Travel Narratives by Celebi, Cesaire, Basho, and Zaabalawi - Essay Example

Journal – Evliya Celebi The Book of Travels

Learning history from Celebi and seeing the Ottoman Empire through the eyes of this traveler has been a unique experience for me. It is like living in an alien land. The experience is so real. Celebi’s travels are immersed in culture and are adventurous as well. What attracted me most in this book is the attention given to detailing. While reading along, I personally feel that humans have not changed much in their basic nature. Celebi has narrated extensively, the conflicts of that era, which according to me were not concerned with human welfare but only petty selfish motives. They were not ideological either.

I understand that Evliya had a partisan approach in his narrative. But I welcome it as it reflects the Ottoman mentality and culture of which Evliya is also a part, when we watch from this era. But within the parameters of his culture and social conditioning I find Evliya quite impartial. The stories of imperial marriage associations depicted by Evliya are intricate accounts of the political as well as the social system of Ottoman period. To look back in history, is an exercise to remind oneself that there lived people who went through greater conflicts and greater peace and happiness in history than us. Also reading this book is an occasion for me to realize that social norms are a product of time.

Evliya’s somewhat fragmented narrative has often left me desiring for more. If this writer had tried to give more dramatic strength to his narration, I think, this book must have been devour able. The comic anecdotes of his adventures, brought smile to my lips even though his partisan approach often reflected in them. I wondered what such a traveler must have felt, moving around in the hot sun and watching people fight with each other and plot against each other. But I think Celebi disapproved of the selfish ways of the social elite. He must have felt the futility of their petty egos and fights, as his insights into life being shaped by watching many civilizations (286-89).

Celebi’s curiosity towards different dialects has made me see the sharpness of his observations. He had a very keen nose for what excited the readers of his period. Celebi has also described the attires and living spaces of the people in detail. He keenly observed architecture of each and every place. I could not stop wondering about his political knowledge as well. Many influential people are seen asking his opinion regarding serious political matters. He is respected as a knowledgeable man owing simply to the travels that he made. I am sure he might have returned from his travels wiser.

A progression is seen in his views regarding tolerance towards other cultures as his journey moved ahead. He did not blindly believe in the Sultan. He had his own views, which some times also shifted against the Sultan. Both his official and informal travel accounts had equally reflected his interest in matters of law, diplomacy and politics. Thus we can estimate that these were his priorities. While analyzing Celebi’s book, I have arrived at the conclusion that he lacked an eye to see the miseries of the common folk, and their life. We could only draw conclusions about the poverty and oppression of that era by making projections on Celebi’s accounts. Yet, this traveler has left me wonder-struck regarding the huge volume of his work, the patience with which he undertook this with as much detailing as possible and the interest he took in deciphering the real politics of Ottoman Empire.

Journal – Aime Cesaire Notebook of a Return to The Native Land

I have been aware of the complex political overtones of Aime Cesaire’s works and especially, “Notebook of a Return to The Native Land”. But as I started reading this book, the first thing that caught me unaware was the power of his verse. This was something I had never experienced before, something smelling of dust and toil. This was something exuberant with raw cultural honesty. It was like tasting a cold iron surface. It was familiar and yet wild.

I felt Cesaire was trying to make the unbearable, more bearable through a postmortem by words. Everything ugly, unappealing and even disgusting was coming alive with unbelievable poetic strength. I started wondering how one could hate so intensely unless one loved so intensely. And soon I started to realize that it was out of sheer love for humanity that so much anger and hatred was being expressed against the dehumanizing effect of colonialism.

I felt as if the whole of nature and its all elements were coming alive in a surge to correct the errors of human destiny (2542-2543). The images of mud, water, dust and ruin were breaking out of their implied meanings and standing apart as pillars of protest. While reading through some lines, I felt the whole poem was written in blood and agony. But the strength of ‘Negritude’ was soon pouring out as a refreshing shower of hope and resurrection.

The honesty of the writer was nearly suicidal. I could feel the anguish in every pulse of my vein, when I read on. Cesaire was unique in his hatred of the oppressors as well (2569). He does not want to stoop as low as his oppressors even if it was necessary to confront them (2570). He keeps his dignity and his ability to joke even in the face of death and despair. His black humor gives a finishing blow to well-crafted words of retaliation. Nobody could ever dare to question it without the fear of spilling all the skeletons stalked in the cupboard of colonialism. The victory of truth and wisdom is what gives the poem a positive tinge, in the end.

To me, Cesaire is a very courageous sailor who dared to go deep inside the ocean of humanism and evading the tentacles of racial hatred came up with a pearl of human brotherhood. For him, resistance is something dissolved deep in every breath. His words have a smell of bitterness and the taste of iron will. All the discredited materials on this earth rise only to get transformed into the most beautiful things on earth when touched by Cesaire’s words. His sarcasm is sharp when it comes to the victorious races and his compassion is endless towards the oppressed (2568). He has also made me aware that it is the oppressors who are doomed and in need of pity. Because they never knew how they had foregone their chance to live in peace, in harmony with others.

After reading this book, I felt myself purified and redeemed. It was like a therapy by history. Now I have also become part of this search for freedom and equality. Cesaire has reminded me that I need to be more sensitive towards the injustices in this world. I should never walk away believing that they were not going to affect me, because, oppression is an epidemic. If you do not treat it, the whole humanity will be affected.

Journal – Matsuo Basho The Narrow Road to The Interior

I opened the first page of ‘The Narrow Road to The Interior” and read on. I started to fly like a feather under a lonely blue sky. Basho is simply ethereal. ‘Adrift’ is the word that could come near to the feeling that one gets when one goes through this masterpiece. It is not a travel by road, but on the wings of a lovely evening breeze. Basho proclaims himself that he, the wanderer, is the first winter rain (607). He never sees any mortal on his road, but only the autumn evening (610).

As I read on, I started wondering how could one observe nature so deep. The concentration I could feel in Basho’s words was picture perfect and tranquil. It was as if the poet could sit still under a tree until eternity if he wanted to. But he also concerns himself woth the mundane and tells us tales of the historic and important places that he visited. When he reintroduced the poets who sat on the branches of history once, I could feel the vastness of knowledge that humans can achieve only through generations.

I felt Basho was searching for himself through his travels. He was searching truth and perfection. His travel, to me, was an experiment to find out if one could dissolve oneself totally in nature and humanity forgetting one’s selfhood. But all the same it was surprising for me to see that Basho could be very practical and of this world, whenever he wanted to be so. It is evident that he was trying to establish himself as a poet master of his era. I have also read that Basho had fabricated and twisted facts so as to impart poetic strength to his verse and to make them show him in a more favorable light.

Though the narrator is an ailing old man, I could smell the freshness of springs in his words. When Basho says, “an orchid’s perfume transfers incense to the wings of the butterfly”, it was like I was drinking sublime poetry for the first time in my life (612). In every breath of nature, Basho could see beauty. I thought, with such a sweet outlook, I could have been thousands times happier in life. But I know that like any other talented poet, Basho was feeling lonely, and uncertain about his life. He was even thinking of death amidst all this beauty. I feel this is the contradiction that we face in life. Surrounded by the abounding beauty of life, we lament in silly matters. Even then, what keep him alive are the glimpses of that beauty that come to visit him and get reflected in his verse.

I have been thus attracted to the philosophy of Basho as much as to his poetry. The use of poetic prose and verse intermittently is another aspect of Basho’s poetry that charms me. I feel this style is more close to a person’s inner expressions. Whenever one needs to indicate a transformation in one’s mood, one can switch over between these two styles. To me, this seems to be more freedom in one’s expressions.

After reading Basho, I have also been thinking about the changes that might have happened to rural Japan since Basho traveled through the narrow roads. Will on enow be able to see all the biodiversity that Basho reported? Would the villages be as tranquil as it used to be in his days? I am sure they won’t be. From an environmentalist’s view point, if we read Basho, we would understand what humans have destroyed in nature and what immense peace we have foregone in vein.

Journal – Naguib Mahfouz Zaabalawi

I feel that the ailing young man in ‘Zaabalawi’ is me, myself. For that matter, every human being who trod on this earth must have at one juncture or other felt a similar urge to travel in search of truth and eternal healing. The existential and emotional wounds that we have to suffer from, since our evolution to consciousness, have been incurable. But we have been searching for a cure since times immemorial.

In the beginning of the story itself, we are informed that the narrator had tried out all the commonly accepted cures for his disease but failed. Here, I think, begins the process of breaking away from approved norms and conventions. And hence the opposition that Mahfouz had to face from religious fundamentalists. In other words, I think, Mahfouz was suggesting that existing religious system could not find a panacea to our spiritual sicknesses.

The calligrapher Hassanein was the one who impressed me more in this story because he had experienced what it was to be close to Zaabalawi, namely truth (2530). Hassanein also tells the narrator that Zaabalawi was nothing more or less than a man. This is the first suggestion that truth resides in one’s own self. I was fascinated by this idea that truth could be so simple and that it became unnoticed throughout our life as we tried to find it in more complicated spaces.

When the narrator knows Zaabalawi had a beautiful voice, as a reader I felt this was suggestive of the most intimate and personal medium of human communication, namely voice. The suggestion that Zaabalawi may be concealed even among the beggars is an infusion of Christian religious thought into Islam by the author (2532). For that matter, I think there is an influence of Christianity and Sufi thoughts in the author’s philosophy.

Towards the end of the story, I think the drunkenness of the narrator and the appearance of Zaabalawi at the same moment reflects the view that truth could be realized only when one is free from the past and one’s ego. That is why the narrator is depicted as loosing his memory and will. (2538). For me, as I told in the beginning of this reminiscences, ‘Zaabalawi’ is connected to my inner conflicts and quests also. The dilemma that the narrator faces when he seems to be so close to seeing Zaabalawi yet so far away from him is the same agony that I have felt when I thought of the meaning of life.

The versions of people vary and we get carried away in the flow of their arguments. Even truth seems to be relative in such a context. But the narrator has enough faith in himself to carry on his search of the eternal truth, which many often lack. I take this as a lesson to be learned from this short story. I think it is not the attainment that matters but to continue the search. The narrator though having missed the unique chance to meet Zaabalawi has really been convinced that Zaabalawi exists. In my opinion also, life should move ahead with this message. A journey through Cairo town by the narrator thus becomes my individual journey also.

• A Reply Note
• What I meant was that the dominating cultural trends, naturally concentrated in the city was trying to bring the rural folk also into its fold. A process of homogenization of culture was taking place, as communication and transportation facilities grew.
• By saying that the poet strayed from truth, I was trying to draw attention to Basho’s proved manipulation of facts to highlight himself as a master poet and to give more poetic strength to his verse by dramatizing real events and even distorting them.
• Using Carter’s interpretation of Basho as an ambitious poet, I wanted to discuss the process of travel as an ideology, and a cultural interface. I used this information to prove that a traveler can be guided by multiple objectives, which can also be contradictory to each other. Travel as a socio-cultural process is multi-faceted, I believe.
• Bruinessen places Evliya’s book, as the greatest depiction of everyday life of the Ottoman Empire. Bruinessen has explained the reason for this. He has observed that Evliya Celebi has not left out frivolous details, which other historians or narrators must have avoided as irrelevant. But when looked into from another era, these frivolous matters are very important to decipher how the people of that period lived. This is why Bruinessen places this book as the greatest depiction of everyday life of the Ottoman Empire.
• When I said, Naguib Mahfouz’s works angered the political Islam, I was referring to the power centers of that religion as an establishment in contrast to the spiritual authority of that religion.