“Each time I go to a place I have not seen before, I hope it will be as different as possible from the places I already know.”
There’s a race against time in the packaging of this book to be the first to mention Edward Said. In Orientalism, Said frames the way we should look at colonial, Orientalist, and imperial writings, and really ask the key questions. Who gets to talk? What do they say? Who do they say it about? Etc. Said was an avid reader of Foucault, and understanding most texts and most language as a series of competing discourses helps to understand what we are reading when we are reading something.
Edmund White is the first the mention Said in the introduction to this collection of travel writing from Paul Bowles. Much of Bowles’s writing takes place in North Africa, Asia Minor, and the Middle East, both his travel writing and his fiction. But this book specifically is sub-titled “Scenes from the Non-Christian World,” and so the focus is much more tightened on Islam especially in reference to American and European travelers. And of course if this feels too distasteful to consider, I wouldn’t recommend reading this book.
What is interesting here is that while he’s writing (and these pieces are not connected except by writer and general subject and most were published elsewhere and collected here) he is grappling with the question of representation. The two questions he primarily discusses: what is truth? and what is real? And again it’s not that he sees himself as being the truth or real here, but that those terms in themselves are up for debate. The debate centers on a conversation he has in Morocco in the book with a man who is mad at him for representing the scenes from the city accurately, showing the various highs and lows of a living human city. For the man, Bowles should show the “truth” which is the representation of the city as the city itself most aspires itself to be. He shouldn’t show the real, the actuality of what the city contains. This question permeates this book. Some of the essays are very good and interesting; some immediately cross over into uncomfortable Orientalism almost instantly, even cartoonishly. But at the very least, this is a time capsule of a book because it was published in the early 1960s, and it’s so much that the attitudes have necessarily changed, but it does seem as empire creeped further and further into the past, perhaps some of the “truth” changed.