Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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Finally, Part 5 “Sites for Self-Exploration: Travel and Illness Narratives” covers different spaces that have been recently used for self-discovery in the quest for identity. Some of the authors discussed in this section use traveling to other places and times as an autobiographical act that helps them extend their political activism or find themselves. Other authors, however, explore the body as a sensory text that allows them to reconstruct the past, while some others use illness narratives to tell the story of a personal struggle to reconstruct their bodies and sense of self. In the first of these essays, Jesús Varela-Zapata turns his attention to Alice Walker’s autobiographical travelogue Overcoming Speechlessness (2010), in which she narrates the horrors and cruelty she witnessed during her 2006 trip to Rwanda and the eastern Congo (as part of the Women for Women International organization) and the endless suffering of the Palestinian population during her 2009 trip to the Gaza Strip (invited by the women’s and anti-war group Code Pink). Varela-Zapata locates Walker’s travelogue within the African American tradition of international activism. He notes that many African Americans have tried to “spread their political action across borders, realizing that their fight [in the US] could act as a model for the African brothers striving for independence” first and then fighting against apartheid systems. Walker’s account of her journeys is interspersed with personal recollections of herself as a young woman in her twenties and thirties as an activist in the Civil Rights movement, finding parallels between the events she witnessed in Gaza and her own memories of growing up black in the Jim Crow South. As Varela-Zapata suggests, in telling the stories of people who have suffered genocides and brutality, Walker is also telling her own personal story as an activist during segregation. “Walker,” Varela-Zapata argues, “serves as a case in point to demonstrate that the genre of travel writing goes beyond the mere description of places or adventures or political vindication” and becomes instead a “kind of personal narrative” and an “exploration of the self” in which the author identifies with those suffering and condemns any form of oppression in the world.