travel writing as a field of research 

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Travellers usually write about their experiences, producing a great variety of texts: travel diaries and memories, descriptions of the foreign lands, as well as narrations of their inward journeys that coincided with physical dislocation. Travel as in interrogation of identity and changes of self-perception and awareness that it brings about are important aspects of transcultural studies. One of topics that I studied more specifically is the Oriental journey since Romanticism to our times; I delved in biographies of explorers and converts keen to penetrate into the empty heart of the Desert. Some of them actually did it, and I mused on the experience of hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) performed by Europeans. Others could only dream about the inaccessible heart of Arabia; such was the case of the Polish adventurer Wacław Rzewuski and the romantic poet, Juliusz Słowacki, who contributed greatly to his legend. 

essays on the journeys of Europeans to the Orient

“Stawanie się Orientem. Wyprawy Europejczyków do Mekki jako doświadczenie transkulturowe późnej epoki kolonialnej” [“Becoming the Orient. European travels to Mecca as a transcultural experience of the late colonial period”], Litteraria Copernicana, no 1(29)/2019, p. 111-119. ISSN 1899-315X 
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/1 0.12775/LC.2019.009 
http://apcz.umk.pl/czasopisma/index.php/LC/article/view/LC.2019.009

The aim of this paper is to reflect on the European hajj (travel to Mecca) as a transcultural experience in the context of the late colonial period. The interpretation of the case of Lawrence of Arabia, proposed in the Orientalism by Edward Said, is taken for the starting point. This classical diagnosis is confronted with the narrations speaking about the travel into the heart of Arabia as a spiritual journey, read as a testimony of a progressive overcoming of the orientalization as a condition limiting, in the first place, the Western subject, unable of experiencing fully the orientalized reality. After the exploration of Richard Burton, the figures of the converts from the first half of the 20th century, such as Harry St. John Bridger Philby, Evelyn Cobbold and Muhammad Asad gradually achieve a deepened transcultural experience on the road to Mecca. ​

​​"Friendships of the Desert. The Europeans in Arabia", De Amicitia. Transdisciplinary Studies in Friendship, Katarzyna Marciniak, Elżbieta Olechowska (eds.), Warsaw, Faculty of „Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw, 2016, p. 189-199. ISBN 978-83-63636-58-6
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As an autobiographical work that invites an immediate and simple-minded reading, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom actually brings about several quite convincing images of friendship, including the relationship between the author and Auda Abu-Tayi. Yet the requirements of post-colonial analysis are particularly severe on such a point. Following their school of suspicion, A. Clare Brandabur and Nasser al-Hassan Athamneh comment: “Indeed the self/other relationship common to all autobiography is complicated in the imperial model by the disparity of power, which is further distorted by what Fanon called the imperialist's requirement not merely for submission, but, perversely, for love from the subordinate. The Seven Pillars adds the ultimate twist to this relationship: an Oriental expert who comes to see himself as inferior to those he had presumed to dominate. In Lawrence's admission that he saw in himself no such heroism as that of Auda Abu-Tayi, we have essentially Kipling's less elegant "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din."”
Gunga Din, if any one still cares to remember, was a Bhishti, an Indian water-bearer who saves the white soldier's life in Kipling's poem written in 1892. As Gunga Din is shot and killed, the Englishman regrets the abuses committed against him and recognizes his superior humanity revealed in the act of sacrificing his own life to save the other. Nonetheless, neither the sacrifice nor the regret contributes to modify the general framework of colonial relations. Meanwhile, the post-colonial way of deconstructing the relations of power and dominance, schematic as it may be, works for most contexts. Yet I've always had a persistent impression that the Arabs, especially those uncolonised Arabs of the central Arabia, the “pure” ones, constituted an exemption in the mental framework of the colonial era. They were something else, nobler, more admirable, not in the humble sacrifice of the water-bearer saving the life of the white soldier, but in quite a different, yet specific meaning: perhaps even placed in the position of a secret, non-revealed super-ego of the Western man. In any case, potential friends among colonial servants.

international journals in travel writing

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