Some Things I’ve Learned From Starting the Nation’s First Writing Workshop For Travelers Of Color
Faith Adiele in front of “Tonantzin Renace,” a mural by Colette Crutcher in San Francisco’s Mission District. Photo by Ronald Palmer.
As part of our series, Better Travel Writing for a Better World, Faith Adiele reflects on starting the nation’s first writing workshop for travelers of color and how the language of travel writing is so embedded in travel’s colonial origins that it’s a constant struggle not to replicate the imperialist project, no matter how inclusive travel becomes. You can ready our interview with Faith here.
The summer of 2014, Voices of Our Nations Arts (VONA)—at the time the largest and preeminent multi-genre summer workshop for writers of color—asked me to start a travel writing workshop. My heart thrummed. If any literary genre were in need of desegregation and decolonization, it was travel writing. For centuries the genre had been an old boys club, its so-called classics offering accounts of white men on road trips across America, white men on Grand Tours through Europe, white men stationed in colonial outposts in the global south, where the rare person who looked like me was serving drinks. Women’s travel writing was on the rise and patting itself on the back for unearthing historical accounts of wealthy white women hauling their steamer trunks onto the page and for allowing a few (invariably white, slender, young) women into the travel club.
I learned a few things, which I’ll share with you now.
#1 WE HAVE ALWAYS TRAVELED
As far as we knew, Traveling While BIPOC would be the first writing workshop for travelers of color in the US. I couldn’t wait! I wanted to establish once and for all that people of color/global majority peoples are both the most traveled and the most visited demographic on the globe, our lives the grand stuff of literature. I would disprove all the editors and publishers who had told me that we didn’t travel and didn’t write travel. Or if we did, it was “just a roots journey,” not Real Travel. I wanted to challenge notions of Real Travel as freedom and self-actualization and to explore how the traveler’s identity problematizes this Western fantasy. And I wanted to teach responsible, decolonized travel writing (which in turn requires responsible, decolonized travel and acknowledgment of the complex, hierarchical relationship between traveler and native). I knew we could be simultaneously colonized and colonizers. I certainly had.
“I just needed to expand the definition of travel.”
Folks of color had been so long shut out of travel writing and publishing that in 2014, many had no idea what I meant by travel literature and assumed I was teaching guidebook writing. I visited memoir classes, poetry gatherings, journalism conventions, travel festivals, and academic conferences to preach the gospel: It’s all travel writing! The personal histories of POC, multiracials, first-generation immigrants and other boundary/border crossers, are de facto travel tales. I just needed to expand the definition of travel from elite leisure activity to include the way we choose (and often don’t get to choose) to move through the world.
I was like the Oprah of travel writing: Your roots return is travelogue! Your movement between language and culture—travel! Climbing from working to middle class? Travel! Immigrant narratives, identity quests, international witness? You know it! First to attend, then drop out of, college? The road to recovery, research and reporting trips? Escape, exile, and e/migration? Travel, travel, travel! My recruitment tagline—Every time people of color leave the house, we travel!—started to show up in articles. Participants appreciated the encouragement to recast what we have been doing for generations as travel. To see the narrative potential in leave-taking and returning, in the pattern of going Down South/Out West/Up North/Back East, where there were evocative homelands to seek, countless cross-cultural negotiations, dragons to slay, and travelers who self-actualized. “And if you make it home alive at the end of the day,” I tell them, “Well, that’s the Hero’s Journey.”
#2 WE MUST RISK SOMETHING
My pedagogy involves sharing stories about my own challenges. In this case, the journeys that cost us something. My sophomore year in college, I had a breakdown and flunked out. Somehow I managed to crawl to northern Thailand to lick my wounds as part of a study abroad program. There I became fascinated by Buddhist nuns, a relatively invisible category of Thai women. When I proposed a fieldwork project to my Thai advisor, he warned me, “Western Anthropology has failed. Scholars visit the southern hemisphere for a week, a month, a year, then go back to write their stereotypical fantasies in books, claiming to report on the world.”
A few weeks later, I shaved my head and eyebrows, put on white robes, took a vow of silence and poverty and one daily meal, and moved into the forest to live as Thailand’s first Black Buddhist nun. It was incredibly hard and incredibly rewarding, and at the end of my ordination period, I was allowed to interview any interested nuns. I knew I got great “data” because they’d seen me struggling nineteen hours a day, every day, to be a decent nun (or at least, not so horrid a nun they’d regret letting me ordain) and because when I put down my notebook, each woman leaned in and asked for my fall-from-grace story.
Later, when I dropped out of my anthropology program and abandoned formal education like so many of my VONA students had, I reshaped my data into a travel memoir. When Meeting Faith: The Thai Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun was released, no one had heard of Black Buddhists. I worked with a book artist to design a non-traditional structure and format that would recreate the disorienting experience of arrival and negotiation, and that led reviewers to say that I was treading new ground, pioneering both form and Black women’s experiences. But deep down, I feared that it was just another self-indulgent tale of Westerners seeking Enlightenment in the East.
This is my first rule of travel writing, which I share with each VONA Workshop: The writer must be at risk, must have something at stake, to earn the right to report on someone else’s culture and home.
#3 WE NEED NEW WORDS
It quickly became obvious that encouraging Black, Indigenous and POC voices wasn’t enough. Though the shape of our travel stories was often more complex, VONA participants were constrained by travel writing’s settler-colonial origins. As the point of most travel, historically, was to rename and acquire, it only makes sense that the very language we use to speak about travel, encounters, other places, and difference carries with it the imperial imperative. Despite our best intentions, our vocabularies—and, therefore the way we conceptualize the act and purpose of travel—reinforce power imbalances. We are the center and every other place is “foreign,” filled with the strange and “exotic” or “simple” ways of life.
“It was hard to acknowledge my blue passport privilege and Western point of view and inadequate vocabulary.”
It hurt to admit. Like me, most of the writers in the workshop had been struggling their whole lives—as women of color; as scholarship students; as the only Brown people in our immigrant families or schools—and travel could feel like home. I was good at it. I could speak multiple languages and read body languages. I had integrated with the locals. I was there for the culture. It was hard to acknowledge my blue passport privilege and Western point of view and inadequate vocabulary.
In the era of the anti-tourist, this settler-colonial mentality is coded as the quest for “authenticity.” The self-avowed Real Traveler (who pities the lowly tourist for purchasing a curated experience) is on a quest to acquire and consume a new, authentic “experience” (which they may or may not sell to a travel outlet or monetize with likes, followers and sponsors). We pour into “untouched paradises” or hack our way through “teeming jungles,” eager to leave the “modern world” behind, then whine when in between “cultural dances” with “tribal drumming,” the “smiling natives” take calls on decidedly-unpicturesque cell phones.
Looking for new words that don’t center the Western experience and privilege we are addled with requires deep self-examination.
#4 WE NEED TO REST AND RESIST
Seven years in, change has happened. Participants in the workshop have worked with with like travel journals Off/Assignment, Away: Experiments in Travel & Telling, On She Goes, and Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel; with podcasts Ethical Traveler and There She Goes, and with showcases like TravelCon and the Weekday Wanderlust reading series. Bani Amor, who took the workshop twice and was my Teaching Assistant their third year, is a leader in the decolonizing travel culture movement, speaking widely on ending systemic inequalities in travel, writing service articles that queer the genre, and teaching workshops on dismantling coloniality in travel writing. Anu Taranath, an alumna who hired me to work on her manuscript, published Beyond Guilt Trips: Mindful Travel in an Unequal World, which counts among its many awards Oprah Magazine's "26 Best Travel Books of All Times,” Fodors' Travel "Best Books to Bring on Vacation,” Newsweek's Future of Travel Awards in Storytelling, and Global Shakers "40 Leaders in Sustainable Tourism”. Alumnus Ernest White II is host of Fly Brother Radio Show and producer and host of FLY BROTHER with Ernest White II, a docu-series on PBS and Create TV about building authentic connections through travel.
During this time, BIPOC Millennials were moving from immigrant to expat in the very places I’d wandered solo, dreaming of community. The New Black Travel Movement birthed superstars who didn’t need traditional publishing. Travelers with a quarter-million Instagram followers and groups with half a million Facebook members could bypass publishing gatekeepers and directly access their readers (i.e., markets). Mainstream travel magazines were dismayed, marveling to their equally-dismayed readers that Black Americans alone spend over a billion dollars annually on leisure travel. And in 2020 the Black travel media called out the industry on its racism.
So now that so many of us are finally here at the travel table (kind of), it’s tempting to do it the same way it’s always been done. And why not? Folks without generational wealth need to get paid. Living well and sleeping deeply may not be something we’ve always had. Representation of ourselves in beautiful places is important.
But remember that social media and service travel are essentially capitalist endeavors, with patriarchy and white supremacy in their DNA. When we travel, we’re tempted to regard locals and their homes as props. To take staged shots that evoke the romance of colonialism. To tout ecotourism, sustainable tourism, voluntourism, spiritual tourism, digital nomading, etc., without analyzing their human costs. To imagine that we’ve bonded with someone reliant on us for tips.
I know I am guilty of these things, and constantly need to remind myself to be wary of the limited tools I’ve inherited to write about travel.
We Must Keep Moving Forward
Perhaps the pandemic was an invitation to slow down. An opportunity to reflect on the purpose and costs of travel. A quiet moment to work on language and craft, so that any writing we create—be it literary tales or service pieces or personal social media stories—resists recycling, reinforcing and updating the same old travel narrative. This is the moment to demand everything—of the industry that shut us out for so long, and of ourselves. How will we speak on the page in a way that invites in those we haven’t seen or heard from before, in a way that makes nuance and connection, in a way that lives up to the transformative potential of travel writing as we go from here?
Faith Adiele is the Nigerian Nordic American founder of the nation’s first workshop for travel writers of color through VONA (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation). She is author of the memoir Meeting Faith, which won a PEN award and routinely appears on travel listicles, co-editor of the anthology Coming of Age Around the World and subject of the PBS documentary My Journey Home. Her work appears in Best Women’s Travel, Off/Assignment, Ethical Traveler Podcast, A Woman Alone, and the meditation app Calm. She teaches around the world. Visit her at adiele.com and @meetingfaith.
You can ready our interview with Faith here.
