As part of our series on responsible travel writing, we recently spoke with Faith Adiele, travel writer, author, and founder of the nation’s first workshop for travel writers of color through VONA (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation). We discussed misconceptions about the travel writing genre, how we can diversify the publishing industry, and whether or not we should make a distinction between travelers and tourists.

You can also read the essay she wrote for us, “Some Things I’ve Learned From Starting the Nation’s First Writing Workshop For Travelers Of Color,” here.

When you first agreed to develop and teach a travel writing workshop for people of color, what did you envision teaching, and did that go the way you expected it to?

Initially I didn't anticipate what a schism there was between folks of color and the industry. They immediately thought that I was talking about service travel, like guidebooks, and because it had been segregated for so long, folks of color just didn't even think it had anything to do with them. So I hadn't anticipated that I would have to do so much education around what travel literature actually entailed. I kept on saying, “if you're a person of color writing memoir, chances are it is a travel tale.” I was really trying to more broadly define travel because our lives are de facto travel tales.

I had to shift and make it more memoir bound, but then also teach the various options of service travel. I'm not particularly interested in service travel, but you've made this huge trip, and there are many things you can do with that. You can be working on the personal essay or the memoir, but there are all these other things you can do to get your name out there. And rather than only teach craft, because we were making up for lost time, I also thought I should be reaching out to publishers and having some sort of partnership. Then I had to educate them too, because they were saying, “books of color aren’t travel. Or a roots journey isn’t actual travel.” So I was having to educate everybody, and it ended up being this holistic thing that I hadn't anticipated.

Travel writing can definitely be hard to define, and I feel like so many people are reluctant to call themselves travel writers. Even with this Better Travel Writing for a Better World project, when we approach certain writers who have an amazing sense of place and write other cultures so well, they would often say, “Oh, but I'm not a travel writer.”

Right!

Why is that?

I think maybe because it does have this service aspect to it or this commercial aspect to it, some literary folks look down on it.

And what about your students of color? In addition to the service stories they didn’t resonate with, is the commercial nature of some travel writing part of the disconnect?

I think it was initially when I first started in 2014 and before we had this new Black travel movement and Instagram and social media. There just wasn't any awareness at all, and I could own all the books there were. And then folks of color have found out that they could bypass the traditional segregated travel writing and go straight into being influencers and meeting up with their market, which is both good and bad. That also means that there's no critique about what was so problematic about travel to start with. So folks of color are kind of unconsciously, or to get contracts, replicating the imperialist origins of the genre.

There's this great joy when someone does get a commercial story in a magazine because we should be getting these gigs, and we should get paid, but this has developed separate from the movement to decolonize travel, and they're not necessarily speaking to each other at all.

When it comes to travel influencers and bloggers, there’s also so much sponsored content that you’re adding a whole new layer of expectations being put on what you’re writing. Do you or your students have to deal with that?

I'm not hugely in that world, but like when I teach at TravelCon, there's some intersection there. I love traveling because it brings everybody together. It's got the literary, and it's got the influencers, and it's got everything. So it was so interesting because I would get these folks who, if you look at their Instagram accounts, they could buy and sell me, but they would take my workshop because they didn’t have the writing skills. They knew how to look cute doing that over the shoulder thing—you know, the one doorway in Bali where we all do the over the shoulder thing—and they wanted stronger skills. But it was really interesting because if you’re looking for sponsors, you can't be critical, right? It's got to be positive. You've got to kind of trade on people wanting to be you and showing that this place is great, and that is a completely different goal.

I've talked about this with other serious travel writers of color and we’re like, “did you see those photographs, and that was a bit problematic, right?” But you don't want to be calling folks out. Because there's not enough positive stuff about folks of color. So that's why I appreciate being in spaces like TravelCon where I can just talk about it as a craft issue.

I talk about it that way with white folks, too, because they never want to feel guilty about shit. So it's always just about a craft issue, like how can you be the most reliable guide?

So if you can couch it as craft, maybe people won't get defensive? And you find that that helps you bridge that divide?

Exactly. Because we live in a patriarchal white supremacist society. I'm assuming that everybody's got part of that embedded in them. So I'm not really concerned with whether or not they're going to cop to it. That’s not useful. Let's just assume that’s the baseline and then get at the craft issues, like how can you be the most reliable guide?

When you’re teaching travel, what are your students most surprised to learn?

I think all the different possibilities. I'm very interested in innovative structure, or decolonizing structure, allowing for breaking the hegemony of the Western model of storytelling. How we can allow for oral story and talk story and the storytelling that they already know in their bones.

What's an example of a great piece we might point to that uses a different structure or an oral storytelling structure?

Maybe if you look at Shailja Patel, Migritude. It's a hybrid text that has letters and images and manifestos, and it’s part performance. Also Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawaii and Jai Arun Ravine’s The Romance of Siam. They actually play with the idea of the travel guide, but then use all this art and commentary and kind of meta stuff to deal with a place that's a zone. There's so much fantasy around Siam and around Hawaii that you have to just basically rewrite the whole text. To me, it’s really exciting that they go in and deal with it in that way.

What do you mean by a zone?

A site like “the Orient” or “the Amazon” or “Africa” that has been so mythologized and stereotyped, both negatively or positively, that it’s almost impossible to see it clearly. It's a place that you've already brought your idea of what it is, and then you're just going to confirm that.

In the essay you wrote for us, you talk about that baggage. It seems natural not to just show up in a new place without any context, so you want to read what's been written or to learn about the place, but then you're coming in with these preconceived notions. So how do you teach travel writing without relying on what’s been written about a place or the canon of travel writing in general?

One of the first things we do is a cultural inventory of a place, to see what is out there. What are all the things that we're not even aware of? In the television news, in the books we read as children, in comics. So that's the lens you're bringing, and that's the lens your readers are probably bringing. Then what is it you need to do in order to tell a corrective, and also authentic, story, rather than trying to say one is colorblind or any of these other things? You're not just telling a story, you're correcting the master narrative, so you have to know what the master narrative is.

So if I'm going to be critical about an experience I've had in Nigeria, I need to really think about how I'm going to do it in a complex way that’s not just going to feed into the fantasies of Africa. But it's also not going to just so positive and whitewashed that no one will believe me. We have to know what the misinformation is, the prevailing narrative, and then we can look at different ways that’s being carried in language, the things we just fall into: paradise, teeming jungle, authenticity.

Can you think of any examples in your own writing where you realized that your initial thoughts or drafts were steeped in the expectations you came with? And how did you change it to make it more complex?

Yeah, I think I have colonial fantasies like everyone else. I'm very reluctant to admit that I, as a black woman, have Western privilege or blindness to certain things. I want to imagine that I can connect with people right away and that I kind of know what's going on, but I still wonder if Meeting Faith was just the same sort of, “Westerner going to be enlightened in the East” kind of narrative. I also had a piece in a glossy magazine out of L.A. that I feel was problematic. I was trying to talk about this place in Brazil that was sexualized, and I think I pandered to that. I was trying to critique it, but I do feel as though I fell into the fantasy of Brazilian free life or something like that. I feel like I didn't quite get to where I was trying to, and I might have just confirmed these fantasies about nakedness and sexual freedom in Brazil.

Does that experience ever make you freeze or sometimes not want to write travel?

No, it doesn't. Because one of the things I like about travel and travel writing, and particularly in the global south, is that it is complex, and you're always part of the problem to a certain extent. Being part of the problem is more complex and makes for an interesting story. It'd be very boring to think that you were perfect and doing it right, so I've never shied away from anything that was complicated or hard for me. That's where it's worthwhile. It's important to try and fail.

I love how in your essay you kept telling people, “you’re writing travel and your story is travel, and yours is too.” And then a moment ago, you were talking about the black travel movement and folks of color being able to reach their audiences directly without traditional barriers. At the same time, so many people have been saying for years that travel writing is dead. What do you say to those people that are saying travel writing is dead when you're seeing it blossom?

Hmm. I don't know. I mean, what do they mean by travel writing is dead?

That the section at the bookstore is tiny, that magazines are shutting down. That we don’t need to read guidebooks or have someone tell us about other places because we can connect with other cultures online. But you ask a great question. Maybe your question is actually the answer. Like, yes, the old style of travel writing where the author goes off and brings back tales of the natives definitely seems to be dead. And that's a really good thing. Maybe a better question is: where do you see travel writing now and potentially in the future?

I'm never good at questions about the future, but I definitely have mixed feelings about how it was and how it is now. Ideally it would be a robust profession that was inclusive and anti-exploitative. I do have issues with writing in general all becoming “content” that anyone can do. On some level, I believe in democratizing these things, and on another level, if there is no critique, if the market is seen as the only arbiter of worthiness, that's really problematic.

And I think there is a lot of interest, at least lip service being paid to doing it better, doing it right, doing it more sustainably, doing it more… all the buzzwords. We'll see how that shakes out too, and where we are in the end.

For sure. In publishing, there's a movement right now to include more diverse voices. How do we make sure that that's not just a trend that's going to pass? How do we keep encouraging more voices to fully be part of publishing rather than just a new trend?

It is a trend, or let's say it's a cycle. These things are always cycles. Frederick Douglass told us that. You have to fight to get it, and then you have to fight to maintain it. As soon as people get complacent, we'll lose it again. So it's never as though we reach a place where we're all enlightened and we agree that we want to be inclusive and then we just stay there.

Things open for a minute, and then people think they've had enough, and now it swings back the other way. I remember my mom talking about so many of the things happening now happening in the seventies, the kind of really international, very multicultural publishing. So we've been here before, and we will lose it in future. I'm not naive about that. What does need to happen is that there needs to be more folks of color and other marginalized groups or global majority groups in decision making.

There need to be editors and there need to be publishers, not just people who for a moment want to go out and catch the flavor in the writers. It's not enough that I'm cultivating these writers, but we need to have editors who understand. We need to have folks who are willing to mentor and edit correctly and not wound someone through their editing and push them through and let them know about opportunities. All of that will help make it last a little bit longer than the natural attention span of folks who are like, “oh, I'm feeling guilty."

How important is a writer's racial or ethnic identity in travel writing?

My feeling is that both your identity and then also your phenotype and how you're perceived will impact how people interact with you, what you have access to, what you don't have access to, what you're seeing, what you're not seeing. So I always want to know who my guide is. And you can go to the same place and have a completely different experience based on your personality, your identity, how people saw you, whether or not you speak the language, all of that stuff. So I think it adds another fascinating layer to the experience.

One of the things we’ve found most interesting while editing the stories for this series is how our different backgrounds and perspectives influence what we question about a piece. We each might feel the writer should explain or not explain something based on whatever context we’re bringing. So we wonder how much do you think should be explained for the reader and how much should they just look up if they don’t get it. How do you navigate that?

That's a really good question. I deal with so many students who have come out of the workshop model in which people demand stuff all the time. Like you should explain this, you shouldn't have foreign words, and there's all this directive stuff. So part of my thing is saying you can decide who you're writing for, and there's a way in which you can code it.

If it’s for the people that you want to speak to and anyone else wants to read it, they might have to do some extra work. You're signaling who it is you want to speak to, and that can be really, really powerful. So really think about who do you want to talk to?

If you're using Spanglish or if you're using a mixture of Tagalog and Spanglish, then it's really clear who you're writing for, and that can just add this kind of intimacy and authenticity, and it can be really wonderful. And then if you want to take it into the marketplace for a more general audience, there might be some things that you do in organic ways to translate the code. There’s direct translation, there's context, and then there's coding to keep outsiders out, like if you're talking about special ritual practices that can't be shared.

I just want my students to be aware of all of those things, and then they can make the decision.

They can resist anything that doesn't fit with their goals.

That’s a super helpful perspective. Okay, last question. In your essay, you said trying to distinguish between travelers and tourists misses the point. What should we be asking instead?

It’s kind of like the racism debate. Nobody wants to be considered racist, even if they want to advocate racist policies. Klan members don't want to be called racist! So there's a way in which everyone knows that they shouldn't want to be a tourist. Which is kind of ridiculous because we all are.

And I think there's also a way in which the way people are defining themselves as travelers, around this quest for authenticity is, in fact, an extension of colonialism—this desire to acquire the authentic experience and that the people who are giving you the authentic experience shouldn't have Western amenities because they need to be pristine and pure, so you can have your authentic experience and unplug from your very sophisticated gadget driven life.

So I find that by classifying, by grading the way people travel, it's very easy to point fingers at people who are having prepaid curated experiences and to imagine that you are doing something so much greater simply because you're calling yourself a traveler.

You know, so I think we need to question the way we travel in general, and making that distinction distracts from the deeper things that we should be doing in general because it's low hanging fruit.

So what are some of the deeper things we should be doing?

I think we should be decolonizing travel. I feel very uncomfortable by this language of authenticity or thinking that you've discovered a place and then you don't want anybody else to find it because you found the authentic one. The language in that tells me that people feel that they've achieved the next level. They've graduated to some certain enlightenment, so they're not questioning the fact that they're actually perpetuating colonialism through that. They're just saying that tourists are problematic, and there they are greater enlightened beings because they're travelers.

Absolutely. And like you're saying, they're searching for authenticity, which to them means the stereotypical fantasy of this place, which is just perpetuating the colonial mindset rather than actually doing something beneficial.

Whereas tourists are very clear about what they're doing. They’re being honest.

Yeah. Ironically, they're the ones being authentic.

So yes, they're authentically tourists! It's also easy to then exploit tourists, too, like with these, like, volunteer packages where you, like, parachute in and put some bricks up. And then at night, the villagers have to redo what you did. It's all a complex. It's all more complex than wasting your time saying you're a traveler, not a tourist.

You can also read the essay Faith Adiele wrote for us, “Some Things I’ve Learned From Starting the Nation’s First Writing Workshop For Travelers Of Color,” here.