Unseen Text: Oaxaca Journal

Text Type: Diary – Travel Writing

Guiding Question: Comment on the ways this passage suggests travel can lead to personal change and discovery.

Travel writing is a rich and varied category of writing with fluid genre boundaries. Extracts could range from an informative guidebook entry, to an online review advising people whether or not to take a particular trip, to a descriptive passage helping you visualise a faraway place, or an advert persuading you to sign up to a tour… and these are just a few of the possibilities that spring to mind. The extract below is a piece of travel writing in the form of a journal or diary. One of the challenges of being given such a rich passage is deciding what to write about – remember, after you plan you’ll only have an hour or so to write your analysis. Before you read the sample response, first work with the text and guiding question. Plan a series of points that you would want to develop into your own answer. Then read the response that follows. Which points would you also have written about? If you chose to write about different aspects of the text, or if your interpretation of the narrator is different, you shouldn’t think you have the ‘wrong ideas.’ While examiners may have some notion of what to expect in a good response, they are encouraged to appreciate a wide variety of possible ideas; therefore, alternative approaches can be equally valid.

Friday

I am on my way to Oaxaca to meet up with some botanical friends for a fern foray, looking forward to a week away from New York’s icy winter. The plane itself—an AeroMexico flight—has an atmosphere quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen. We are scarcely off the ground before everyone gets up—chatting in the aisles, opening bags of food, breast-feeding babies—an instant social scene, like a Mexican café or market. One is already in Mexico as soon as one boards. The seat-belt signs are still on, but nobody pays any attention to them. I have had a little of this feeling on Spanish and Italian planes, but it is far more marked here: this instant fiesta, this sunny laughing atmosphere all round me. How crucial it is to see other cultures, to see how special, how local they are, how un-universal one’s own is. What a rigid, joyless atmosphere there is, in contrast, on most North American flights. I begin to think I will enjoy this visit. So little enjoyment, in a sense, is “permitted” these days—and yet, surely, life should be enjoyed?
 
My neighbor, a jolly businessman from Chiapas, wishes me “Bon appetit!” then the Spanish version of this, “¡Buen provecho!” when the meal comes. I cannot read anything on the menu, so I say yes to what I am first offered—a mistake, for it turns out to be an empanada whereas I wanted the chicken or fish. My shyness, my inability to speak other languages, alas, is a problem. I dislike the empanada, but eat some as part of my acculturation.
  
Observing that I said yes when asked about the empanada, obviously having no idea what it was, and then as obviously disliking it when it came, my neighbor has again lent me his guidebook, suggesting that I look at the bilingual glossary of Mexican foods and the illustrations that go with this. I should be careful, for example, to distinguish between atún and tuna, for the Spanish word tuna does not denote tuna fish, but the fruit of a prickly pear. Otherwise I will keep getting fruit when I want fish.
 
Finding a section in the guidebook on plants, I ask him about Mala mujer, bad woman, a dangerous-looking tree with nettlelike stinging hairs. He tells me that youths in small-town dancing halls throw branches of it around to get the girls, everyone, scratching. This is something between a joke and a crime.
 
“Welcome to Mexico!” my companion says as we touch down, adding, “You will find much that is unusual and of great interest.” As the plane draws to a halt he gives me his card. “Phone me,” he says, “if there is any way I can be of help while you are visiting our country.” I am very touched by the sweetness and courtesy of this man. Is this a characteristic Latin American courtesy? A personal one? Or just the sort of brief encounter which happens on trains and planes?
 
In the airport we meet up with a huge man, wearing a plaid shirt, a straw hat and suspenders, just in from Atlanta. He introduces himself—David Emory—and his wife, Sally. He was at college with John Mickel (our mutual friend, who has organized this trip), he tells me, back in ’52, at Oberlin. John was an undergrad then, David a grad student. He was the one who turned John onto ferns. I confess that, even more than ferns, my own preference is for the so-called fern allies: clubmosses (Lycopodium), horsetails (Equisetum), spike mosses (Selaginella), whisk ferns (Psilotum). There would be plenty of those: A new species of lycopodium was discovered on the last Oaxaca trip in 1990, and there are many species of selaginella; one, the “resurrection fern,” is to be seen in the market, a flattened, seemingly dead rosette of dull green which comes to startling life as soon as it rains. And there are three equisetums in Oaxaca, he adds, including one of the largest in the world. “But psilotum,” I say eagerly, “what about psilotum?” Psilotum, too, he says— two species, no less.
 
Even as a child, I loved the primitive horsetails and clubmosses, for they were the ancestors from which all higher plants had come. Outside the Natural History Museum (in London, where I grew up) there was a fossil garden, with the fossilized trunks and roots of giant clubmosses and horsetails, and inside were dioramas reconstructing what the ancient forests of the Paleozoic might have looked like, with giant horsetail trees a hundred feet high. One of my aunts had shown me modern horsetails (only two feet high) in the forests of Cheshire, with their stiff, jointed stems, their knobby little cones on top. She had shown me tiny clubmosses and selaginellas, too, but she could not show me the most primitive of all, for psilotum does not grow in England. Plants resembling it—psilophytes—were the pioneers, the first land plants to develop a vascular system for transporting water through their stems, enabling them to stake a claim to the solid earth 400 million years ago, and paving the way for everything else. Psilotum, though sometimes called whisk fern, was not really a fern at all, for it had no proper roots or fronds, just an undifferentiated forking green stem, little thicker than a pencil lead.

But despite its humble appearance, it was one of my favorites, and one day, I had promised myself, I would see it in the wild.

–Taken from Oaxaca Journal by Oliver Sacks, published in 2012

Sample Response:

The given text is a diary written by Oliver Sacks recounting his journey to study ferns in Oaxaca, a Mexican town. The passage gives insight into the writer’s own travel experience, his feelings of culture clash, and his difficulty coping with the atmosphere on an unusually noisy plane. However, through introspection and the help of a symbolic guide figure, the passage reveals how embracing the challenge of travel ultimately leads to personal transformation and the achievement of personal goals.

Through highlighting his perspective as an outsider, the writer conveys the sense that he is initially challenged by the culture clash of his experience. For example, he describes the scene on the plane as ‘quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen.’ He lists unexpected sights and sounds (‘chatting in aisles, opening bags of food, breast-feeding babies…’) in a way that makes the plane seem chaotic. His use of sensory imagery includes noise words like ‘chatting’ and ‘laughing’, conveying the sense that he is overwhelmed; this impression is heightened by similes describing the atmosphere ‘like a Mexican café or market place’, which evokes more sounds of shouting, clattering, and noise. At one point the writer uses a metaphor, ‘this instant fiesta’, to suggest the atmosphere on the plane (which is conventionally quiet and sedate) is like a party! Overall, the writer uses the outsider’s perspective to depict himself as a ‘fish out of water’, unused to and surprised by the energy and noise of the different people around him and challenged by the ‘clash of cultures’ he’s encountering.

However, through introspection, the writer conveys how stepping out of one’s own cultural comfort zone can be a transformative experience. Before long, his discomfort is replaced by the realisation that he’s enjoying the journey. He explicitly compares the warmth and vibrancy of the Mexican plane with the sterility of his ordinary life. He calls the atmosphere on North American flights ‘rigid’ and ‘joyless’ and places the word ‘permitted’ in inverted commas, to suggest the way his normal life is guided by rules and regulations. He also states that he’s looking forward to ‘a week away from New York’s icy winter’: therefore, ‘warm’ and ‘cold’ become symbolic of the different attitudes of Americans and Mexicans towards life. For example, the word ‘sunny’ suggests that the laughter on the plane somewhat brightens his life. He ends the first paragraph with a question: ‘surely life should be enjoyed?’ which implies a newfound desire to escape his ordinary, dull routine. Therefore, through introspection, the writer suggests how travel can lead to personal realisations and the transformation of one’s point of view.

While introspection prompts change from the inside, the passage also implies that travellers might need external help to succeed in their journeys. For this reason, the extract depicts a symbolic ‘guide’, a ‘businessman from Chiapas’ who helps the narrator navigate an unfamiliar culture in a foreign language and sets him on the right path for his journey. The businessman offers the narrator a guidebook with a ‘bilingual glossary’ to help him, equipping him with an aid he needs to succeed. Moreover, despite coming from different cultures, the two easily find common ground through their mutual interest in plants. The businessman tells him about a plant called ‘Mala mujer’ which ‘youths in small-town dancing halls throw… to get the girls, everyone, scratching.’ This anecdote suggests how mutual interests cross cultural barriers, prompting the realisation that people may not be as dissimilar as they first appear. Therefore, the businessman from Chiapas not only helps the narrator navigate the challenges of travel, but he connects him with the knowledge that he has been seeking all along, directly contributing to the discovery of an unusual fern that he had always wanted to see in the wild.

In conclusion, the extract demonstrates how travel can be transformative by changing the perspective of the narrator from ‘fish out of water’ to ‘comfortable traveller’. Nowhere is this clearer than in the change in tone after the plane lands. Whereas before he was unconfident, his evident comfort with and enthusiasm for plants and botany represents discovery and achievement of a goal. Finally, when he describes a selaginella as ‘flattened, seemingly dead rosette of dull green which comes to sparkling life as soon as it rains’ the reader can understand the symbolism of the narrator’s own transformation mirrored in this particular species of fern.