Thanksgiving

Each week I am going to post a few notable quotes from things I'm reading.


"Here 'the Frankincense country, mountainous and forbidding, wrapped in thick clouds and fog, yields frankincense from the trees,' and Arab camelmen waited under the dust of their camps as they do now, and in their bales, together with the incense of Arabia and Africa, tied pearls and muslins from Ceylon and silks from China, Malacca tortoiseshell and spikenard from the Ganges, Himalayan cinnamon leaves, called Malabathrum,... And from India, diamonds and sapphires, ivory and cotton, indigo, lapis lazuli, and cinnamon and pepper above all. And dates and wine, gold and slaves from the Persian Gulf; and from the eastern coast of Africa, long subject to Arabian traders, frankincense, gold, and myrrh, ivory and ostrich feathers and oil."
-Jane Fletcher Geniesse from the introduction to The Southern Gates of Arabia: A Journey in the Hadhramaut, by Freya Stark in 1936

"We, on this our first day, having left the region of Cana, travelled eastward still tossing violently, and looked out through the afternoon on the volcanic fringes of teh Sachalitic bay.... No grimmer coast can be imagined. The mountains are sharp--naked apparently as when they hissed in black coils from the darkness of earth, lonely and hard as death, and with a derelict and twisted beauty. Their cliff faces press one behind the other towards the sea, whose luminous moving waves seemed to repeat in gentler and more living form he chaos of thier desolate chasms and ridges."
-Freya Stark, The Southern Gates of Arabia: A Journey in the Hadhramaut

These quotes capture a pure sense of bounty, awe, and terror from a journey during a time when images of the east were unseen unless travelled to-- months sick at sea by compass and setting sun. In this time, bountiful treasures specific to exotic regions were untasted, unsmelled, untouched unless by arduous travel or trade conducted by the worn hoof of a camel and the sweat under a turban under the sun through the desert. The Incense Road-- the trade routes explored in this book-- involves months away from families and tribes to share the unique treasures of one's land and receive the legendary bounty from another. Geniesse, in her list of goods traded from their mother land, evokes the preciousness of these products.

In my culture and time, cinnamon, oils, dates, wine, pepper, frankincense, and myrrh line a shelf within a few feet of each other, a five minute drive from my house. These treasures, through the fast-paced commoditization of our economy and technology, are lost on me daily as I whiz past them looking for a specific brand of wheat flour. I expect to find anything I can imagine within a 20 mile radius of my home. I expect to afford it without much sacrifice of time or resources. I don't think about where it came from, how cinnamon is harvested, what myrrh really is.

In her travel essay, Freya Stark retraces the steps of a historical trade route: "But no one knows how long before them (Hippalus, a Greek who led Mediterranean commerce across the Indian Ocean in 45 CE), in what morning light of history this trade began, nor when Dravidian boats first set their single sail, and with high carved stern and rudder at their quarter, and sun and wind behind them in the favourable season, first crossed the Indian Ocean and dumped their cargoes on its Arabian shore" (Geniesse, 5). She encounter the "incensed" Hadhramaut (present day Yemen) in 1936 (just 75 years ago). Her delicious descriptions are full of revelry, awe, wonder, and enlightenment. I appreciate how a place may seem so fully new, terrifying, and exotic to someone. I am able to feast my eyes upon images of Arabia, China, the rainforest, the Arctic, at any time from the Internet. I see without care or want the images of those who have gone before me. As I travel, I must seek to extract the present uniqueness of a place from its cultural architecture like the "arabs tap their trees with small incisions cut into the bark..." (Stark 11). I soak in Starks entranced account of meeting a wholly new culture and place.

In just 75 years "Westernization" has seemingly eroded the sharp contrasts of place to place, culture to culture, creating a world more familiar than foreign. Or perhaps technologies like the Internet have allowed intimate communication between separate peoples, which now illuminates the shared human experience and commonalities rather than assimilating all peoples to one identity. Whatever the cause and effects of time and technology and economy, what we share with the foreign comforts me, and how we differ enchants me.

Geniesse captures the bounty and beauty of precious commodities and allows me to see these goods as the ancient traders may have-- a means to live, the pride of one's country, a mysterious gift from the gods. Starks description of landing along the Arabic coastline is exhilarating in its sense of newness and mystery.

I think even today, with the whole world one flight away, this sense of wonder can be achieved. Perhaps it takes retracing the ancient trade routes-- the incense road-- and imagining a world where coming upon a group of people with different skin, different language, different values and customs was wholly new and completely foreign. Perhaps it takes valuing the small jar of cinnamon for its miracle of being harvested from the bark of a tree, and appreciating its ability to enhance our sense of taste and smell and all its benefits therein. With this book, I discover the value of reading a primary source recounting terrific travels to "new" lands as they were. History comes alive in the present and exists just as terrifying as if it was now, and now as if it was.