Exploiting tourists

(Þessi færsla er í raun ritgerð sem skrifuð var í húsbíl á meðan mig langaði meira til að vera að drekka bjór (og ber þess því miður merki). Hún er á ensku af því ég nennti ekki að þýða þetta rugl. Ykkur er fyrirgefið ef þið gefist upp á miðri leið.)

In "The Tropics in New York" by Claude McKay, fruits in a window shop become symbolic representations of the narrator’s tropical homeland:

Set in the window, bringing memories
of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills,
And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies
In benediction over nun-like hills.

The tropics are uprooted and displayed for sale in a window, evoking idyllic images in the passer-by. In the fruits the tropics are for sale; at least an experience of it. Like a tourist the buyer is invited to use these "souvenirs" for his own pleasure and according to his own wishes.
Tourism is a violent act in the sense that it is intended to make a place, artefacts and certain people, meet the needs of the tourist. Susan Sontag says that "the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation" or "translation" of a work of art, the "conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain "rules" of interaction”, presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers: "The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can't admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning." Modern interpretation that "excavates" and "destroys" as it digs behind the text to find a sub-text which is the true one is “largely reactionary, stifling” when in could be a liberating act. It is “the revenge of the intellect upon art” and “upon the world”. The cause is that “real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art.” If we convert this point of view to literary tourism, the act of interpreting a land and a country according to one’s own needs can certainly be a stifling and violent act, aiming to tame a perceived other and make it fit pre-existing codes of meaning in an attempt to dominate that other.

When the tourist attraction is a colony like McKay’s own birthplace, Jamaica, the “selling” of an experience of the country also becomes a reminder of, if not a continuation of, the violence of colonization. In that light, the fact that “parish fairs” are markets for the fruity souvenirs in “The Tropics in New York” indicates the violence of a domineering culture, shrouding the land according to its own religion, in nun’s habit, making the native-born narrator bow his head and long for “the old familiar ways” of a colonized people:

My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze;
A wave of longing through my body swept,
And, hungry for the old, familiar ways,
I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.

It is important to note, though, that the narrator in this poem also partakes in the tourism of his own land – his gaze devours, trying to satisfy a hunger. It is he that has moved away rather than someone has taken the land away from him. Furthermore, he realizes that his “wave of longing” can never be fully satisfied. Tourism is in essence an unsatisfying enterprise; a quest or a search for something that is always just around the corner.
It is exactly this unattainability and constant movement that characterizes McKay’s violent conception of place and absence. In many of his poems endless displacement causes characters and places to slip in and out of the roles of victims and torturers, in a quest where the Promised Land is always out of reach.
It is worth bearing in mind that the relationship of authors and readers is often depicted in such violent terms. Reviewers often praise books for “holding their attention” to a sadistic degree; denying them the ability to put it down until it is finished and “craving” full attention. In such terms, the act of reading becomes a masochistic pleasure. The violence goes both ways, though, and readers’ interpretations can be seen as violent acts, by the author himself or by oppressed groups like feminists who see standard readings of female writings as a way to maintain male dominance. Some authors even try to control the interpretations of their books, although such efforts only highlight the complex struggle for dominance that lurks behind. Other authors, like Claude McKay, play with the notion of a sado-masochist relationship between reader and writer, consumer and artist, land and tourist.

When dealing with the essential element of movement in McKay’s poems I think it is appropriate to bring up the term “literary tourism”. In my view there are two kinds of literary tourism. In the former the reader travels safely but superficially with the aid of a book to foreign lands and/or experiences without ever engaging himself fully or being in danger. In the latter a voyager travels physically to places mentioned in books to experience them in a “literary” way. The recent hype concerning the places mentioned in the DaVinci Code is a good example.
As Wenche Ommundsen points out, literary tourism is often seen to provide a “quick fix” literary experience and is therefore looked down on as it is thought to appeal primarily to “people who are too lazy, or insufficiently educated, to appreciate literature in its 'normal' mode of consumption, the silent communion between text and reader”. However, Ommundsen says, market research into the audiences of literary tours and events suggests that most literary tourists are well read, and their reading is directly related to their tourist experience.
Returning to the tropics, it might be useful to look at the experience of an actual literary tourist. Pamela Klein wrote a travel article on her quest for the spirit of the author Jean Rhys in Dominica where she describes her efforts to interpret every sign, however small and insignificant to others, to her own ends: “A cock crows very loud, and I take this as a sign,” she writes enthusiastically when nothing more eventful happens. Even other tourists are subjected to her own codes of interpretation: “A white woman with very long fingernails and short shorts enters the courtyard, sits in the corner, lights a cigarette. ... A worshipper, I think: kin.”
The first words of the article are enlightening; the tourist is not “empty” for the land to fill with experience, she is already “full” of the spirit of the author. The land will be moulded according to her expectations, rather than it will mould her. However, the tourist is not in total control. She is “led there”, has been “haunted” and is “called” to come and still the locals refuse to meet her expectations:

While I want to talk about my ghost, the drunk at the bar, who is amazingly philosophical and definitely interested, doesn’t understand. “Dominicans will never forget what the Americans did for us after Hurricane David, ’79,” he says.

It is therefore up to the tourist herself to interpret her imperfect experience according to her own needs:

Sensing my disappointment, [the waitress] offers me something: “Rhys mentions that tree in the book. Somebody from the guesthouse once told me.” I smile and sip the mango juice, and let the afternoon lull me. “I bet the tree’s over 200 years old,” I tell her.
“Could be,” she says, looking up to the top of the tree, where it reaches toward the dark-blue sky. What it must know.

Ommundsen points out that the practices of literary tourism are “dependent on physical proximity: the body, or bodily remains, of the writer become the repository for literary genius, and paying homage becomes synonymous with experiencing, through one's own body, a sense of continuity and contact” – in this case with a mango tree. It is “as if the aura of history, cultural tradition and art could somehow be transmitted by touch”, giving us something more tangible than words to build an interpretation on:

The problem, it would seem, with simply reading literary texts is that they never provide the answers to all our questions: there is always a degree of uncertainty about our interpretations, an interminable deferral, as literary theory has it, of the signs and their meaning, which somehow leave our questions hanging in mid-air. It is perhaps the promise of grounding certainties that attract sections of the public to literary sites and events. … By providing tangible realities, in the shape of bricks and mortar, gravestones, relics of various kinds, and in the case of 'live' events, the tangible body of the writer, to counteract the shiftiness of language artifacts.

Sometimes, though, “the absence of a body can inspire a fascination as potent as its presence” and tourism through the act of reading depends on a notion of distance rather than a notion of proximity; of being somewhere while not really being there. Although this form of literary tourism could be viewed condescendingly as a superficial approach to a text, all reading of literature can essentially be seen as tourism. The efforts of the reader to “counteract the shiftiness of language artifacts” with his interpretation can also be seen as an equally violent action as looking for a greater meaning in a mango tree with fellow “worshippers”.

Travel literature is a traditional mode to tame nature and the other through language. “The category of travel literature has traditionally belonged to writers who center themselves in the metropolis, not the margin,” Gary E. Holcomb says, and “the traveling image of a locality like the Caribbean originates in the metropolis”, in the point of view of the metropolitan travel writer who “thinks in terms of travel as a form of moving around for the most part freely on foreign property”. Stepping into such a tradition can be problematic for writers from colonized countries and the literary products of most Caribbean writers “do not seem to lend themselves” to the classic classification of travel literature.
Holcomb, however, sees McKay’s stories as a “textualization of movement”, a different kind of travel literature, stating that McKay’s incessant travelling, sexually and textually as well a geographically, allowed the author to take up and abandon identities as he needed them. Although Holcomb states that “in many ways the novel is the product of travel literature”, I think that McKay’s poems in Harlem Shadows should be considered as a textualization of movement as well and that the poetic form underlines the resistance to rules and codes of conduct designed to nail down interpretations of placement to a prefixed dominant order.
Holcomb focuses on the act of movement and McKay’s poems certainly do not refer to real “places”; they refer to movement out of or to places which are and are not other places – they are moving, too, sometimes in time; from past to present, sometimes in the perception of the narrator.
“Home Thoughts” is one of the poems where places meet in movement. Memory is framed by absence; by the sentences: “Oh something just now must be happening there!” and “Oh something’s happening there this very minute!” Not only is the narrator absent from these happenings but the place of his memories also changes with each “happening”, moving it further away from him. Thus the physical place of his childhood is not the same place anymore and can only be visited in memory and through art.
The reader is thus invited to visit the narrator’s childhood places, through his poem, while realizing that the narrator alone can really access this place and know its true meaning. He is in control, as we see in “Heritage”:

… And I can read like large, black-lettered print,
What seemed before a thing forever sealed.

I know the magic word, the graceful thought,
The song that fills me in my lucid hours, …

We are again faced with the supposed masochism of the reader, who Ommundsen says has refused the opportunity of freedom from the constraints of an authoritative author:

The death of the author, in the discourse of literary tourism, means not the liberation of the text and the birth of the reader so much as an invitation to worship at the graveside. If tourism, as a number of cultural theorists have pointed out, functions as a kind of secular religious practice, then authors are the modern-day saints and our pilgrimages become rites of initiation into their mysteries.

Maybe all reading is to a certain degree such a pilgrimage; an attempt to demystify and decode a text. McKay at least seems to see his work as a souvenir of his life, left for passing tourists, in the poem “When I Have Passed Away”:

When I have passed away and am forgotten,
And no one living can recall my face,
When under alien sod my bones lie rotten
With not a tree or stone to mark the place;

Perchance a pensive youth, with passion burning,
For olden verse that smacks of love and wine,
The musty pages of old volumes turning,
May light upon a little son of mine,

And he may softly hum the tune and wonder
Who wrote the verses in the long ago;
Or he may sit him down awhile to ponder
Upon the simple words that touch him so.

However, the constant displacement of the narrator within the poem unsettles any notion of gaining concrete answers through literary tourism. The author is forgotten and no one knows where he is buried so worship at a graveside or an attempt to get physical proximity is out of the question. The only point of connection between dislocated worlds is “olden verse” that might arrest a tourist in a place for “awhile to ponder” before he moves on to seek satisfaction for his “passion” in another place.
Holcomb thinks that McKay shows a need to flee from all forms of categorization with ceaseless deferral:

... that is, rising out of the need to flee servitude is a need to flee certitude: social, racial, epistemological, linguistical, and sexual. What McKay attempts to resist, no matter how they manifest themselves are the constraints on identity always already received in social spheres, black or white, radical or conservative, male or female, gay or straight.

Pointing to McKay’s sexual “experimentations”, Holcomb concludes that McKay shows “clear dislike for the idea of domestication, for the bourgeoisification”. The West Indies “signifies a traveling back to the “slavery” of marriage, traditional family, bourgeoise values, all of which mean a stultifying restriction of sexual exploration”. As a result, there is “no return, only an endless spiraling outward, a flinging further and farther from the etiological, an activity metonymical of both the scars and possibilities of traveling as representative of the diaspora”. Holcomb thinks that McKay never returned to the Caribbean because Jamaica “geographically as well as metaphorically, represented servitude to him, and servitude represented heterosexual colonialism”. McKay’s sexual travelling, therefore, offers him a release that “must radicalize the very terms of identity themselves, whether they constitute themselves according to history, culture, family, sexuality, or travel”. Displacing the white man like he has displaced the black man might be a liberating act, the narrator states in “Enslaved”:

Then from the dark depth of my soul I cry
To the avenging angel to consume
The white man’s world of wonders utterly:
Let it be swallowed in the earth’s vast womb,
Or upward roll as sacrificial smoke
To liberate my people from its yoke!

Using the master’s methods can be a double-edged sword, however, and in “Outcast” the narrator admits that he may “never hope for full release” while bending his knee to the great western world’s “alien gods”. Violence and hate are only inevitable consequences of and continuation of the oppression of a place, not liberating powers.

Sexuality, as well as race culture, is the region where servitude – slavery – enacts itself most dramatically, Holcomb says. When McKay creates a tourist’s paradise out of “tropic lands” in the poem “North and South”, he emphasizes European conceptions of a lush and wild southern land where “time and life move lazily along” with a “breath of idleness in the air”. This is a place “sweet for waking dreams” where “wonder to life’s places clings”; a place waiting for the tourist to inscribe his dreams and wishes to escape a dull reality. The erotic image of a humming bird dipping a “long beak” in the big bell-flowers to the beating of the sea “softly on emerald strands” seems to naturally follow this train of thought; the dominant position of the “dreamer” is emphasized by the sexual availability of the land and its inhabitants: “And love and mating time are everywhere”.
Prostitution is the ultimate violence of domination and it is no wonder that tourism is often associated with prostitution, not only in the phenomenon of “sexual tourism” but also in the ambivalent feelings frequently evoked by selling access to one’s land and culture. In the “Harlem Dancer” the narrator makes an explicit connection with a dancing prostitute and her tropical native land: “To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm”. Black flute-players entertaining at a picnic (a very European form of outing) give the comparison of tourists being entertained in an exotic land. However, as with literary tourism, the final satisfaction of sexual tourism can never be reached; although the sexualized other is “devoured” with a gaze her “self” is always out of reach.
McKay not only recognizes the many-faced qualities of erotic tourism, he uses it to destabilize oppressive notions of power relations by making his characters and narrators slip in and out of the roles of sexual predators and victims. In “Harlem Shadows” little dark girls tellingly both “bend and barter at desire’s call” and go “prowling through the night from street to street”, playing both roles at once. They certainly are victims of “poverty, dishonor and disgrace” but at the same time they represent the “sacred brown feet” of the narrator’s fallen race, turning enslavement into martyrdom. Like the “halting footsteps” of feet that “know no rest”, the oppressed other refuses to be pinned down to simple interpretation and constantly keeps moving out of place.
Holcomb thinks that the way Claude McKay establishes a “traveling sexuality” allows him, through a form of renegotiated “primitivism”, to keep moving through worlds unavailable to the writer of travel who does not pursue what the metropolitan world condemns as deviance. McKay thus writes culturally from the position of blackness as he perceives it rather than the conditions laid on such an idea according to white, racist ideology and “achieves so discriminating a movement between the polar certitudes by deploying a kind of strategic sexual difference, a form of sexual différance which moves the author into territories ripe for de- and reterritorializations, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s words”.

In the poems “America” and “White City” we can see how the narrator plays with the interchanging roles of abuser and victim with the aid of constant movement and shifting places. Hate is the instrument of violence and it is passed on from place to narrator and back again through intimate sado-masochistic relations, like a sexual disease :

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.

America is feminized and shown as a dangerous place but she and the narrator shift positions and do not stay in place. America feeds the narrator but also feeds on him. He in turn tests his youth, strongly erect, against her hate; being fed on but receiving vigor in turn. Mary Pratt’s use of the term transculturation might clarify the ambiguous power-play at work:

While subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own, and what they use it for. Transculturation is a phenomenon of the contact zone ... While the imperial metropolis tends to understand itself as determining the periphery ... it habitually blinds itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis – beginning, perhaps, with the latter’s obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries and its other continually to itself.

America exploits the tropics for tourism but the tropical narrator is also a tourist in America, choosing and interpreting, using and abusing. The “vigor” the narrator receives is really like a gift from a vampire or a sexually transmitted disease. Sexual victories carry with them risk of catching disease and the reversal of traditional roles, where the tropical native conquers and enjoys America, only results in a ceaseless continuation of the exploitative violence which the narrator embraces as willingly as any colonizer or tourist before him.
Contaminated with hate, a “dark passion”, the narrator seems to return in the “White City”; now so saturated with hate and so “erect” that he will not bend or “toy with it”. He bears his contamination proudly and “lives his part” of this endless power-play, in fact it becomes his whole life:

My being would be a skeleton, a shell,
If this dark Passion that fills my every mood,
And makes my heaven in the white world’s hell,
Did not forever feed me vital blood.

He is not only a victim; the nature of the disease of hate is that the diseased partakes in passing it on. The narrator thus feeds on “vital blood”, playing his moving part in an endless violent play of différance, where every “interpretation” moves “meaning” further away from the always absent point of reference. This he can do because he is an “Outcast”:

Something in me is lost, forever lost,
Some vital thing has gone out of my heart,
And I must walk the way of life a ghost
Among the sons of earth, a thing apart;
For I was born, far from my native clime,
Under the white man’s menace, out of time.

McKay’s poetic narrators are true vagabonds, constantly moving like people in a train “fearfully rocking”, either in “ugly mood” of the waiter or an “angry glutton” demanding service, like the travellers in “On the Road”. The travelling reader should be able to relate to their plight. Reading and travelling have sometimes been described as addictions and are certainly taken to be habits that define the nature of a person. Vagabonds and bookworms have had both negative and positive connotations stuck to them and one trait they are seen to have in common is disconnectedness with the the practical world. Refusing to stay in place they constantly seek “other places” whether they are literally tourists or literary tourists. Whether they set out to abuse or to be abused – in more positive words, to please or to be pleased – in Claude McKay’s poems they seem destined to be undertaking an endless violent and erotic power-struggle where no final satisfaction can be found.


References

Hesse, Hermann: "Preface", Steppenwolf, London, Penguin, 2001.
Holcomb, Gary E.: "Writing Travel in Anglophone Carribbean Literature: Claude McKay, Shiva Naipaul, and Jamaica Kincaid," PhD, Washington State University, 1995.
Klein, Pamela: "Wide Caribbean Sea. Calling up the spirit of Jean Rhys", LA Times, 8.-14. October 1999.
McKay, Claude: Harlem Shadows, 1922.
Ommundsen, Wenche: 'If it's Tuesday, this must be Jane Austen': Literary tourism and the heritage industry, October 2005, Website, Griffith University, Available: http://www.gu.edu.au/school/art/text/speciss/issue4/ommundsen.htm, 27. May 2006.
Sontag, Susan: "Against Interpretation", Against Interpretation and other essays, New York, 1981, 3-13.