A Traveler's Library » Pacific Islands

Islands: Lost and Found

pen4hire — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 08:00:01 +0000

Announcements: Check out my post on 5 Things to Do in Tucson at Got Saga.com

AND, note to winners of our January contest–the books are in the mail.

Book Cover: Atlas of Remote Islands

Destination: The Oceans

Book: The Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will (NEW in English, 2010) by Judith Schalansky

As a writer, artist, and typographer, the perfect job for Judith Schalansky, surely would be to create an Atlas. And she did just that. An Atlas of Remote Islands wins a place in the traveler’s library as a book of beauty, ingenuity, poetry and even contains some of the statistical facts you expect from a reference book. I will treasure this book, dipping into it whenever I feel the need to flee ordinary places and ordinary books.

Her book won awards in Germany, where people sailed into book stores to buy this instructive yet fanciful look at 50 islands. She explains in her foreword that one book in just about every German household is an Atlas. And to add to the love affair with maps, consider that she grew up in East Germany under communism, when the government banned travel, but could not stop travel of the imagination–armchair travel.

Judith Schalansky and pages from Remote Islands

Shalansky serves up one page of text and a handsome map of each of the 50 islands. Other than a few facts–location, size, governing country–she doesn’t try to tell us everything about each island, but introduces each with a story of a person who once lived, or tried to live on that island. While based on fact, these stories reside more in fantasy than reality. As Utopias, most of these islands proved to be let downs. If they were uninhabited, there was good reason–too remote, too bereft of flora and fauna, not conducive to farming, no fresh water sources. And yet, humankind must seek out islands just as they must climb mountains–because they are there.

The not-so-remote St. Lucia in the Caribbean

While you may have heard of a few of them, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) for one, most will trip you up on a geography quiz.

Go Nomad published this article which compares the book’s story to the experience of “The World’s Most Traveled Man.”

Britain’s Guardian on line, whose reviews I always love to read, says:

In her foreword, Schalansky describes the act of finger-walking a map as an “erotic gesture”. Cartophiles will know instantly what she means: not that there is a sexual frisson involved in map-reading, but that the distant longing for a landscape is usually far greater than the satisfaction gained by reaching it (eroticism’s essence being anticipation rather than consummation).

I want to thank Penguin, the publisher for providing this book for review.

If you are an island fan, you will also want to read

And for Map lovers:

I took the photo of a St. Lucia beach was taken while I was a guest of the gorgeous East Winds Inn. The beach was right outside my apartment. Not remote, but SO island!

How about you? Share your island stories. What is the most remote or unique island you have ever visited?

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Poet’s Travel Book of Rapa Nui

pen4hire — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:00:04 +0000

Tongariki, Rapa Nui. Photograph property of Margaret Randall.

Destination: Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Book: Their Backs to the Sea(2009) by Margaret Randall

(review copy supplied by Wings Press, San Antonio)

In her journey to Easter Island, the well-traveled Margaret Randall, came to a place more remote than any she had visited or lived in before. The introductory stanzas of [amazonify]0916727610::text::::Their Backs to the Sea,[/amazonify] imagining the arrival of the ancients who carved the giant totems, spells out the location of Rapa Nui..

Unyielding Pacific, 1,300 miles west of Chile,

1,260 southeast of Pitcairn,

at 27 point 9 south and 109 point 26 west

in the measurements we use today.

a journey of stars beckoned you then,

exhausted but ready,

to this speck of land.

The debate about whether we should ignore the writer’s life and just look at the work may never come to a satisfactory conclusion. But I cannot help but think that knowing something of Margaret Randall’s life brings even more depth to her work. Randall and Adele Barker comprised the panel I moderated at the Tucson Book Festival. Their subject was “Memoirs about Travel and Place,” because both have written about foreign places that they lived for an extended time.

Randalls’s long periods of living in Cuba (just after Castro came to power), and Mexico (during student uprisings), visiting North Vietnam(at the end of the Vietnamese War), and again living several years in Nicaragua were not trips taken to immerse oneself in culture or to study history, let alone lie on a beach. A writer–essayist, memoirist, poet–and a photographer, Randall lived her political beliefs. Her opposition to United States policy eventually led to her losing her U.S. citizenship. You can read more about that and the long struggle that finally restored her citizenship at her web site. You can also read more about her Cuban life in the newly released [amazonify]0813544327::text:::: To Change the World: My Years in Cuba[/amazonify]. Excerpts can also be read at the Havana Times web site, a site sympathetic to the country and government of Cuba.

I bought To Change the World at the Tucson Book Festival and am eager to read it, having read some of the excerpts at the Havana Times. Just to be perfectly clear, I am not sympathetic to Castro, and steeled myself to dislike an apologia for his revolution. However, Randall is far too intelligent to just parrot dogma. I found the excerpts I read to be fascinating, and a good counterpoint to the (my) unexamined attitude toward Castro.

Randall now lives in Albuquerque, and the travel to Easter Island was spurred by an article by playwright Edward Albee about how a visit to the island had affected him.

A Lone Moai, His Back to the Sea. Photograph Property of Margaret Randall

In the first half of her book, the poetry and photography beautifully portray the mysterious stone heads on the island, and she asks the questions that I have asked when seeing pictures of the carvings, weaving the physical descriptions through the facts and speculations of history and anthropology.

Even here, she sees the dangers of colonialism, and her contemplation of the ancients moves through time to Baghdad, and on to a loop between past and present and future–both personal and global. Thus the second half of the book moves from Easter Island to the contemplation of universal life questions, and asks more of the reader than simple tourism.

Fallen Moai

Margaret Randall kindly gave me permission to use her photographs here. They are copyrighted and are NOT available for your use, other than enjoying what you see here.

I hope that you will start or join a conversation here. Surely I have given you enough controversial topics to approach. Have at it!

Read about the other panelist from Tucson Festival of Books, Adele Barker, and about another South Sea Island experience. And don’t forget to recommend this post by clicking on one of the social media buttons below.

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New Book Travels to Pacific Island

pen4hire — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:30:56 +0000

Pacific Islands Coral Atoll

Destination: Marshall Islands, Pacific

Book: Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing Island by Peter Rudiak-Gould (Released November 3)

Do you have a secret wish to travel to a remote Pacific coral island–palm trees, deep blue lagoons, friendly natives, an endless supply of fruit and fish? Then perhaps you should read this as a cautionary travel book. If you were smitten with island in Tom Hank’s movie, Castaway, and still think that a remote island contains Paradise, you may need this book before you travel.

In [amazonify]1402766645::text::::Surviving Paradise[/amazonify], Peter Rudiak-Gould goes looking for Paradise and finds on the tiny island of Ujae–not Hell–but a very difficult existence. Barely twenty-one, ill prepared for his job of teaching English and full of the confidence of a young American man that he can figure out how to deal with anything, his introduction to the island is not auspicious. Instead of the joyous celebratory welcome he had imagined, he sees frozen stares from the children and indifference from the adults.

I stood next to the plane, holding my scant luggage, and wondered if I could pretend there had been some sort of mix-up. “Sorry, this isn’t the Ujae I was looking for,” I would say–which was the truth–and fly back home.

The next day when he sets out to travel around his new home, he finds, “I had circumnavigated the world before lunch.” The island is 1/3 of a square mile large.This tiny world may not consist of a huge amount of land, but it does hold huge surprises for the explorer of cultures.

At first Rudiak-Gould finds the interplay between his expectations and island reality amusing, later it becomes tedious, and then oppressive. The book’s style follows suit. I was laughing out loud on every page in the first few chapters, but found the continuous whining about his difficulties tedious in the middle. I do not dismiss this as a useful book for travelers, however. After all, I don’t like the churlishness of Paul Theroux either, but plenty of people lap up his travel literature.

In the end, this author realizes that although he can analyze and classify the behaviors on this island, he still cannot understand them. The Marshallese still live in a subsistence society, despite the fact that they watch videos that teach the kids gang signs which they flash without knowing their meaning. He says:

What looked like paradise was actually one of the hardest places on earth to live.

and:

I talked the talk and walked the walk–but I did not value the values and believe the beliefs. For all my differences, for all the aspects of their culture I still rejected, did the people of Ujae still, somehow, accept me as their own?

In the end, Rudiak-Gould goes on to graduate school and a project about the Marshallese attitude toward global warming and the rise of the oceans. He returns to the island three years after his first stay to do his anthropological studies. But the first part of the book also has an anthropological feel and frequently not the detached, scientific air of information gatherer, but judgmental comparer of societies. I wished for the conclusion of Adam Gopnik in Paris To The Moon, that neither society is better than the other, they are just different.

The author is appalled at the attitude of the Marshall Islanders at global warming, for example. The book’s subtitle and promotional materials tout the unfortunate future of these islands as ocean levels rise and low-lying coral islands are washed away. However this strikes me as possibly a newsworthy add-on to a book that meant to be about the survival of a subsistence culture both invaded and sometimes improved by American t-shirts, T.V.s, and motor boats.

In the end, although Paradise does not live up to his expectations, Rudiak-Gould declares himself still a romantic, still a traveler who will seek out the impossible remote places. For us, as armchair travelers to remote atolls, the book will be more a cold bath of realism (about a place where cold baths do not exist) than the lure of travel literature.

Sterling Publishers kindly supplied a review copy of this book, and I got the photo from Flickr. You can click on the photo and see more about the photographer.

Is a coral atoll in the Pacific your idea of Paradise? Or have you been there, done that, and bought the made-in-America souvenirs? Or perhaps you’ve been to some of the more touristed islands like Fiji? Please tell us about it in the comment section below.

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