Review by Liz Dexter
How intrepid you are as a traveler depends, at least partly, on how entitled you feel to travel. On whether there’s an army base nearby with soldiers from your country. On whether guidebooks are written to ease your path through the world.
Shahnaz Habib is a translator and writer who lives in Brooklyn, New York. In this, her first work of nonfiction, she interrogates notions of travel and travel writing, passports and citizenship, global and otherwise. She deftly weaves together the history of travel with its current state, where where you can go and who can go where are linked to the colour of both your skin and your passport; where one person’s trip to find themselves is another’s migration to become an immigrant.
Habib documents her own struggles with visas and paperwork, her parents’ long journeys across the world to visit their children and her mum’s and dad’s different attitudes to those journeys, her dad preferring to stay local when he visits but to travel the world through a deep dive into news and current affairs. Habib contrasts her own need to settle and stay local with a White American woman she meets who is “doing” all the museums of Istanbul as quickly as possible – neither being the “right way” to do travel – and describes her own experiences of travelling to Istanbul and other places in Turkey and then later living in the city.
Each essay takes a different perspective and travels through history and the present, rooting colonialism in travel and travel in colonialism, finding surprises and parallels in all sorts of places. Her piece on guidebooks finds their basis in the Enlightenment and shows how they still, even now, tell us where to go like they told the Grand Tourists going through Europe. She has a lot on “passportism” which is discrimination against particular people and groups of people on the basis of their citizenship and thus passport (or passport as a sub-category of citizenship), as historically people have sometimes only been allowed to travel out of / into certain countries (talking about travelling, not settling) if they fulfil educational and other qualifications. This gulf between citizens / passport holders is reflected in her own family, where her White American husband is astounded that you can get all the paperwork done and still fail to get the relevant permissions granted in time, never having had to go through that: “If only he had listened to me,” she wails as they cancel a trip.
It’s certainly a historically literate text, with “empire” meaning Roman as well as later colonialists, reminding us that the “Dark Ages” of low cultural import in Europe happened while Polynesians, Africans and Chinese travellers were trading and moving around the globe in glorious colour laden with gold and salt, and this elevates the book from being just a set of essays about travelling while holding a less-respected passport.
In one essay Habib extends her discussion overtly to the intersectionality of being a woman traveller with other statuses, as well as the displacement of Indigenous communities in the name of tourism and “protection”, and raises the fact of male privilege dominating all sorts of areas of travel and travel writing:
It is because the wilderness, too, has become a space where male privilege plays out. From hunting to natural science to wilderness tourism, men have claimed the landscape of wilderness and the metaphors of its ruggedness. The framing of wilderness as the antithesis of domesticity, of rule of law, of safety, has served men so well.
She calls for a new travel writing that doesn’t set the writer above the subject, but instead explains their reactions, their mistakes, the way they settle into the new culture in a more equitable way, understanding local people rather than patronising or laughing at them, celebrating the quieter moments of being somewhere else as well as the monuments and museums.
At the end of the book, Habib makes a case for still calling the “Third World” the “Third World” because it’s elastic, sprawling and all-encompassing, and can show parallels in the places people migrate from around the world. This is where she is most overtly provocative, but the whole book is a delicious provocation, full of the great writing the travel writing reader looks for but making us think hard, too.
There’s a great bibliography showcasing the histories of travel and travel documents that she draws from in the text, which I know I will find very useful for future reading.
Liz Dexter likes to visit the supermarket first anywhere she travels. She blogs about reading, running and working from home at https://www.librofulltime.wordpress.com.
Shahnaz Habib, Airplane Mode: Travels in the Ruins of Tourism (September Publishing, 2024). 978-1914613708, 277pp., paperback original.
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The kind of new travel writing that Shahnaz Habib calls for makes perfect sense to me too. Most of us have had enough of the “I’m-here-but-you’re not” style of article. The “passportism” you quoted her on is surely another significant topic that will become even more relevant. Thanks for such an enlightening review, Liz!
Thank you, Brett, I’m glad I got across in the review what I wanted to!