Armchair Traveler's Alert
Choose your tour guides with care
Travel writing is one of my favorite genres. I love to read about other people’s adventures in places I may never see. I like traveling well enough, and I’ve been to some pretty awe-inspiring places, though I hate the part about getting there—especially if it involves a small plane. I don’t have a travel bucket list, and I would just as soon wake up in a campsite with an amazing view of the mountains somewhere in America as in a luxury hotel in a far-flung city.
Unfortunately, travel writing has a problem—one it shares with some fiction and other forms of non-fiction, because, by definition, it’s authored by people observing new places and cultures from the outside looking in. And they’re not always smart about it.
Writing about other people’s cultures is fraught. It always has been. From the racist depictions of Africans by early European explorers to the controversy over the 2020 border novel American Dirt, we’re becoming more sensitive to and aware of the problems with reading about people and places as reported upon by outside observers. The entire field of anthropology is struggling to figure out how to move beyond the roots of colonialism that taint its work. The famous anthropologist Franz Boas coined the term “cultural relativism” to address the idea that, as Oxford Reference puts it, “there is no universal standard to measure cultures by, and that all cultures are equally valid and must be understood in their own terms.”
If you’re writing from outside a culture, it’s well-nigh impossible to “understand it in its own terms.”
Concerns about outsiders documenting others’ cultures really hit home for me a few years ago when I picked up the bestselling novel The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad. I gravitate toward books about Afghanistan because we have friends who came to the U.S. as Afghan refugees. We’ve spent countless hours with them over the past seven years, helping them with American culture, rules, and Paperwork with-a-capital-P, sharing our holiday traditions, and reaping from them the benefits of abundant meals, celebrations, and perhaps most important of all, insights into what it means to live in poverty in our own city.
Seierstad’s wildly popular book was published in 2002, but I doubt it would be picked up today. Her project was to literally move into the home of an Afghan bookseller in Kabul and write about the inner workings of his household. Several times, as she reveals an often disparaging portrait of his family—at least to Western eyes—she reminds the reader that the bookseller, Shah Muhammad Rais, had welcomed her into his home. But if you know any Afghans, or anyone from that region of the world, you know that hospitality is sacred. If you ask an Afghan man to allow you to move into his home and live among the women of his household in order to write a book about everyone, he will likely say, “You are welcome,” just as Rais did. That does not, in any way, mean that you should actually move in and write a book about everyone.
Reserving further judgment, I read the whole book, but my disgust for Seierstad’s behavior didn’t change. This “travel account” wasn’t about the landscape, the places, the adventures; it was about a particular group of real people, judged through someone else’s cultural lens.
My ire was raised again by writing this post for you, and I went in search of information on what had happened to Rais and his family after publication of The Bookseller of Kabul. A 2007 piece on NPR affirmed my understanding of how Seierstad had gained access in the first place:
In 2002, Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad asked if she could live with Rais and his family to write a book. The bookseller agreed. He says he couldn't refuse a guest, even though his tiny home was crammed with 20 people at the time.
For five months he openly shared his life with Seierstad. But Rais says he was unprepared for her interpretation of what she saw. In the book, Seierstad paints an unflattering portrait of a controlling patriarch with two wives and the oppression of female relatives, among other things.
His oldest son, Iraj Mohammed Rais, says Seierstad is "like a typical Westerner, you know, no offense. She'll do anything for fame and money. That's it. This is not the West where you can just live with friends and all that. This is about the life of people."
He and his father say they fear being attacked by Afghans offended by the portrayal of Afghan family life in The Bookseller of Kabul. The elder Rais sent his first wife and several of their children to live in Canada. The second wife and several more children sought asylum — ironically, in Norway.
A defamation lawsuit followed, which Seierstad ultimately won. In 2022, Rais sought asylum from the Taliban in the United Kingdom.
If you’re interested in reading a more genuine Western woman’s story of Afghanistan, instead try Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil by Deborah Rodriguez. Rodriguez went to Kabul not to write a book but rather as part of a humanitarian aid group. Much to her own surprise, she ended up staying on to offer her services as a hairdresser and help Afghan women open their own beauty salons. Her portrait of Afghans is more nuanced, humble, and warm. She doesn’t sugar coat a bad situation, but neither does she use the particular personal crises of her students to argue that Western culture is in some way superior. Ultimately, her story is about herself and how she learned to live in a city so foreign to her previous experiences.
I don’t think we want a reading ecosystem in which authors are only permitted to write about their own culture. Aside from the obvious fact that such a rule would mean we can’t have books in which multiple cultures interact, it raises another concern as well, highlighted in an article at Sapiens.org that documents the experience of the American cultural anthropologist Chisomo Kalinga. Born in Malawi, Kalinga immigrated to the United States as an infant and grew up American. When she became an anthropologist, she wanted to study the representation of HIV and AIDS in fiction in the U.S. Instead, she had to bring Malawi into her research in order to receive funding.
Kalinga’s experience speaks to an important debate taking place in academic disciplines that place human beings and cultures under the microscope. In these fields, including anthropology and sociology, questions are being raised about the power dynamics surrounding “who gets to study whom.” In anthropology, the questions form part of a broader debate about how to make the field more inclusive of scholars from underrepresented communities and nations.
In consequence, the field has tried to amplify nontraditional voices—those from communities where, historically, anthropologists have been outsiders. “The instinct was not malicious,” says Ron Kassimir, of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), referring to this effort. “But it developed into an unspoken idea that scholars from the developing world should study their own.”
It’s this idea that concerns Kalinga. “I have never met a white student … who was told to study their own,” she says.
Ironically, the impulse to ensure that anthropologists work as insiders serves as a powerful restriction on research choices, especially for scholars of color.
The onus is not just on writers to avoid measuring others’ cultures using one’s own yardstick. It’s on readers, too. In her famous speech “The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Adichie talks about the cultural interpretation problem from the readership side. Even when writers tell stories from their own cultures, readers may cherry pick, reading only one or two accounts of, say, family life in Nigeria and then leaping to their own conclusions. In her speech, she said:
I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called American Psycho and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. Now, obviously, I said this in a fit of mild irritation.
It would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. And now, this is not because I am a better person than that student, but, because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America.
Even when we read works by authors writing about their own cultures, we have to remember that each one of them is just a single story. It’s tempting to forget this as a reader, but as a subject, it’s easy to understand. My family traveled to the Galapagos Islands in 2010—one of my favorite vacations. One of the dozen or so local tour guides on the boat said he had lived in America. Where? we asked. He answered, “Phoenix, Arizona.” We looked at each other and laughed—then explained to him why, of course. Phoenix was about as different a place from Connecticut as we could imagine within our own country. And yet, in his eyes, Phoenix was America.
These lines about “who gets to study whom” and who gets to write about what are being drawn right now, sometimes fiercely and with stifling rigidity. As readers, we have a role to play. When we read outside our own cultural experiences, we should do so with awareness. Ask yourself whether the author is writing from inside or outside the culture—and, if from the outside, whether they are using their own cultural lens to inappropriately pass judgment on their subjects. And remember that every writer comes at their subject matter with a singular interpretation of one small corner of a culture unfamiliar to us. Every writer gives us just a single story.
I do think that travel writing continues to be relevant, when done well. Sometimes the outsider’s experience is the story. At other times, we simply can’t learn about many of the world’s more tucked-away places without an outside guide because publishers would have to translate works by local writers—and they won’t.
When you read to learn about places far from home, you don’t have to pack a suitcase. But you should bring with you a measure of caution—and an open mind.