse.

The second book was Korean Literature: Stories and Poems. It was a 245-page sampler of the works of the Korean writers appearing at the Book Fair, publushed by LTI Korea. In my experience it’s hard to find translations of lesser known Korean poets and writers. In that respect, this neat collection alone was worth the price of admission.

The third book was a catalogue, containing images from Korean children’s books. Having visited Paju Book City, I know that children’s literature is big business in Korea. It’s a huge export market. In fact, I managed to catch a Q&A with one Korean children’s book artist at the Book Fair, Suzy Lee, who is a total superstar.

So, with my books in tow, I set off on my miniature journey through Korean literature today.

All three of the seminar sessions I attended at Göteborg Book Fair 2019 related to Korea. These were a real highlight of the Book Fair for me. The organizers provided simultaneous translations in English, Swedish and Korean). This made the events intimate and intelligent. We could listen in as Korean panellists spoke. We could watch them as they listened to translations of moderators’ questions.

I’ve never seen anything quite like it at a book fair.

The design theme of the Korea Stand

Attending a book fair can be pretty wearing on the feet and legs. What was also pretty tiring was the way in which the Korean stand was set up. According to the rather neat Human and Humanity program book, the stand even had its own designer.

Enter Seong-ho Ham, architect and poet. According to him, “Sadness is the human condition.”

Well, okay, but—

“Each of us has our own slope. Humanity begins in recognizing that discomfort and sympathizing with the other.”

Fine.

So, the stand was a raised platform “that slopes upward by 1 percent with chairs facing this incline.” The audience members sat on 66 chairs placed on this incline. In ergonomics terms, this meant actual physical pain for anyone who sat there for more than a few minutes.

How this idea managed to get past the Göteborg Book Fair OHS committee (if there was one) is beyond me. It also strikes me as being in tune with the hard-edged theme and sub-themes of the stand itself. I can assure you, my hips were aching for days afterwards. But whether that is of significance to anyone else remains, of course, moot.

The Korean stand at Göteborg Book Fair 2019. — The Korean stand at Göteborg Book Fair 2019 was designed by Seong-ho Ham, an architect and poet.

The Human Condition in Korean Society

The first session on my agenda was ‘The Human Condition in Korean Society’. The program stated that it would be about the tensions between the old and new in Korea. The unintended consequences of the country’s swift development.

The session featured two Korean panellists. Cheon Gwan-yul is a political journalist. He writes for SisiaIn, an independent online news magazine. Lee Sang-heon is a writer and academic. He’s also the Director of the International Labour Organization’s Employment Policy Department. The panel also included Sweden’s former ambassador to South Korea, Lars Vargo.

The moderator, Patrik Lundberg, asked each panellist some pretty searing questions. It may come as no surprise that Vargo painted a predictable and moderate portrait of Korea. I found it annoying that he mentioned ‘karaoke’ rather than ‘noraebang’, though. Lee was more nuanced. He reflected on how Korea has copied other systems in the past but now faces a new existential crisis. He also spoke about the concept of ‘han’ and about inequality in Korean society.

Cheon was the most radical panellist. He’s written a lot about government corruption in Korea. I hoped that he might say a little about this. But he seemed to face the most difficult questions, and at times I found this frustrating on his behalf.

This came to a head towards the end of the session. Lundberg stated that the overseas adoption of Korean orphans has been a big issue for Korea. He added that he himself was an adoptee. He then invited the panellists to comment on this issue. For me to say that this is a sensitive issue for many Koreans would be presumptuous. But I could sense Cheon’s discomfort. Such a tough question to answer.

The discussion then moved on to the issue of refugees in Korean society. This was not something I knew much about, to be honest. For example, I was unaware that 500 Yemenis seeking refugee status arrived on Jeju-do in 2018. I guess even I’m still stuck in a ‘one-blood’ conception of Korea.

In Human Time

The second session I attended on Thursday had the title ‘In Human Time’. As the name suggests, it focused on how we understand time. Or ‘towers of time’ as the program described it. A tad bombastic but okay. Time was a suitable topic for two Korean poets regarded as ‘futurists’.

Both Haengsook Kim and Yong-mok Shin had appeared at the Korean stand (on that infamous inclining stage) to read some of their work. A screen projected their answers to some generic questions about their preoccupations. Simple, yet effective.

But in this session, Yukiko Duke, a Swedish writer and journalist, acted as moderator. She’s translated Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood into Swedish. Which made me realize how little I know about how Swedes regard (or read) Asian literature.

Anyway, it was nice to see two poets talking about their work. Especially as they are both around the same age as me. Kim’s comment on the descriptor ‘futurist’ also struck me as familiar.

She noted that some critics had used the term to describe her style. But this may have reflected the alien-ness of that style, she said. In that it was a style that people could not yet understand. I suspect many other poets from ‘post-2000’ generations would have received similar comments.

When Kim added that she was ‘trying to write about questions that have no answers’, it almost broke my heart.

She went on to describe an experience she had in a hotel on Jeju-do in 2014. In fact, she wrote about it in the sampler made available to Book Fair attendees. But she was there to chair a session at the Seoul Writers Festival. Three times, while addressing the audience, she said ‘1914’ instead of ‘2014’.

Later, in a hotel corridor, she felt surrounded by spirits from a different era. This led Kim to meditate on the quality of time. In fact, she admitted that ‘within my body there are two modes of time’. I can kind of relate to that!

Yukiko Duke is a sympathetic interviewer. She managed to draw out each poet on the themes in their work. But I found her reference to Indigenous Australian concepts of time a bit strange.

Duke also introduced each poet’s work by inviting them to read. I also found this a little odd, given the short time available in the session. Anyone interested in their poetry could read it in the program anthology. Or attend the separate readings.

But then I heard both Duke and Yong-mok Shin read his poem ‘Community’ and something clicked into place:

May I use the dead person’s name? Since he’s dead,
may I take his name? Since I gained one more name today
the number of my names keeps increasing …
—Yong-mok Shin, ‘Community’ (translated by An Sonjae)

Shin also weighed in on the ‘my generation’ debate. He pointed out that political and aesthetic progress in the 1990s did not coincide. In other words, younger Korean poets have needed to do a lot of experimenting. Or at least that was my hot take.

Interview with Yong-mok Shin courtesy of LTI Korea.

Then he spoke of a student friend who had self-immolated. The reference was almost casual, but I’ve heard Koreans stating similar things. This tragic event had provided a motivation for Sin to write.

Shin concluded by emphasizing how mystical it is that we live in different times in our bodies. Experiencing the same thing at the same time. In the end, “reading poetry in this place is proof that we exist in the same place”.

And with that we all picked our jaws up off the floor and moved out of the auditorium.

That evening, after checking into my Air BnB stuga, I took a stroll through the Botanic Gardens. I then grabbed some dinner at a Japanese restaurant in the Haga precinct in downtown Göteborg, before catching a tram back to home base.

And thence, dear reader, to Bedfordshire.

Social-historical Public Trauma at the Göteborg Book Fair

The third session I attended, on the Friday afternoon, was the one that everyone wanted to attend. Han Kang was on the panel.

It’s safe to say that Han Kang is a literary superstar, almost a household name by now. That’s what happens when you win the Man Booker prize. Or write a book that no one alive today will get to read. She could have filled an auditorium appearing all by herself. Which made it strange and intriguing that the organizers sttuck her on a panel. In a room with capacity for around 100 people.

Needless to say, I fought my way into that auditorium with vigour. By that time, deep into my second day of the Göteborg Book Fair, I was an old hand. Swedish queues are the stuff of myth. There are rules and regulations governing how to queue for a bus. How to stand in line at a health centre. How to navigate a kölapp (paper ticket) system. This one was no exception.

I’d seen the queue for previous sessions stretching in to the distance. So I made sure I got there early. To each person inquiring whether this was the queue for Han Kang, I answered in the affirmative. I gave nothing else away. Not even an inch. As the queue snaked forward I remained in my place, a neutral expression on my face. In the end, I was one of the last people let in. It seemed like at least one hundred people behind me missed out.

Anyway, it wasn’t all about Han Kang. This session also included Eun Young Jin and Athena Farrokhzad. All three writers discussed the issue of social-historical public trauma from interesting perspectives. Mats Almegard, the moderator, did well to keep the conversation on track.

A reading by Eun Young Jin courtesy of LTI Korea.

Jin discussed the Sewol ferry tragedy, and her own response to it as a poet and writer. She described how she wrote a poem for a girl named Ye-eun, one of the 250 school students who drowned on 16 April 2014. “I had to write that poem,” she explained. Farrokhzad also discussed the tragedy of the 1998 discotheque fire in Göteborg. The fire, lit by a group of boys, killed 63 young people. Grim but moving stuff.

Kang discussed The White Book and Human Acts, two of her most well-known books. The latter deals with the 1980 Gwangju massacre. Again, hardly cheerful stuff. But it was fascinating to watch the way she answered the moderator’s questions. Sitting so still as she listened to the translator. Narrowing her eyes in an enigmatic way. Was I projecting? It’s possible.

The cover of Han Kang's Human Acts, which the author discussed at Göteborg Book Fair 2019. — The cover of Han Kang’s *Human Acts*, which the author discussed at Göteborg Book Fair 2019.

Kang spoke at some length about the process of writing Human Acts. It got to the point, she said, where the book was writing her. Sure, it’s a phrase one often hears but in this case it seemed compelling. She described how difficult it was to find the voices of the victims of the massacre. The polyphonic nature of the narrative, in the end, provided a way to work through the events of 1980.

The session ended too soon for everyone’s liking. As we filed out, a new queue formed in the foyer. Fans stood in line, waiting for Han Kang’s autograph. An assistant performed triage, asking what they wanted inscribed in their copies. I left them to it.

The staff at the Korean stand had told me there were no copies of any of the Korean writers’ books available. But I took the stairs down to the main hall of the Book Fair and came to the English Bookshop’s stall. I noticed they had copies of Human Acts, as well as some other books. I purchased a copy and raced up the stairs. But it was too late.

Han Kang had left the building.

Epilogue: station to station

As for me, it was also time to head home. But I still had several hours to kill before my train departed. I left the Bökmassan and headed over to Göteborg’s cultural precinct. There, in the cute-as retro Bio Roy, I caught a screening of a Korean film.

Seoul Station (2013), directed by Yoon-ho Bae, unlike the zombie film of the same name, is a documentary. It chronicles the experiences of labourers renovating the Old Seoul station building. Built in 1925, the building is a relic of Japanese imperialism—a topic discussed at length in the film.

In 2011, the renovations completed, the station was ‘reborn’ as Cultural Station 284. The 284 refers to the station’s previous designation as a Historic Site.

A still from Seoul Station (2013), directed by Yoon-ho Bae, and screened at Göteborg Book Fair 2019. — A still from *Seoul Station* (2013), directed by Yoon-ho Bae, and screened at Göteborg Book Fair 2019.

The film has no narrator. It features interviews with workers, including migrant workers from China and Viet Nam. It was a sobering experience to see the looks on their faces at the Cultural Station 284 opening. As if to say, ‘We slaved away in substandard conditions for this?’

I’d like to say the film was a fitting finale to my two days of Korean culture but I’d be kidding myself. Like the entire program, it posed uncomfortable questions about labour and culture. It attempted to show a non-glossy side of Korea that I found refreshing and honest. It made me ponder my own privilege as I trudged down Avenyn towards Göteborgs Centralstation.

I regretted not staying for the entire duration of the Book Fair, as I missed the chance to see a number of other Korean writers. But after two days, I was ready for a sit down. Which was just as well. My return trip to Stockholm ended up taking more than five hours. I did not arrive home until 2am the next morning.

As with my outward journey, I suspect most of my fellow passengers were also returning from the Göteborg Book Fair. Only this time, the carriage no longer smelt like coated printer’s paper. Was it my imagination, or did the whole train smell like bibimbap?

22 April 2019 / 0 Comments

Schiermonnikoog (Skiermûntseach), Fryslân

I arrived on the Waddenzee island of Schiermonnikoog (or Skiermûntseach in Frisian) today after a roundabout journey via Groningen, Leeuwarden and Lauwersoog.

I’d spent a long weekend just outside Groningen, in a cute cottage in the forest. I then took a train to Leeuwarden, but only had time for a 20-minute walk through the city centre. I’d like to return to this part of Fryslân again some time.

What followed was a long bus ride to Lauwersoog, and then two beers at a bar near the sluizen. Followed by one 10% alcoholic-volume brown beer on das boot to Schiermonnikoog (SMO).

Essentially, I was drunk on the Waddenzee, heading for Biermonnikoog.

Living. The. Dream.

What a bizarre little place Schiermonnikoog is. No cars, just electric buses and masses of bicyclists heading back and forth from the dunes to the town.

Schiermonnikoog dunes. — Schiermonnikoog is basically an island made out of sand.

The dunes themselves, as expected, were windswept. To put it mildly, the sand blasted my face right off the entire time. The water was ice-cold, too. But boy, did that walk clear out the cobwebs.

I had expected the strandpaviljoen to be open but was proven wrong. It has an abandoned feel in this photograph.

Schiermonnikoog strandpaviljoen. — Schiermonnikoog *strandpaviljoen* (closed).

I am presently lodging at the Hotel van der Werff, which has a very old-world vibe, as if it could be a set for a Paul Thomas Anderson film.

Tonight I sat at an outside table facing the street and ordered a beer and an oude jenever. It’s a thing I do whenever I’m in the Netherlands and feeling the need to take the edge off my mood.

In case you don’t know, jenever is Dutch gin, which is more like aquavit or mild vodka. To combine a jenever and a beer (either in the same glass or side by side) is to order a kopstootje (trans: ‘small head butt’).

I had only got halfway through the jenever when some old codger wandered by and remarked, Dat is en kopstootje.

His wife looked at the jenever and the beer on my table and replied, Nou, dat is echt en ouwemanse drankje, hoor.

Feeling deep in Fryslân now.

21 April 2019 / 0 Comments

Eelderwolde: somewhere in Drenthe

I’m sitting in a cabin in the woods near Eelderwolde, just outside the northern Dutch city of Groningen. It’s 7pm, a pleasant 20 degrees Celsius, and the sky is impossibly blue.

I had an early start to my journey, at 5.30am this morning in Gustavsberg.

Off we go! I whispered, as I crept out of the house and walked the 1.4km to the bus stop.

I caught the 474 to Slussen. Then I took the T-Bana to T-Centralen, from where I jumped on the Arlanda Express.

For reasons I dont want to go into here, I was catching a flight from Stockholm to Hamburg. The flight was slightly delayed but that was no big deal.

What was a big deal was that the passenger sitting next to me got out of his seat about halfway through the flight. He then apparently collapsed at the back of the plane.

Then came the loudspeaker announcement everyone dreads. A flight attendant, failing to disguise the panic in her voice, asking if there’s a doctor on board.

Long story short: the guy made it.

I faced another long delay at the airport in the queue for subway tickets. But I still had an hour to two in Hamburg before my bus to Groningen. So I went and had a beer or three in the sun.

The three-hour bus trip to Groningen was a little boring, and stiflingly hot. But we made it there on schedule.

The weather was sunny and the old town was bustling with holiday visitors. I grabbed some supplies and hit the bus station, which is right next to the train station.

From there, it was a 20-minute ride south to Eelderwolde, which is actually not in Groningen province but in Drenthe.

So that’s how I got to my final destination for the next three days. My very own private cabin in the woods.

It’s time to get back to basics.