From: kabir@kabir.Eng.Sun.COM (Ihtisham Kabir)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.bangladesh
Subject: Chittagong [LONG!]
Date: 15 Sep 1992 17:14:59 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems
Distribution: world
Reply-To: kabir@kabir.Eng.Sun.COM
NNTP-Posting-Host: kabir

[The following article was prompted by a description of Chittagong by a Canadian
traveller. I wrote it over the weekend in a fit of anger upon reading
that description, and I solicit rebuttals from those familiar with that city - IK]

 

                               BAD TRIPS

I have partaken liberally of the recent harvest of travel books from
several American publishers. Most of the authors are engaging and
adventurous (notably Redmond O'Hanlon, James Fenton and Nick
Danziger) and their books have until now whetted my appetite for armchair
adventuring. Until now, that is, because I have just finished reading
"Bad Trips," and it gave me indigestion.

I was intrigued by the idea behind "Bad Trips," a "sometimes terrifying,
sometimes hilarious collection of writing on the perils of the road."
Someone by the name of Keath Fraser had the idea of putting together a
book of unpleasantries encountered by the traveller, and the potential
for such a book, I felt, was enormous. It could be humorous. It could
shed light on the human condition, specially on the differences between
cultures and why people miscommunicate. It could be poignant, as when
one runs into the lives of those who are more unfortunate. It could be
a testament to the courage of individuals struggling against the harshness
of nature in desolate areas. It could have been a lot of things.

But alas, the book, whose contributors (with the exception of two
expatriate Indians Anita Desai and Rohinton Mistry) are all white,
turns out, for the most part, to be cynical at its best and
viciously racist at its worst, with a "Yecch! look at those dirty
natives wallowing in the filth." spilling out of the belly of most
of the writers (the notable exceptions being Wilfred Thesiger, the
great explorer of the Arabian Desert, Graham Greene and Peter Mathiessen.)

"Bad Trips" is mostly a compendium of white people traveling to
non-white parts of the world and being disgusted by what they saw. Then
they try to make it look funny. Or worse, they try to sound clever about it.

Take, for example, "My Worst Journeys," by George Woodcock, wherein Mr.
Woodcock lowers his condescending little eyes on Chittagong and has this
to say:

"Inge and I ended up in Chittagong, the dirtiest, ugliest, most
wretched and hopeless town I had ever seen - 'rectum mundi,' as I then
described it. In the 'best' and only possible hotel, where the officers
from the freighters stayed and drank themselves to sodden boredom, the
'luxury suite' had a 'bathroom' that was really a section of the balcony
where one squatted to shit into a hole and showered under a pipe jutting
from the wall, with only a four-foot screen to give scant privacy.
[... stuff about holes in mosquito nets ...]. The palms were dying
in the gardens and the fountain in the courtyard was filled with
rubbish. Around it the beggars clustered, not in ones and twos, but in
families and tribes, many of them with limbs deformed and faces partly
eaten away by leprosy and other sicknesses. Occasionally, the hotel manager,
a Eurasian who talked pathetically of England as home although he had
never been there, would dart out and urge his porters to drive them away.
[... some more drivel about beggars.]

Of course our own wretched hotel life, kept awake by the mosquitoes, eating
tasteless and suspect food, hating everything we saw and heard and smelt,
was in local terms the height of privileged comfort, even though it
resembled in no way what we had expected from the posters put up in
Dacca to show the palm-fringed beaches of Chittagong. 'Beaches? What is this
about beaches?' the hotel manager had asked... We flew...to Bangkok, where the
modest standards of the thais, looked in comparison, like those of
rich men."

The above litany is not dated, but I think the visit took place in
the 1950s. Now, I have been to Chittagong twice, and I happen to
think, like many other people, that it is a rather nice city. So what
was this guy's problem?

Another example of subdued racism is a section from Paul Theroux's
Old Patagonian Express when he visits Costa Rica (notice how "black" is
associated with everything bad:)

"It's a _white_ country, a man had told me in San Jose. But this was
a black town, a beachhead of steaming trees and sea stinks. [Goes into
a pathetic tirade about the town of Limon where he could not find
a hotel room because he did not have reservations. What did he expect?]
In one place ... a woman said, 'Them - they're doubling up.' She indicated
a passageway of people- grandmothers, young women, sighing men, glassy-
eyed children, black, fatigued, pushing old valises into a cubicle and several
changing their clothes as they stood there in the passageway....
I came to a precinct of Limon known as Jamaicatown - in this white
Spanish-speaking country, a black English-speaking area: a slum.
These were the worst streets I had seen in Costa Rica, and each street
corner held a dozen people, talking, laughing..."

Or, from Patrick Marnham's contribution which starts thusly:
"Indian trains were filthy, stifling, and hopelessly overcrowded."
and then goes on to bitterly complain about his futile attempts to con
his way into a first class compartment without a ticket. The first class
compartment had some Army Generals who asked for his tickets - they
become the butt of Marnham's anemic jokes on paper (although I am sure he
did not have the guts to joke with the Generals in the train.)

Or Martha Gellhorn, "Rumor says that the gentle Balinese are as
skillful at gouging the tourists as everyone in the mysterious
East." Oh yes, I can just picture those diabolical slant-eyed
devils. [Does Ms. Gellhorn really have to take out the frustrations
of her failed marriage with Hemingway on the gentle people of Bali?]

Most of the natives remain anonymous. Some of the writers, in moments
of magnanimity, stoop to give them names, but never those names
that the natives' parents had given them. No, that would require
talking with them, perhaps even shaking their filthy hands. Unthinkable!
Instead, the natives are identified as "Gold Tooth", "Mr. Big," and so on.

Of course, if things ever go wrong in the white people's country, it
is either mechanical malfunction (a plane cannot land, a car spins out
of control) or it is the fault of the author. But in the native's land,
it is _always_ the native's fault.

Sometimes the book is predictable. In an article on the Sudan, some
volunteers of the Red Crescent show up. "Hey, the Red Crescent is the
Islamic equivalent of the Red Cross, so how come I haven't read any-
thing negative about them YET?" I ask myself. Sure enough, two paragraphs
down, snide remarks are made about the volunteers.

I thought this book gave me indigestion. But now I want to puke.

- Ihtisham Kabir
~