A New Way of Seeing: Exploring the Role of Home and Self in Travel and Travel Writing Elizabeth Pearson “No, gracias.” That was my refrain, always on Granada, nowhere and everywhere, waiting for the tip of the tongue, ready to burst forth at the their next target. slightest provocation. No eye contact, a small but I was determined to not get tricked into a firm shake of the head, a purposeful step, marred gypsy encounter. My husband’s and my purpose only by my natural bounce. It was almost second for these three days in Granada was to fulfill a nature now, very similar to the response you give lifelong dream of mine, to see the Alhambra and to the kiosk attendants in the mall, its palace complex. The complex is a mass of except in the case of the kiosk people, they only gorgeous contradictions from the never-ending chase you so far. The Ewok key chains, special muqarnas dome in the Alhambra and the exfoliating Dead Sea salt, and electronic meticulously wild gardens of paradise in the cigarettes are too precious to leave unattended Generalife Palace to the hulking Charles V for too long. The gypsies will chase you down palace and the lovely and subtle nods to Debussy the hill, around the corner, over the river and and Washington Irving.Tip: When visiting the through the woods to grandmother’s house if Alhambra, do not linger at the Washington Irving need be. Statue. It says two things about you: Gullible I knew this going in, of course. Granada American. As we investigated the statue, a strong is home of the shock-and-awe gypsy attack. claw grabbed my arm and swung me around to Clutching their bundles of rosemary, the ladies face a Miriam Margoles look-alike with a hawk fortunes and blessings on each corner beatific smile and several sprigs of while the men engage in increasingly odd rosemary.“¡Que bella!” she exclaimed.In the performance art, from the mime hanging by his beauty of the place, I had let my guard down. suspenders from the cathedral’s wrought-iron “¿Casados? Bueno, denme su mano.” Pressing fence to the grown man pretending to be a rosemary into both our hands, she held onto mine shrieking baby in a stroller in the town square, with a vise-like grip. “¡Ah, bueno!¿Aquí? Dice sounding more like a mockingbird’s shrill que tendras una vida muy larga y con buena imitation of an irritated kitten than a human salud.¡Y con mucho amor!Pero solo amaras a child. The gypsies are the street people of una persona…a él!” Our gypsy was delighted with the fortune she was divining from my palm. Exploring the Role of Home and Self in Travel and Travel Writing 72 She made a grab for Michel’s hand, turning his expression from one of confusion to one of alarm. I wasn’t translating for him in an attempt to extricate ourselves from the situation as Travel writing has been around as long as quickly as possible, and he had no idea what was humans have been traveling and telling stories happening. “¡Oh, que bueno!”she exclaimed. about it, from Pausanias’s Descriptions of Greece “Tendrán tres hijos.” Her hand shot out and in the second century CE and Petrarch’s account patted my stomach before I could jerk away. of his trip up Mount Ventoux in 1336 to Samuel “Dos hijos muy fuertes como él,” she caressed Johnson’s 18th-century account of his trip to the Michel’s arm, “y una hija con pelo largo como Hebrides and modern writers like Paul Theroux, tú.” Walkers, both Spanish and tourists alike, Bill Bryson, and Joan Didion. However, the hurried by, some chuckling and shaking their proper approach to traveling and travel writing head as they passed. I smiled frigidly back, has oft been debated. The account could be a lens incensed that they did not realize how lucky they through which the reader experiences a new were that we were taking one for the team. place or people, the author almost non-existent except as the holder of the lens. The account I snapped out of my reverie as Michel’s could be all about the author and his or her panicked voice reached my ears. “I’m sorry?” he thoughts, feelings, self-realizations, and growth, stammered. “Dime,” our gypsy ordered in a the visited local just an afterthought, a backdrop grandmotherly but firm voice, her long fingers on which to enact the author’s emotional journey. patting Michel’s pocket. “What? I don’t know. I Or it could be a combination of the two, perhaps don’t know!” Michel stuttered. “Money. She a failed attempt at being objective and wants money. Give her the coins in your pocket.” documentary or a carefully balanced look at a She looked at me expectantly, pleased I new place through a specific and acknowledged understood the situation. He thrust the coins into personal experience. No matter what the form, her hand, and she shook her head patiently. “No. though, the author’s experiences in their home, Papel.” Michel’s relief turned again to alarm, but whether with their family, hometown, or home I stepped in. “No, lo siento, pero no tenemos country, are just as important in understanding papel ahora. Este es todo el dinero.” She knew as experiences abroad as the actual experiences well as I did that we had plenty of bills between abroad themselves. As such, people present Michel and I. Her attention shifted to Michel themselves a certain way when traveling abroad again and made the same request for paper based on how they see themselves at home: as money. “No, no, we don’t have any. Sorry,” he traveler or tourist; open-minded or a know-it-all, insisted, having correctly picked up on my an observer or an action person; a confident decline of her previous request. “No. Cuesta explorer or a timid internalizer; and all shades in vente. Diez para ella, diez para ti.” Twenty euros between. for unwanted palm readings? She must be joking. I repeated myself again, and she sighed In this essay, I explore the importance of resignedly. “Bueno.” She took back half of our home in the current critical discussion on travel sprigs of rosemary, blessed me with the sign of and travel writing, examining writers and styles the cross, and patted Michel’s cheek. As we like Zoë Brân’s documentary approach, Michael hurried off, I explained to Michel what just Mershaw’s balance between experience and happened. He laughed. “Well, at least she didn’t documenting, and a round-table discussion lead curse us. She only took away half our blessing.” by Robert Root that discusses travel writing as Plaza: Dialogues in Language and Literature 2.2 (Spring 2012) Exploring the Role of Home and Self in Travel and Travel Writing 73 personal memoir. I then analyze writings by subjects, to tell their stories as honestly and Samuel Johnson and Maureen Dowd as two truthfully as possible. But how to do that, to examples of how home directly affects the uphold her duty, is tricky. author’s self-presentation and travel account; and It seems that how the author approaches travel apply some of my findings to my own travel writing and upholds the duty to reader and writing about my husband’s and my time in subject really depends on how the author defines Spain during the summer of 2011. I argue that his or her work. For example, Michelle Moreno acknowledging ones home and experiences there defines travel narrative as a “subset of personal is imperative to understanding one’s self- storytelling…one of the many lenses through presentation abroad and how that affects the which we examine experience and shape stories” experiences one allows oneself to have. Finally, I (Root 80), while Zoë Brân claims that for her, argue that the idea of traveling to improve one’s “the most accomplished travel writers reveal the home, promoted by both Johnson and modern world through their eyes whilst keeping travel writer Rick Steves, is an insightful though themselves more or less in the background… admittedly difficult approach to travel. their personality is expressed in how they write and what they choose to write about, not through autobiography” (Brân 163). Brân’s preferred documentary style is an intriguing idea, the author simply holding the lens through which the Returning to the grounding for this reader views the travel narrative as analysis of home and self in travel writing—my unencumbered by the author’s experience as own experiences—I travel to learn, to see things possible. She notes that as she would rather read in actuality that I’ve only seen in pictures, to about a place or culture than the author moving experience new places and people, to learn about about or interacting with that place or culture, myself. I write to learn, to synthesize those she assumes her reader does, too, and writes experiences, to remember those new places and accordingly. However she also acknowledges people, to understand what I learned about that some writers are criticized for being to myself, and, perhaps, teach others. But what is remote from their own story, and “it is necessary the duty of the travel writer to his or her readers? to have some kind of balance between presence Clearly, my own reasons for traveling and and absence” (Brân 163). It seems that Brân says writing are selfish, the goal, as Michael this with a twinge of frustration or regret that she Mewshaw says, for each writer is the same must cater to her audience’s taste and not simply —“insight, joy, euphony, vivid experience, visual write a purely documentary account of a country.