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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Destination: Scotland

The Scottish Flower, Thistle

Books by: H. V. Morton, George Blake, Edwin Muir, Kathleen Jamie, and others.

When I asked for suggestions for books for travelers to ten specific destinations, I put Scotland on the list. Alasdair Pettinger, who edits the valuable Studies in Travel Writing web site, had some definite ideas about Scottish travel literature, and literature about Scotland for travelers.

“I find the most engaging travel books were written in the 1920s and 30s: H. V. Morton, In Search of Scotland (1929) and In Scotland Again (1933); George Blake, The Heart of Scotland (1934); and Edwin Muir, Scottish Journey (1935).” He goes on to explain,  “They proceed from an imaginative documentary impulse that is missing from recent travelogues which tend to be more introspective and inclined to dwell on cultural identity.”

I learned that H. V. Morton was one of the most popular (or THE most popular, according to the speaker) travel writers of the twentieth century in the British Isles.  He traveled around the world and wrote 50 books, many of them titled “In Search of….” He gave practical information along with descriptions of the country or city he was visiting, and appealed to the middle class reader. Perhaps it is not fair, but I picture him as kind of an early Rick Steves, encouraging people to travel, in an age when Scotland was practically unknown to the average Englishman.

Muir, on the other hand, was known as a novelist and poet. According to reviewers of his only travel book, he  writes beautifully but politically about his subject. I could find very little about Blake, and my local library does not have his books, so it will be some time before I can read him. Perhaps Mr. Pettinger or another reader can enlighten me.

Despite his predilection for the earlier writers, Pettinger  lists some more recent books by Scotsmen either returning to their country, or rediscovering Scotland.

Invisible Country (1984) by James Campbell

A Search for Scotland (1989) by R. F. MacKenzie

Four Scottish Journeys (1991) by Andrew Eames

Native Stranger (1995) by Alistair Scott

In Waiting (1998) by Michael W. Rusell

He also mentions an Englishman, Charles Jennings, whose Faintheart: An Englishman Ventures North of the Border (2002) is a Bill Bryson-type book. “(the book)hides some perceptive observations behind its self-deprecating humour. And I would rate it more highly than the Scottish sections of round-Britain accounts by Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux,” says our Scotland contributor.

Pettinger saves his highest praise for a contemporary Scottish writer, Kathleen Jamie. “But no one captures the intensity of the lived moment indoors or outdoors better than Kathleen Jamie in Findings, 2005” A new edition of the book, whose subtitle is “Essays on the Natural and Unnatural World” came out in 2007.

I have found some quotes from this book, “Once, on a flawless sandy beach in Donegal, I found five silver fishes, freshly abandoned by a wave, glittering and bright as knives presented in a canteen,” that make me most eager to read it. She is a poet, even when writing prose, and her sharp observations remind me of Ann Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift From the Sea.

See more about Scotland in Music of Scotland and Mystery books in Scotland. If you like Scotland, you may also want to look at the posts on Ireland. I have written about McCarthy’s Bar, the Beara Peninsula, and the Blasket Islands. And don’t miss R. Todd Felton’s book on Literary Ireland.

Well, there you have it, from a between-the-wars perspective, through home-coming books, and humor, to the observations of a poet.  Do you agree with Alasdair’s leaning to the writers from early 20th century? Can you add to my very sketchy research about them? Let’s talk.

Photograph courtesy of John Haslem of Scotland,  “foxypar4″ via flicker.

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.