Creative Works by the
Honors Composition II Class, Spring 2004
College of Arts & Sciences
Howard University,
Washington, DC.
Directed by
Professor
Daiyyah A. ABDULLAH Vignette by
Susan C. Mekkawi Web Production
Noël R. Mekkawi
Published by
Howard University
Libraries, 2004
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Focus on Travel Writing
by
Daiyyah
A. Edwards Abdullah
The
genre of travel writing is quite diverse, embracing
nearly any type of writing that documents some type
of excursion. Travel writing then intersects with
and shares space with a number of other genres to
include journalism, memoir, humor, short story,
poetic reminiscence, and the epistolary to name
a few. In this intersection, we find various types
of travelers who write and writers who travel who
delineate accounts of their interactions with the
landscapes, people, places, and cultures encountered
on their journeys. We everyday people are not unlike
the famous travelers and writers whose works we
so often read. If we have traveled anywhere, be
it of some distance from home or among the junkets
of our routines, there is a story to be told about
the journey. This has been the focus of our composition
class this semester; to both summon rememory of
the traveling eye and to sharpen the subjective
“I” through which we speak to write
about a traveling experience. This journal showcases
our accomplishments to that end.
We
found models to facilitate our objectives in Elaine
Lee’s compilation of travel stories, Go
Girl. We looked at a number of essays in that
anthology to examine the types of rhetorical styles
and devices travelers use to write about their travels.
We interrogated how these strategies assist writers
to convey information about the places they visit,
taking into account how these techniques divulge
as much about the writers as the places they write
about. The student writing in this journal may be
viewed similarly. For example, “Journey on
the Carpet” by Monica Jefferson says much
about her ability to manage the angst that emerges
when presented with a major life-changing occurrence.
Likewise, Hannah Groce’s coming-of-age narrative
“Ohio Exposure” is revealing, as well.
The inward lens that the author writes into her
text provides an aperture that allows the reader
to witness the author’s pubescent anguish
as she negotiates her bi-racial identity.
James
Baldwin’s “A Stranger in a Village”
showed us that whatever one’s purpose for
travel, a traveler is often saddled with more than
the physical weight of luggage. For travelers carry
with them, the emotional and psycho-social materials
of their own character, their own culture, their
own fears, dreams, and ambitions. As Baldwin’s
landmark essay helped us to discern, these are realities
that are intrinsic to the narrative that assist
the text’s representation of otherness. The
ideas explicated from Baldwin’s essay inspire
the first chapter of this journal: “Our Travels:
Otherness – Personal Journeys.” In this
chapter, the student writers explore how “home”
offers a point of reference – not only to
provide a foundation for an interpretation of other
people, their culture and landscape, but also to
provide an impetus that inspires a re-examination
of one’s self when confronted with the unfamiliar.
Consequently, the essays in this section reveal
a preoccupation with identity of both self and the
Other.
Chapter
Two, “Short Stories and Poems: Development
of Ourselves” offers creative pieces inspired
by Colleen McElroy’s A Long Way from St.
Louie, V.S. Naipal’s In a Free State,
and Kadija George Sesay’s “Five Travel
Poems”; all are texts that toy with traditional
notions of travel writing while playing with a variety
of rhetorical strategies. In this chapter, the student
writers frolic with the challenge of using travel
as the center for their creative pieces. The subtitle
of this chapter “Development of Ourselves”
references the students’ growth and development
as critical thinkers as they struggled to prevent
the thematic centers of their projects from disintegrating
within the chosen rhetorical forms of these creative
pieces.
The
third chapter is orientated toward research. Chapter
Three, “The Big Sea: Dreams of a Harlem Littérateur”
is a critical look at the influence of travel on
Langston Hughes’s life and work. Here, students
critique the posture of Hughes’s particular
observing eye along with his interpretations of
a visited space. In these analyses, the double-consciousness
of this African American traveler/writer is illuminated.
The essays in this chapter articulate the tensions
apparent in Hughes’s attempt to negotiate
two distinct world views often locatable in the
binary of his African American psyche. Because of
this duality, the idea of home for Hughes, similar
to many black travel writers, seems to be linked
to the elusiveness of a fixed identity caused by
the historical estrangement from one’s ancestral
homeland. The authorial identity delineated in Hughes’s
travel-inspired writing is at once black and European.
The evident duality that may be explicated from
the essays in Chapter Three becomes a figure that
finds Hughes empathic toward the “colored”
people of other lands.
This
journal casts these students as both travelers and
writers. As travelers, the students for the most
part assumed roles as tourists on family vacations
and school excursions. As writers, they apply in
these pieces rhetorical styles and techniques found
in the works of mature writers. And yes, the students
did become travel writers this semester, for these
writings provide the principal characteristics of
travel writing; a subjective “I” that
narrates an account for the traveling eye.
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