Lauret Savoy is a geologist of mixed heritage. Her book Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape is a study in finding the stories that wind, water, time, and discomfort have eroded. She begins with a memory of traveling as a child to the Grand Canyon. The beauty of the landscape and the sting of casual racism in the memory of a woman who once was seven years old set the tone for the whole book.
Her specificity and understanding of how to tell the story of the land evoke clear images of places I've never seen. She travels along the border with Mexico and interacts with a man on patrol there. She and a friend tour a plantation in South Carolina and have questions about the absence of enslaved people in the narratives shared about the house. In the desert she goes looking for an army base and finds remnants. Ragged threads and bits of stories put together to work out the layers of her life before, the layers of the people who made her, who came before her, who lived, and left traces of themselves in the land. It takes sharp eyes and ears to pick them out, and she has both.
I grabbed this off the new release shelf the day that it came out. The cover is intense and intriguing, the subtitle is inviting and the author's background in geology was like a door opening up to some unimagined library. I love how scientists write about the world. Their specificity and ability to see the story of a place, of a tree or insect or weather pattern is captivating. And I wasn't disappointed. There is no place in this book for me to put my own memories over any of her landscapes - they are so sharp and clear and rooted that all the imaginative work reading this is in keeping up with her.
And it's hard work. There is loss and erasure. There are vast scopes of time, human and geologic, to cope with. There is the personal damage of racism, the psychic amputation of foiled creativity, the injustice of the forgotten. No landscape can lie about its origins in her gaze. I get poetic talking about the book, and that is how it should be.
This was also the first book I reviewed for WomenArts Quarterly.
People of color travel. People of color write. They photograph, draw, science, music, food, paint, sculpt, plant, shape, sew, etc. So where are the travel books? The answer is too obvious to warrant the question, and yet - we ask.
There are growing movements of people working to encourage change in the travel industry and in the world. Here are a few:
Nomadness Travel Tribe
TravelNoire
Vagrant Anonymous - in particular Decolonizing Travel
Bani Amor - also on twitter
#40days40books list
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