The University of Chicago Press, 2009
Anyone fortunate enough to have spent time living within an unfamiliar culture knows the exhilaration that comes with hearing a new language, encountering remarkable landscapes and architecture, discovering new foods and flavors, and visiting sidewalk stands adorned with unfamiliar fruits and vegetables.
That was my experience, certainly, spending one month in San Miguel de Allende, a colonial town far up in Mexico’s mountainous bajío region. The narrow sidewalks – precarious in daylight, treacherous at night – led me into a world full of roaming donkeys, urban roosters, makeshift taco stands, and elderly Mestizo women scraping the spines from nopales, or prickly pear cactus. This is so new, so different, so essential, I told myself, that it must be somehow wonderful. Charming, at the least.
It was wonderful, yes, but I was also guilty of exoticization. Because I had not seen it before, I imagined it to be out of the ordinary, but of course it was not. This was real life. This was not an experience designed just for me, the lucky American tourist: this was someone’s neighborhood, someone’s existence.
Here, precisely, is where most travel writing goes bad – the allure of the “new,” the “simple peasant,” the charming (but impoverished) streetscape. And this is where Philip Graham, author of The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon, shows us how to write honestly and well about an unfamiliar culture.
Based on a series of dispatches originally appearing in McSweeney’s online magazine, The Moon, Come to Earth is strikingly honest (“I do and I don’t feel at home here. I oscillate between comfort and unease”), written like a poem, and full of the poignant details one only notices when embedded in a new culture, not just passing through.
Consider one sentence:
When I’m walking its stone-cobbled streets, catching glimpses here and there of the bordering Tejo River, or taking in, from a vista on one of the city’s hills, the gloriously staggered topography of the white buildings and their salmon-colored tile roofs, I feel that I am also traveling some interior landscape, that those streets are leading to a place inside myself I haven’t located.
Graham’s book is that story: one man’s search inside of himself, and how the experience of living one year in Lisbon (bringing with him all of the challenges of parenting and married life) transformed that exploration.
The Moon, Come to Earth should be required reading for all those about to travel abroad, especially if they plan to pack along pen and paper.
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Dinty W. Moore wishes to return to Florence.