The Necessity of Travel

By Pico Iyer

The images, of course, will not go away: the planes exploding in flames, bodies falling through the air. And in their wake, more mundane but still disquieting pictures--endless lines in the airports, armed guards watching as shoeless innocents empty their pockets (while across the world people clamor for America's humiliation). To many of us, as the peak vacation season draws near, travel may seem a less appealing prospect than it has ever been.

And yet, I would argue, travel has never been so urgent, even necessary, as it is today. To at least a small extent, the horrors of last fall seem to have arisen from people knowing dangerously little about the far side of the world: Islamic radicals tilting against an America they associate only with its economic and political might (or the pop-cultural blast of its images) and cruelly ignoring the human reality that is the true America; and, later on, Washington responding through a President who had seldom been abroad, and a CIA that by some accounts did not have a single Pashtu speaker in Afghanistan. Caught in the middle, as ever, were those ordinary, open-minded souls who might have harbored subtler and more enlightened thoughts about what Islam means, and America.

Travel is how we put a face and a voice to the Other and step a little beyond our secondhand images of the alien. It is, in fact, how we learn about the world and come to terms (and sometimes peace) with it. All the information in the world on our flashing or high-definition screens cannot begin to convey the feel and smell, the human truth, of another culture. And all of us are lucky enough to live at a time when the far corners of the world are more accessible physically than ever before. The minute I got off the plane in Yemen last summer, I could see how everything I thought I knew about that country was wrong and how far most of its people lived emotionally from, say, the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Southern Yemen. Likewise, the minute a Yemeni sets foot in New York City, she sees it as quite different from the lawless jungle of gun-toting druglords and prostitutes she may have imagined. Most people in the developing world, though, do not have the opportunity or resources to come and see us. It is therefore up to us--at least those of us with the time and money--to go and see them.

The principle applies, of course, even if we go no farther than Washington or the Lebanese restaurant on the other side of town; we have the chance at any moment to walk outside our prejudices. Those who stay home may think the outside world is dangerous (and the more they stay home, the more dangerous it will seem). Yet as soon as we travel, we are reminded that, for example, during the 1980s when war was tearing apart Beirut, San Salvador and Kabul, Washington had a higher murder rate than any of them. Last year, when I took my 70-year-old mother on holiday to Syria, she quickly saw that its people were much friendlier than the country's dictatorship suggested, that the roads were clean and that (for a visitor in any case) life was in most respects as safe as in the affluent California town where she lives. Insofar as such places are difficult, traveling abroad allows us to appreciate better all the opportunities and freedoms of home that we otherwise take for granted.

In the wake of the 9/11 violence, most Americans were wise enough to realize that the terrorist atrocities had nothing to do with Hamid, in his skullcap, who runs the grocery store around the corner, while all the Muslims I knew grieved as if the losses were their own. Yet many people wondered why America had provoked such animosity. Traveling to Bolivia, Vietnam, India and many other countries in the months since the attacks, I have been sobered to see the words U.S. OUT OF AFGHANISTAN! scrawled across the walls of an elegant colonial building in the Andes (while a shoeshine boy down the street told me he longed to come to America to help fight terrorists). In many closed or impoverished countries, meeting Americans is the only way the people can learn that America is not the "axis of evil"--a George W. Bush phrase that some foreigners have turned back on the U.S.

In some ways, Sept. 11 was a harrowing reminder of how truly we all live in the same neighborhood now, even if the differences and distances between us remain as great as ever. In any neighborhood, it is the people who keep their doors locked and their curtains drawn who are the truly menacing ones. One of the difficult things about the events of last fall was how powerless most people felt as they watched the destruction onscreen. Many of us, in fact, do have the power, however small, to take the first step toward real communication--by going to Beijing, or Mexico City, or, best of all, Damascus.