Introduction: The Global & the Intimate

Abstract

In Among the Flowers, Jamaica Kincaid describes her three-week trek through Nepal. She travels with three 'plantsmen,' a friend from the United States and two from Wales, who are collecting seeds to cultivate for sale in their respective nurseries. Kincaid is propelled by her own commercial interests (she has commissioned by National Geographic to write in that most dubious of colonial genres, the travel memoir) and by her great love of her Vermont garden. [T]he strangeness of my situation was not lost to me. Vermont, all by itself should be Eden and gardenworthy enough. But apparently, I do not find so. I seem to believe that I will find my idyll more a true ideal, only if I can populate with plants from another side of the (2005, 189). It is her love of her garden that compels her to venture out, and she persistently remarks on her lack of interest in seed collecting and botanizing at elevations below those that resemble the conditions of her home. She writes of her compulsion to buy things in tiny hamlets where no commodities are sold, a desire so strong that she purchased clothing off the bodies of local peasants: This craven behavior on our part can be explained: were becoming afraid that there was less and less evidence to show, to ourselves only, that had done what thought had done, that had to the places had been (167). Kincaid periodically gives relatively large sums of money to particular guides, with clearly articulated hopes of how this should be spent. She does not even try to learn the names of all her guides, whom she nicknames I Love You, Cook, and Table. She carries a satellite phone so that she can stay in constant communication with her thirteen-year-old son in Vermont. She ridicules other trekkers, noting that we decided to call them the Germans, because didn't like the look of them . . . and Germans seem to be the one group of people left that can not be liked just because you feel like it (28). There are no self-imposed limits to Kincaid's seed collecting, aside from lack of interest and an inability to cultivate the seed at home. Jenny Diski's Skating to offers another example of travel writing as memoir. Diski relates the story of her two-week cruise to Antarctica, a trip she undertook under a compulsion to journey to the most remote place imaginable. Arctic, she reasoned, would have easier, but I had no desire to head north. I wanted white and ice for as far as the eye could see, and I wanted in the one place in the world that was uninhabited.... That was Antarctica, and only Antarctica (2001, 5). Antarctica, particularly for a British citizen such as Diski, has long represented the ultimate proving ground physically and spiritually, a place where male explorers venture to die glorious deaths in the service of the empire. The absence of human inhabitants and the extreme harshness of the terrain render unique in its potential for colonization without guilt, unique in the opportunity seems to afford the explorer to make not conquests but untainted discoveries. For Diski, the blankness of this last pure place on earth (7) is what gives its allure. Yet her account is not primarily a travelogue; the landscape finds meaning for her as she juxtaposes her voyage southward with the story of her complicated and sorrowful family history. In the end, both inward and outward journeys converge in her desire for a joy totally disconnected from the world . . . unavailable and in that place without the pain (237). We take Among the Flowers and Skating to as points of departure, in part because of the way in which their writers negotiate with the generic conventions and ideological pitfalls of travel writing. Kincaid articulates how the foreign becomes meaningful through personal relations in an exceedingly messy and ambivalent way. Fully aware of the intimate workings of colonialism, she nonetheless frames the world as a spectacle for collecting and consumption and repeats familiar gestures of cultural superiority and paternalism. …

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