“After the Humidity and Stillness of Yesterday . . .”

What happens between “self” and “other” in writing when the other is the self in a different time and place, and when the circumstance and intention of writing are intensity itself? How do I animate what might seem to be the static remnants of the past? In this article, I turn to the tissue paper traces of self elsewhere and otherwise, a handwritten travel journal where old ink bleeds through the backs of thin pages, where tiny words in blue and black squash in the details of encounters of bodies, languages, peoples, histories, textures, senses, landscapes, and to the hands fingering those pages in the present. Inspired by Foucault’s (1986, 1998) ¹ heterotopia as mobilized by Fritsch (2015) in her exploration of disability as a space of imagination, deviation, and difference, in this article, I turn to writing—the process, the event, the artifact, and the affective and material animation of writing through reading across space and time.

A mirror is a heterotopia, Foucault (1986) explains, insofar as a mirror

makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once both absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived, it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. (p. 24)

In this article, I consider how might the travel journal be like Foucault’s (1986) mirror, in the heterotopia, where I am both “absolutely real” and “absolutely unreal” as the “virtual point” of displacement is “over there” in time, space, and matter (p. 24). This article takes these multiplicities and incompatibilities as provocations to read backward and write into the present.

Twenty-two years ago, a woman I will call Susana left her job as a high school teacher for extended travel through South America. She had dreamed of this trip for years, studied Spanish at university in her first year away from home because the next first thing she wanted to do after graduation was to go to South America, but she hadn’t. She moved, worked, married, divorced—the mundane things that fill in time, life itself. So here she was, that Susana, in her 30s, on the brink of that first thing she had imagined, and that desire to be in the world otherwise and elsewhere. Using the paper guillotine at work, she made a travel diary of transparent airmail paper cut to size and punched with six holes to fit a ring-bound faux-leather faux-Filofax diary. She anticipated transformation and was intent on its documentation. Airmail paper let her fit hundreds of pages in the folder so it would be expansive enough for all those experiences she would spill onto its pages. She bought ballpoint pens with disciplined ink so she could write on both sides of the paper, and so she did. What remains is 143 double-sided pages, with around 180 words on each side, 50,000 words—of 5 months of travel through Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru (Figure 1). There was another section that disappeared, with a stolen backpack in Ecuador, and Colombia was relegated to some long lost random notebook picked up along the way. What remains: the bundle of soft-edged pages, the ink, paper surfaces indented by the press of pen and hand, variations in the slant and cramp and color of the writing, the diligence of the diarist writing every day as she never did again.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Handwritten travel journal.

So here I approach this bundle of remnant pages first as a material artifact, already animate, in the sense that all matter is animate, moving, existing in the world, colliding and recombining with other matter in time and space. But more is needed to animate the subject who drifts and scribbles through these pages. Susana, the woman of 22 years ago, and this woman in the present (I’ll call her Susanne) who sat on a window ledge ² on the 18th floor of a good hotel struggling to write this paper in the very same city where Susana started her adventure. Was Susanne the ideal reader—a version of herself in the future—that Susana had imagined?

The beginning of the journal, written at the airport in Australia, declares in dot points:

Susana already imagined herself as a writer, was farewelled by her women’s writing group with a gift of a shimmering turquoise silk sleeping sheet that she would crawl into and write some nights in her little book in a tent in the Pantanal, a hammock on the deck of a boat on a river in the Amazon, or a bed in any one of the many towns and cities that she passed through. She knew that this was what writers did. Writing as a subject recurs throughout the journal with admonishments to self:

Temporal disorientation clashes with a desire for linear narrative, as though narrative logic will mean control of events that might otherwise become unmoored. Writing becomes a disciplinary practice for staying “on track” and getting things “straight,” for keeping things in order, and necessarily ignoring those elements that are disruptive to order. Writing is producing “a record”. Whether it be descriptive or “looser and more reflective speculative,” it seems to be tethered to truth, coherence, and continuity. An absent presence is the friend who traveled with her for the first 3 months, who was particular about many things that Susana was not. What they spent, who they should and shouldn’t have spoken to, what was and wasn’t appropriate.

The banal textures of the everyday are documented, and the extended indulgence of a journey enabled by a job, savings, a line of credit, travel insurance. As critical geographers remind us, mobilities are uneven, and multilayered. They entail “uneven qualities of experience, uneven access to infrastructure, uneven materialities, uneven subjects of mobility, and uneven events of stopping, going, passing, pausing, and waiting” (Sheller, 2016, p. 17). Nor is this turn to diarized accounts of travel at all original, as such travel has long been seen to document “opportunities for escaping the restrictions of previous identities,” and for reconstructing and reimagining the self (Wearing, Stevenson, & Young, 2010, p. 48). Fullagar (2002) notes of her own travel diaries, how “moments of discontinuity or disturbing pleasure . . . unsettle and refigure the familiar movement of [feminine] subjectivity” in ways that suggest heterotopic, inbetween or liminal spaces (p. 61).

Foucault’s (1986, 1998) short essay on heterotopia as an “other space” has been both influential and subject to critique. Harvey and Thrift have suggested that space is conventionally perceived as static, as limited by what Harvey calls a Kantian separation of space and time, rather than by more subtle understandings of space as enabling conditions of possibility and movement (Harvey, 2007; Thrift, 2007). Instead, Foucault (1986) says we are in an “epoch of space” characterized by “simultaneity . . . juxtaposition . . . the near and far . . . the side-by-side . . . the dispersed,” that is, we are part of “a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein” (p. 21). Or perhaps skin. Exceptional sites like heterotopias and utopias “have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way to suspect, neutralise, or invent the sets of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect” (Foucault, 1986, p. 24). Of the mirror Foucault (1986, p. 26) says,

I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent . . . . I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. (p. 24)

Heterotopias layer sites that are incompatible onto each other and are often linked to ”slices in time” where time is “flowing, transitory, precarious” (p. 26). Rereading the travel diary might be a sort of heterotopology, juxtaposing placetimes, subjectivities, corporealities.

In 2016, Susanne sits by a window ledge on the 18th floor, looking down on a huge logo for Bayer pharmaceuticals to the left, and to the right down on the red roof of the university where she gave a lecture a few days ago, hovering in the smog of Santiago. She reads of Susana’s first day in this city, at street level, her impressions of the Residencial Londres 54, in tiny cobblestoned Calle Londres, by the Iglesia de Santo Domingo.

Rereading the travel diary, Susanne wants to be surprised with lucidity, insight, fluid prose, writing that warrants the desire that propelled the journey but she finds generalities, banalities, and those old beware-of-everyone travelers’ tales.

Friday 4/2/94

On the couch outside my room at the Residencial Londres. It’s lovely—the ambiance of the building, the rooms, furniture. The people are friendly, helpful enough. . . . Now it’s lunchtime. Started talking to the old man from Sweden who’d been vomited on and mugged and his passport, travellers cheques and tickets stolen on the Metro. Pretty scary. Got lots of useful information from him . . . Londres is the most beautiful street of old stone mansions. Close to everything.

Perhaps the problem comes from looking in the text for evidence of something, some subject, experience, emotion, or affective state in what might be called data? Tracing discursive threads leads only to repetition: peso-pinching when a room is slightly cheaper than the last, or a better exchange rate is had than somewhere else. Meeting the same people on more or less the same circuit, following the same guidebooks, repeating the same old refrains:

14/3 Parillada with Brett and Marilyn from Wollongong. Lots of scary stories there—keeping money in underwear or otherwise secreted on one’s person. Being mugged, circled, room being robbed, safe being robbed. Argh. Don’t think about it.

Provoking another slice of placetimemattering, Susanne descends to street level and takes the Metro to Londres. She finds Londres Trente-Ocho (Londres 38) easily—it’s just half a block from Susana’s hotel, on the same side of the street. Unmarked 22 years ago, now the sign says Espacio de Memorias. It is a notorious torture center of the thousands up and down the length of the country, from the first years of Pinochet’s dictatorship. Here 94 people were murdered, 13 women, two pregnant, almost all of them under 30. Some of the cobblestones Susana walked on have been plucked out and replaced with plaques commemorating the names and ages of the dead. How—if even the stones speak now—could Susana have been blind and deaf to these ghosts? From the second floor of Londres 38, Susanne looks straight across into the windows of the hotel across the road. What eyes were averted? What ears heard only the turned up radio and not the sounds it was intended to drown out. Susana had read what she could about the regime that had ended with an election 4 years before she arrived, but Pinochet had still been Commander-in-Chief of the Army. Susanne rereads the diary and though the familiar handwriting draws her closer, the ignorance of what is written pushes her away. Susana writes,

In the Plaza de la Constitucíon there was an army parade this morning, seems like the army band because they had instruments and were playing that upmarket sort of music that army bands play when they’re entertaining, when their role is public relations. Later as we walked back along Agostinos, looking for American Express, I noticed the policeman on the side of the road—traffic or a guard?—cradling a submachine gun.

The Plaza de la Constitucíon fronts La Moneda, the Presidential building from which Allende spoke to his people, broadcast by an underground radio station, as the army approached to kill him. This she also learned at the new Museo de Memoria y Derecho Humanos in another part of the city, where the name Londres 38 was projected on a wall with interviews, or testimonios, from relatives of the dead, and survivors who passed through there. In this section of the article, a particular place—Calle Londres evokes that “[juxtaposition] in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (Foucault, 1986, p. 25)—Susana writing and Susanne reading, both walking on these stones among all those others, as past and present collide, and exceed them. Pulling back from moral judgment that would find the other lacking is difficult to do here, in this place.

My second dip into the travel diary brings me to text that seems quite different in its aesthetics, intention, effects, and ethics, 2 months later, in Amazonas. This journey can’t be replicated and the locations are imprecise, impressionistic rather than exact, densities of colors and atmospheres, moods rather than addresses. Here in the travel diary, the writing cramps tighter and smaller on the pages to squeeze in every detail. Here, as in many parts of the diary away from the cities, the landscape dominates, but these pages are also full of people. Everything moves together, and it is the affective force of the writing and the memory of the body that it calls up that moves Susanne in the present.

Malocas Jungle Lodge 1/4/94

Arrived here wet and cold and had to wait a while shivering for our hammocks to be readied. Then had to move it as it was getting wet from the leaks in the just completed yesterday roof. Then piranha fishing with Anderson and Valdecir and the Germans, paddling through the flooded forest, the river black and acidic . . . . Darker green taller forests behind on solid ground. The huts too will be flooded later in the rainy season. Reflections from the exposed parts of the flooded forest are strong and bright, mirroring their counterparts exactly. The water calm and flat except where fish flew out so fast that they were gone when you saw them.

Walking: humus underfoot, roots exposed, epiphytic plants, bromeliads, buttress rooted trees, lianas and vines, palms with thorns. The canopy lighter here, heliconias, the new leaves of many plants are pink, the roots on the path are crimson. Valdecir showed us how the tree blowpipes are made and explained curare. . . .

Every moment of her week in the flooded forest, walking, paddling, fishing, eating, talking—the guide Valdecir is there beside Susana. Back in Manaus they run off together overnight before she takes a riverboat for a week down the Rio Madeira, Amazonas province, from Manaus to Porto Velho. After pages describing surreal events experienced in a caipirinha haze, she concludes,

6/4 “Ana Maria VII” 7am

. . . The perfect cure is of course to lie on a hammock for days and daydream, looking out at the passing bank of the river—the greener half drowned only a few metres from our side of the boat . . . It was intensely wicked and against all rules of health and also of friendship but I couldn’t have stopped a second of it from happening and won’t regret it.

On board is a small and shifting community that reconfigures as people get on and off at small towns up and down the river. We too are offloaded at Manicore with the other cargo and transferred to another riverboat.

The old Pole—Vladimir—blind and with purple legs is rather a pain in the ass but I feel sorry for him. He’s lived at Tabatinga for 22 years and the way he gropes and carries on I’m sure he’s caused plenty of trouble in his day. Now he gropes along, counting the hammocks, pushing them along, all his possessions tied to his hammock. Paranoid about theft. He lies in his hammock all the time beside me, smoking, muttering, calling people to get water, help him with his eyedrops. . . . After watching how Valdecir operates—unstintingly kind and gentle— and most others here, I’m too ashamed to be otherwise.

8/4 “The Orlandina” Manicore. After the humidity and stillness of yesterday, it has been raining most of the night and outside is still grey and wet . . . No sign of the hordes who were to descend upon us and take our hammock space, according to the old man. Now, there are 13 hammocks strung like fat cocoons geometrically and alternately across the roof—one is string, others all cotton though the embroidered ones look softer than ours. The orange string one has a woman and her son, the blue one, the couple who look like tourists but have too many supplies. All others are single. In mine there’s me, my silk sheet, towel, bum bag and still, my daydreams.

This article has been difficult to write, imagining my way into another self, an “emergent intracorporeal subject of writing” (Davies, this issue) who is somehow this self but in another slice of timespacemattering. My strategies have been first, to bring the object itself into sight, privileging paper, ink, pressure, style, slant, as well as words and sentences. Second, to bring my body in as an animating methodology, walking on the same street, laminating layers of older and newer stories and subjects. Third, to allow the drift of desire to open a current into the present.