Travel
is being, getting, going at great distance, from the comfort of your mother’s
womb to the loneliness of remote lands where everything is anew.
A
sailor, a documentarian, a hippy, a photographer, a businessman, an adventurer,
a nomad, a passionate lover running away from the banality of a prearranged
comfortable life in the suburbs; for them, there is no place called return.
Home
becomes a distant memory, it turns into an abstract past reality to be
preserved only by guilt if any loved one left behind. The traveler knows no
home, no reassurance, no pampering – only exploration and discovery.
Tourism
dislocates; it seduces, it bribes, it coerces violently. It dispossesses ceaselessly as a necessary means for
its endless reproduction.
It
automatically transcribes Greece as tzatziki, Italy as Pizza, Paris as
Disneyland and Thailand as sex; it once had the arrogance to present Africa as
a place where you solely hunt and kill wild beasts.
Thus,
tourism steals and deprives people’s past; it eliminates memory and depth,
culture and taste, it falsifies reality once perceived as a collective civilizational
effort to an economic transaction between two partners in crime.
Tourism
cannot, and should not, be abolished. It should be delegitimized, ridiculed,
discouraged, mocked; it should be unwired from the norms of our imagination.
False
(mass touristic) consciousness must generate guilt in the global north and feelings
of shame in the global south.
And
that would be the beginning of the end for it.
