My mother took us on trips and, during long hours in the car, on walks to ruins or simply during meals, told us stories. I barely have vivid memories of the trips themselves., but each place is linked to a story. I remember those stories and the emotion they provoked in me as if he had told them to me yesterday..
My father communicated through music and fantastic stories of his life in the Congo. He told us about animals, of malachite mountains, of impossible adventures that, however, It seemed like every day of his life happened there..
When my mother and father were not there to satisfy my hunger for other worlds, I had a home library, full of classics, that helped me to be. The stories that surrounded my daily life had given me everything.
I confessed my literary addiction to a king of an East African kingdom that has survived successive wars, to different colonial regimes and the constant rewriting of their borders, while that day I was browsing through the books in my house in Heidelberg.
"You have some dangerous books," he said..
—What kind of books do you have?? What kind of books does a king read??
"I like travel books," he replied..
A few days before I had asked some of my closest friends a question.: Why, in these times, someone would like to have a travel publishing house?
A few days before I had asked some of my closest friends a question.: Why, in these times, someone would like to have a travel publishing house? He still hadn't answered me until then..
—We must write about travel because it is a literature that records and reveals our shit as humans. I mean: most of the adventure books we have consumed as children are full of colonial ideas, of exotic and functional landscapes, narrated by white people in positions of power. And people like me are secondary characters, decorative or stereotypical.
Then he looked at me, funny.
"Let's play at being colonial travel writers," he proposed.. I start: I'm going to write a book about my stay in Heidelberg and the day I ate at the house of a white writer who has ketchup in the fridge and thinks she's very exotic and interesting..
-Go on.
—And he cooked the worst lamb I have ever tasted in my life..
-Go on.
—But she is my friend and I sit at her table knowing that she will probably write about me, because writing about white people like her bores him greatly.
The lamb thing offended me. I had spent a few hours cooking before he came and had followed the recipe I found on Instagram step by step.
"Your turn," he told me..
Voucher.
—I'm going to write a text about the day a king with lion skin rugs in his palace came to my house, He invented that I had ketchup in the refrigerator without having opened it and inspected my library while he decided which titles he would have my head cut off in his kingdom for..
Serious.
"I wouldn't cut off your head.". "I would take them from you to read them and I would hire you as a smuggler of banned books," he corrected me..
—Do you have banned books in your kingdom??
—Not in my kingdom; in the country, probably. Addition, I wouldn't cut off your head. That's terribly white: guillotine, axe, scaffold, square… no, in. What a nineteenth-century and dull practice.. I would throw you to the crocodiles that live in my pool and then I would make a duster with your hair.
I would throw you to the crocodiles that live in my pool and then I would make a duster with your hair
Then we laughed until my friend's body hurt and he remembered that he was sick., of a non-exotic ailment. He said he hoped he would die laughing and not dazed by morphine in a hospital so far from his homeland..
Then he sat on my couch and told me about his land; He told me that this is how he would like someone to write about him.. He told me about his people and the resistance. He explained his kingdom to me as if it were an alternative to the wild global north..
"You are furious like animals," he accused me..
He also told me that this is why he believes travel literature is necessary today.: because it is a literature that moves slowly, but it's never the same. There are always radically different perspectives on the same place.. That Maybe that's why travel publishers are as unlikely as African kingdoms: beautiful and necessary, although many people do not understand them.
Those words made me smile.
I end the year writing about the importance of travel literature because I will start the new year as part of this publishing house, that has been my home for years. I think of the brave writers we will publish. I think about the people who have invited me to be part of this project, whom I deeply admire.
I think about the journeys we have ahead of us, not to look for anything new, but to disobey the story, to oppose the omniscient voices, to tell what cannot be mapped
I think about the journeys we have ahead of us, not to look for anything new, but to disobey the story, to oppose the omniscient voices, to tell what cannot be mapped. The world doesn't need to be discovered, but maybe retold.
"Looking is also a form of power," the king reminded me the last time we met in cold Europe.. Those who look have more power than kings.
Maybe that's why travel literature is necessary.; It's one of those romantic things that, if they are done well, They can be revolutionary. like love. like friendship. like faith.
One of those romantic things is also believing, each 1 Jan., that everything starts from scratch and that everything will be finen.
"I would give everything for my kingdom," he confessed to me before leaving..
-Me too.
Neither of them talked about borders.
