by Paul Theroux
The early French travelers who were the first to encounter these Anishinabe were blind to these scrolls, could not read them, were interested only in the furs the people could supply. There are distinct disadvantages to being a stranger. The stranger is always somewhat at sea and, like a castaway, faced with unusual, unexpected problems.
Otherness can be like an illness; being a stranger can be analogous to experiencing a form of madness—those same intimations of the unreal and the irrational, when everything that has been familiar is stripped away. The stranger can feel like someone wounded or disabled. In The Wound and the Bow, Edmund Wilson used the Greek myth of Philoctetes as a metaphor to describe the relationship between art and illness. The underlying idea in the myth is that Philoctetes' wound is part of his character: "the conception of superior strength as inseparable from disability." It is not only Philoctetes' wonderful bow that makes him superior, but also his fortitude, a power derived from his bearing the pain of his wound. His unhealed injury gives him nobility. This notion of the link between trauma and art (or sickness and strength) was not new with Wilson; it exists throughout literature. It is in part the basis of the heartsick artist-lover of the Romantic movement, as well as much of what we understand as modern. Borges, who was blind, wrote, "Blindness is a gift."*
The greatest exponent today of this interpretation of illness as a possible source of imaginative power—though he has never referred specifically to the myth of Philoctetes—is Dr. Oliver Sacks. His patients are classic strangers. In the case histories collected in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, Dr. Sacks has explained how an apparent disability in one area of a person's life can grant an access of strength or inspiration in another area. More recently, in The Island of the Colorblind, he has described how achromatopes develop a keen understanding not of color but of what he calls "a polyphony of brightnesses." (The non-colorblind person is as helpless as the sighted man in H. G. Wells's story "The Country of the Blind.") And he tells of encounters in which the physician is revealed as less acute, less capable, and less perceptive than the patient.
To be a stranger is to be childlike, a bit defenseless and dim, and having to acquire a language. In Seeing Voices, his study of the deaf, Dr. Sacks compares Saint Augustine's description, in his Confessions, of his learning to speak as an infant with the deaf learning sign language. Wittgenstein's analysis of this experience relates this to the stranger's dilemma: "Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one." This is precisely what the stranger feels: an inner sense of helplessness, almost infantilism, in this new place, as if the stranger had passed through the looking glass.
Living in the African bush for so long meant that I was dependent on the hospitality of Africans, the Nyanja people in Nyasaland. They could have managed very well without me, but I needed them. My first task was to learn their language, Chinyanja, also known as Chichewa. After that, my life was much easier, although I felt isolated: I had only a bicycle for transportation for my first two years; I had no phone, and for long spells of time—hours or days—no electricity. On the plus side, I was not far from a vegetable market and a post office. I raised pigeons and ate them. I liked my students. I had friends in nearby villages. Except for periods when there was political trouble in the country and rifle muzzles were pointed at my face, I did not feel I was in much danger, because in general I understood the risks. In spite of my sympathy and good will, I knew I lived apart, but that was not a new feeling. In terms of being a writer, I felt very lucky.
Another important and common fact was that in the Africa I knew, and even the Southeast Asia I knew, local people did not think of solving problems by uprooting themselves and emigrating. They accepted that they would live and die in their own country, indeed in the village where they had been born. They did not have relatives or families elsewhere. A person who is in a country for life tends to see himself or herself as part of a community, with responsibilities. Because fleeing was not an option, the people I knew had a well-developed sense of belonging. They took the long view: they had been there forever, the land was theirs, they were part of a culture, with a long memory, deep roots, old habits and customs. Living among such people intensified my sense of exclusion, of being a stranger, and it fascinated me.
Haunted by the restless dead, these places are more populous than they appear, for most people share their existence with the unseen world of spirits. Ancestors live within us. There is an Inuit notion that a baby born soon after the death of a grandparent is actually the incarnation of the deceased, and the infant will be referred to as "Granddad" or "Grandma" and treated with the respect accorded to an elder. In most of the places I lived during my decade of being cut off, it was an accepted belief that the dead were not dead at all, nor even absent; for many people in the world no one dies, no one really goes away. The dead are present, friends are present, ancestors are present. Recognizing this, Lévi Strauss wrote, "There is probably no society which does not treat its dead with respect." At my present age I am more prepared to entertain the concept of ancestor worship and the proximity of the spirit world than of monotheism. Anyone who has grieved for the loss of a father or mother understands what I am saying, but it extends to all areas of time passing.
Turning up twenty-five years after leaving Malawi, I met people there who reminded me that I had not been forgotten. As a friend, I had not really left. For them, not much time had passed. Is this because we in the West tend to measure time in terms of a single lifetime? Perhaps in places where life expectancy is short (it has been calculated to be thirty-eight years in Zimbabwe), a life span is a useless unit of measurement.
Toward the end of a long day's paddling in the Trobriand Islands, off the northeast coast of Papua–New Guinea, I put ashore at a tiny seaside village intending to ask permission to camp on a nearby beach. "Stay here," the goggling villagers insisted. "You will be safe." That also meant they could keep an eye on me. No one ever asked me how long I intended to remain in the village, though they were bewildered that I should prefer my tent to the hospitality of their huts. Fear of malaria—endemic and often fatal in the Trobriands—was my only reason. After two weeks of utter contentment I paddled away.
They yelled: "Come back sometime!"
Six months or more passed before I returned, and when I did, without any warning, dragging my kayak out of the lagoon, a woman on the beach smiled at me and said, "We were just talking about you."
Her casual welcome delighted me. There was nothing remarkable about my reappearance. It was as if I had hardly left. I had thought of the intervening months as full of incident in my life. That same time was not long for them; it represented one harvest, one storm, and several deaths. But no one truly dies in the Trobriands. The dead simply go to another island: their spirits reside on Tuma, just a bit north.
The villagers' own notion of the passage of time made my return less stressful. There was Trobriand protocol—ritual greetings and presents—but none of the drama and forced emotion that characterizes an American homecoming. It pleased me to think that I figured in their consciousness. Death or departure was part of an eternal return.
And the friendship of people who come and go, for whatever length of time, is not diminished by their absence. What matters in the Trobriands is your existence in the consciousness of the village. If someone talks about you, or if you appear in their dreams, you are present—you have reality.
The most dramatic example of otherness occurs when two radically different cultures meet for the first time. This encounter is summed up in the expression "first contact."
In First Contact, their 1987 account of a series of such events in New Guinea, the authors, Bob Connelly and Robin Anderson, found people in the New Guinea highlands in the 1980s who had been present when Australian prospectors first came to the highlands in 193
0. The Australians were in a hurry to find gold, but seeing them cross a river in their valley, the villagers believed that these white men were the ghosts of their ancestors. All used the word "spirit" to describe the strangers.
One of the witnesses, Kirupano Eza'e, said, "Once they had gone, the people sat down and developed stories. They knew nothing of white-skinned men. We had not seen far places. We knew only this side of the mountains. And we thought we were the only living people. We believed that when a person died, his skin changed to white and he went over the boundary to 'that place'—the place of the dead. So when the strangers came we said, 'Ah, these men do not belong to the earth. Let's not kill them—they are our own relatives.'" Another man, Gopie Ataiamelaho, said, "I asked myself: who are these people? They must be somebody from the heavens. Have they come to kill us or what? We wondered if this could be the end of us, and it gave us a feeling of sorrow. We said, 'We must not touch them!' We were terribly frightened."
They had to be from the sky—where else could they have come from? Also, some people took the white men to be incarnations of a mythical being, Hasu Hasu, associated with lightning.
This parallels the Hawaiian belief that Captain Cook, in the year of first contact, 1778, was the god Lono—he seemed to have all the attributes, and he was feared until he too was discovered to be mortal. On an earlier voyage, in October 1769, when Cook arrived at Turranga Nui in what is now New Zealand, the Maori thought these Englishmen were atua, supernatural beings, or perhaps tipuna, ancestors who were revisiting their homeland. Cook's ship, the Endeavour, was taken to be a floating island, the sacred island Waikawa, and the crew to be tupua, or goblins. In 1517, the year of their first contact, the Aztecs took the Spaniards to be avatars of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, god of learning and of wind.
Even today the word for foreigner or white man in Samoan is palangi (a related word, papalangi, is used in Tonga), meaning "sky burster," a person who comes from the clouds, not a terrestrial creature. Haole—white person, in Hawaiian—means "of another breath." The polar Inuit assumed that they were the only people in the world, so when they saw their first white stranger, the explorer Sir William Parry, in 1821, they said to him, "Are you from the sun or the moon?"
Dim-dim, in Trobriand, means someone not human, not at all like the Trobrianders, who trace their origins to ancestors who rose from holes in the northern part of the main island. The Naskapi Indians of Labrador thought the first white men were ghosts, because ghosts were white too, and fairly common. The writer Larry Millman, who collected oral accounts of the Naskapi around Davis Inlet in Labrador, told me that as a result of this belief, "the Naskapi kept bumping into their white visitors, who were Oblate fathers, because they thought they could walk right through them, as in fact they could walk through ghosts." Today in Hong Kong, the word gweilo is used for a white person or foreigner; it means "ghost man."
The more isolated a people, the greater the emphasis on a stranger's being benign. I am not referring to their near neighbors, with whom they tended to be in conflict—as in New Guinea and elsewhere—but rather to the hard-to-account-for person of another color who invariably is first seen as a spirit of a dead ancestor, then as a patron with goods to share, next as a pest, and finally as a threat. As they met more foreigners, the Inuit began to see them as fellow humans, but different; the widely used Inuit word for white person is kabloona (derived from qallunaat), which means something like "eyebrow stomachs," probably a reaction to whites' hairy bodies by the almost hairless Inuit.
In general, the more contact a people have with foreigners, the more they lose their innocence regarding the strangers' motives, and this cynicism is usually reflected in their language. The late-medieval book of travels attributed to Sir John Mandeville has proven to be a compilation of travel narratives from many sources, and, along with the actual accounts of early (thirteenth- and fourteenth-century) travelers to China, includes medieval fantasies about cannibals, one-eyed men, and dog-headed people. Among others, Shakespeare used the more outlandish details in his work—Caliban is taken straight from Mandeville.
Columbus's descriptions of the islanders he encountered in the West Indies show him to have been heavily influenced by Mandeville. He asserted that he saw one-eyed men, and cannibals, and dog-nosed individuals. He was also influenced by Marco Polo, and using his copy of Marco Polo's Travels as confirmation, Columbus thought he might be in Asia. Some islanders he took to be soldiers of the Great Khan. It was important for Columbus to establish the myth of Carib cannibalism, for then Spain could enslave the people on grounds that they were savages. This same logic applied in the Pacific (New Hebrides is the most dramatic example), where the apparent existence of cannibalism justified intense missionary activity, or slavery, or both.
Anthropological stereotyping is not new, but one of its symmetries is that when an isolated people are visited, and they discover that the visitors are not gods or ancestors or goblins but are people looking for gold, land, or souls to save—usually all three—they tend to protect themselves, and for defending their homes they are termed "cruel," "brave," "bloodthirsty," "warlike," or "savages." The word in Italian for slave (schiave) is related to the word for Serbian (Schiavone), as in English (from Latin) "slave" is related to "Slav"—so many Slavs had been enslaved that the words became synonymous, as "barbarian" has its roots in "bearded"—the hairy enemy. And "bugger" is related to "Bulgar."
This European stereotyping is shared by the Arabs and the Chinese. In China there are many words for foreigner, from the generic wei-guo ren to the words for "red-haired devil," "white devil," and "big nose." It cannot be a mere coincidence that all these Europeans, Arabs, and Chinese live in places that have been crossroads for foreign travelers, and enemies. Unlike the New Guinea highlanders and the Inuit, they were well aware that there were others in the world.
The Arabic language reflects this worldliness: "foreigner" is ajnabi, and the root means something like "people to avoid." Another such word is ajami, which means foreigners, barbarians, people who speak Arabic badly, and Persians. Gharib, stranger, is related to gharb, the West, in the sense of "a person from the West." ("East" appears to have more friendly connotations in Arabic.) But the point is clear: linguistically, first contact exemplifies a kind of innocence, and nothing intensifies xenophobia more than seeing strangers as a threat.
"Every stranger is an enemy," a notion I have encountered in my travels in various cultures, achieved its cruelest expression in Nazism. In his preface to Survival in Auschwitz (also titled If This Is a Man), Primo Levi discusses this delusion. He writes, "For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager" — the Nazi extermination camp.
It is rare to find the opposite view, but not long ago, Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, wrote in his essay "Compassion and the Individual": "All that is necessary is for each of us to develop our good human qualities. I try to treat whoever I meet as an old friend. This gives me a genuine feeling of happiness. It is the practice of compassion."
But I was not embraced as a traveler. I was seen as a stranger, sometimes a dangerous one. My experience of that conflict made me a writer.
One of the paradoxes of otherness is that in travel, each conceives the other to be a foreigner. But even the most distant and exotic place has its parallel in ordinary life. Every day we meet new people and are insulted or misunderstood; we are thrown upon our own resources. In the coming and going of daily life we rehearse a modified version of the dramatic event known as first contact. In a wish to experience otherness to its limit, to explore all its nuances, I became a traveler. I was as full of preconceived notions as Columbus or Crusoe—you can't help it, but you can alter such thoughts. Non-travelers often warn the traveler of dange
rs, and the traveler dismisses such fears, but the presumption of hospitality is just as odd as the presumption of danger. You have to find out for yourself. Take the leap. Go as far as you can. Try staying out of touch. Become a stranger in a strange land. Acquire humility. Learn the language. Listen to what people are saying.
It was as a solitary traveler that I began to discover who I was and what I stood for. When people ask me what they should do to become a writer, I seldom mention books—I assume the person has a love for the written word, and solitude, and disdain for wealth—so I say, "You want to be a writer? First leave home."
Except for "Down the Yangtze," all the pieces in this book were written since my previous collection, Sunrise with Seamonsters (1985). I have placed them thematically, in a way that seems right to me, rather than putting them in chronological order.
Part One
Time Travel
Memory and Creation: The View from Fifty
ONE OF THE MORE bewildering aspects of growing older is that people constantly remind you of things that never happened.
Of course, this is also the case when you are younger, but it is only with the passage of time that you're sure of the lie. I was driving up to Amherst with my parents a few years ago to accept an honorary degree, and my mother, who was excited and talkative, said, "I always knew you were going to be a writer."
I said to myself, No you didn't. You always said I was going to be a doctor.
My father said, "Yep, you always had your nose in a book."
I said to myself, No I didn't.
