Table of Contents
By definition, travel narratives invoke an experience of moving between cultural worlds. Only a fraction of travel books in English, however, emphasise the language borders that are crossed in much international travel, and deal in a sustained way with the question of how language impinges on the self. This question is central to a range of memoirs by migrants into English: texts such as Lost in Translation: A life in a new language (1989) by the Polish-born Canadian Eva Hoffman, Polite Lies: On being a woman caught between cultures (1997) by Japanese-born American Kyoko Mori, or Chilean exile to the United States Ariel Dorfman’s Heading South, Looking North: A bilingual journey (1998).[1] Migrants into anglophone cultures are increasingly drawing our attention to what is involved in migrating into a new language, but this isn’t the case for people travelling in the opposite direction. The issue of language is also absent from major critical studies of travel writing, such as those by Dennis Porter (1991), Caren Kaplan (1996), Inderpal Grewal (1996), Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan (1998), and is only touched on in Mary Louise Pratt’s influential study Imperial Eyes (1992).[2] Unlike ‘landscape’, ‘language’ isn’t featured in any of the indexes of these otherwise wide-ranging books.
The lack of interest in language in popular travel writing in English is no doubt connected with the global reach of English, and the fact that many anglophone travel writers are monolingual or envisage a readership with no other language. It is symptomatic of the global dominance of English that questions about language and identity are largely invisible in anglophone travel writing. This chapter explores some atypical travel books in this context—‘immersion’ narratives that explicitly foreground what might be called ‘language travel’—and reads them in relation to a wider critical debate about the representation of self and other in travel literature. I examine three Australian texts—Gillian Bouras’s A Foreign Wife (1986), Sarah Turnbull’s Almost French: A new life in Paris (2002) and John Mateer’s Semar’s Cave: An Indonesian journal (2004)—drawing attention to what appear to be some common cultural assumptions in the authors’ accounts of their interactions with speakers of languages other than English.[3]
This chapter draws on research for a larger project on the phenomenon of language travel: ‘Anglos abroad: narratives of immersion into a foreign language and culture’. One of the aims of the project is to explore the degree to which a metaphorical colonising of ‘cultural others’ is inevitable in Western travel writing, as Pratt, among other critics, has argued.[4] The prevailing trope that Pratt identifies in Western travel writing, from the French explorer La Condamine to American writer Paul Theroux, is that of the ‘seeing-man’, a traveller given to a ‘monarch-of-all-I-survey’ view of the cultural landscape. Pratt presents American critic Joan Didion’s 1983 book Salvador as an exception to the ‘imperial eye’ mode: an exception that proves the rule. For Pratt, Didion rightly renounces any claim to insightful comment on El Salvadoran realities: ‘Didion identifies her subject matter as inaccessible to her [W]estern…self…her book aggressively and lucidly sought to abdicate the authority of the seeing-man.’ Pratt contends that only authors of testimonio, such as the Bolivian activist Domitila Barrios de Chungara, can claim to write with authority about Latin America, and that Western travel writing about non-Western places has effectively reached a dead end.[5]
Pratt is concerned primarily with the power differential operating between writers travelling from colonising or neo-colonial powers and the people they write about in colonised or post-colonial countries. This asymmetry of power is not obviously relevant to Sarah Turnbull and Gillian Bouras, who write about their expatriate lives in Europe, although Bouras moves from a middle-class metropolitan context, Melbourne, to a Peloponnesian village. It is clearly present in Semar’s Cave. Mateer expresses discomfort with his privileged position as a Western traveller who can choose cheap methods of transport such as the sudako (or minibus) for the thrill of adventure, while Indonesians would go by cab if they had his money.[6] The question of whether Western travel writing offers alternatives to the ‘seeing-man’ mode of cultural representation is, however, as applicable to the texts by Bouras and Turnbull as to Mateer’s.
As an Australian narrative of language travel, Gillian Bouras’s A Foreign Wife is unusual in being written from the viewpoint of a migrant rather than a temporary traveller. While many well-known Australians have been expatriates based in anglophone countries, until recently few Australian authors have written as long-term migrants to non-English-speaking countries. Bouras (born in 1945) moved to Greece with her Greek-born husband and two Australian-born children in 1980; a third son was born in Greece. A Foreign Wife is the first of several books about her experiences in Greece. It was followed by memoirs A Fair Exchange (1991) and Aphrodite and the Others (1994), the novel A Stranger Here (1996) and memoir Starting Again (1999).[7] Settling in her husband’s village near the southern city of Kalamata, Bouras was plunged into an exclusively Greek-speaking environment. Although on arrival she could speak and read simple Greek, after-dinner conversation was at first ‘a strange staccato rattle’.[8] She evokes from an Anglo-Australian viewpoint the sense of marginality that comes with not speaking the dominant language and, as a parent, the loss of authority that such a lack of cultural literacy and linguistic fluency brings:
At dinner-time, speaking Greek, I make a grammatical error. Dimitrios and Nikolaos hoot, and then the former crushes me with a look, a practice he has down to a fine art. ‘You’ll never speak it well,’ he announces, firmly, for the umpteenth time, ‘not like Sandra, Ken and Teresa. Why can’t you be like them?’ Why indeed? I feel sick, as I usually do, over any breakdown or error in communication, but make an effort to stand up for myself.[9]
Bouras writes poignantly of the impact on herself and her children of the ‘reversal of the child–parent relationship’ in which the child becomes the one who ‘knows all about language, communication and protocol’. One of the consequences of her loss of status in her oldest son’s eyes was his new preference for his grandmother’s company in public: ‘It was a devastating moment for me when Dimitri announced he would walk through the main streets of the village with Yiayia, but not with me. Yiayia became the authority on everything from dietary law to bus timetables.’ Bouras comments, ‘The migrant mother almost inevitably finds herself involved in a power struggle which she is bound to lose.’[10]
Bouras’s perspective on her children’s induction into Greek compares interestingly with British expatriate author Tim Parks’ memoir of his bicultural family life in Italy, An Italian Education (1996). Parks writes about two concepts that he sees as key notions in Italian culture: ‘spettacolo’ and ‘fare festa’ (literally, ‘making a party’ for someone—an expression that, Parks says, ‘combines the ideas of welcoming [someone] and smothering them with physical affection’). He illustrates the centrality of these concepts with an account of a visit by his parents-in-law and its effect on his Italian children, Michele and Stefi.
It would truly be hard to exaggerate the cooing and crying and sighing and kissing and nose-tweaking and exclamations and tears and tickles and cuddles that now have to take place…Nonna lifts up Michele and dances round and round with him and ‘O che bel bambino! O che ometto splendido! O che spettacolo!’[11]
Parks’ children are caught up in a dramatic excitement when their nonni arrive, a kind of performance they are drawn into. Parks suggests that there is a strongly visual element to expressing one’s feelings in Italian, and it is this that makes Italian behaviour seem theatrical to an ‘Anglo’ observer. Although he highlights the cultural basis for this perception, however, he is clearly uncomfortable with his Italian family’s expressiveness, and calls its sincerity into question.
[M]other and father, sons and daughters, all criticise each other endlessly…[Y]et when…the Baldassarres are actually face to face, the gestures of affection, the extravagant fare festa…could not be more voluble or enthusiastic.
My wife embraces her mother rapturously. And her father. Michele watches them. Everybody does seem perfectly…delighted to see each other. The nonni are here! Evviva! Yet Michele is surely aware, even at five, that we complain a great deal about these [visits]…no doubt the children take all this in, this wonderful spettacolo of affection, this carefully choreographed festa.
In A Foreign Wife, Bouras writes similarly of the theatricality and flamboyance of her sons when they are speaking Greek and their relative quietness when speaking English. Like Parks, she emphasises the connectedness of speech and body language:
The boys are completely different people when they speak Greek. It’s not just the sound of the language, but the sense of drama, the marked emphases, the sweeping gestures and body language which inevitably accompany it. When speaking English, they are quieter, less flamboyant and, Greeks would say, duller.[12]
Just as Parks casts his Italian in-laws’ behaviour in theatrical terms (‘choreographed’, ‘show’), so Bouras is struck by the ‘sense of drama’ that characterises her boys’ Greek-speaking selves. Where Parks is sceptical, tending to valorise his own cultural reflexes for all that he is aware of them, Bouras is more sympathetic to this other emotional style. Describing a return visit to Melbourne, she writes, ‘[T]he boys are too noisy and exuberant for understated Australia, and people here have firm ideas about…the place of children’;[13] she identifies more closely here with her children than with the expectations of Australian relatives. Later, she recalls her frustration with what seemed initially to be her sons’ ‘Greek over-reaction to everything’: ‘“Tone it down,” I would say through clenched teeth as they yelled, gesticulated, smote their foreheads and thoroughly indulged themselves. “You’re not on stage”.’[14] Now, she writes, she no longer thinks they ‘exaggerate or over-emphasize’; even so, the phrase ‘thoroughly indulged themselves’ expresses something of her earlier Anglo-Australian cultural perspective.
As much as any resemblance between Greek and Italian emotional idioms, the use of the metaphor of drama by Bouras and Parks to mark what looks and feels (familiarly) foreign to them suggests a close parallel between British and Australian cultural attitudes towards expressing feelings. What seems common to both is wariness towards the open expression of feeling, a tendency to see it as self-indulgent and exaggerated. Bouras’s writing, however, shows how she has partly incorporated a different cultural take on emotions from the one she grew up with, and has made an inward shift towards a Greek-speaking perspective.
[1] Dorfman, Ariel 1998, Heading South, Looking North: A bilingual journey, Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York; Hoffman, Eva 1989, Lost in Translation: A life in a new language, Heinemann, London; Mori, Kyoko 1997, Polite Lies: On being a woman caught between cultures, Henry Holt, New York.
[2] Grewal, Inderpal 1996, Home and Harem: Nation, gender, empire and the cultures of travel, Duke University Press, Durham, NC; Holland, Patrick and Huggan, Graham 1998, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical reflections on contemporary travel writing, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor; Kaplan, Caren 1996, Questions of Travel: Postmodern discourses of displacement, Duke University Press, Durham, NC; Porter, Dennis 1991, Haunted Journeys: Desire and transgression in European travel writing, Princeton University Press, Princeton; Pratt, Mary Louise 1992, Imperial Eyes: Travel writing and transculturation, Routledge, London, p. 218. Michael Cronin’s excellent Across the Lines: Travel, language, translation (2000, Cork University Press, Cork) is an exception to this rule.
[3] Bouras, Gillian 1986, A Foreign Wife, McPhee Gribble/Penguin, Fitzroy, Victoria; Turnbull, Sarah 2002, Almost French: A new life in Paris, Bantam Books, Milsons Point, NSW; Mateer, John 2004, Semar’s Cave: An Indonesian journal, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, WA.
[4] See also Kaplan, Questions of Travel; and Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters.
[5] Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 226.
[6] Mateer, Semar’s Cave, p. 69.
[7] Bouras, Gillian 1991, A Fair Exchange, McPhee Gribble/Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria; 1994, Aphrodite and the Others, McPheeGribble/Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria; 1996, A Stranger Here, Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria; 1999, Starting Again, Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria. See McLaren, John 2001, States of Imagination: Nationalism, citizenship and multiculturalism in writings from Australia and southern Asia Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, for a detailed and illuminating discussion of four of these texts.
[8] Bouras, Foreign Wife, p. 123.
[9] Ibid., pp. 121–2.
[10] Ibid., p. 146.
[11] Parks, Tim 1996 [2001], An Italian Education, Vintage, London, p. 142.
[12] Bouras, Foreign Wife, p. 124.
[13] Ibid., p. 15.
[14] Ibid., p. 147.