Tourist. It’s a word I hate. It divides people, simplifies them, prejudges motives and behaviour, and trivialises what are often the greatest experiences and most sincere passions in our lives.
The troubled expatriates in Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky pride themselves on being “travellers”, not “tourists”. In reality, we are all a bit of both. I was definitely a tourist by Bowles’ standards when I recently visited Marrakech. But we spent a lot of the time looking at masterpieces of Islamic art, including the gorgeously intricate decorations of the Ben-Youssef Madrasa and the Minba from the Kutubiyya mosque in the El Badi palace. So, yeah, tourism if you insist, but also an education.
Now, once again an attack on a unique site of world culture is being described as an attack on “tourists”. Luxor in Egypt is a “tourist city”, according to the Guardian. This phenomenal ancient creation is “one of Egypt’s most popular tourist sites”.
Wait a minute. Don’t you think some visitors to Luxor may be Egyptologists, or lovers of antiquity, or simply people with a passion for history and beauty?
Is it not possible that some visitors to this sublime place may even be Egyptians?
Mercifully, this terrorist attack seems to have been less lethal than the recent massacre at the Bardo museum in Tunisia. That, too, was reported as an attack on a “tourist attraction”. So the slain have gone down in history as “tourists” – an incredibly dismissive word for people who were there to look at ancient Roman mosaics. Why not “lovers of antiquity”?
In Tunisia, thousands of people marched to the stricken museum to protest against terrorism. They were showing solidarity with the murdered “tourists” – or, rather, with fellow human beings.
The casual use of the term “tourism” disturbs me because it mirrors how terrorists themselves see places such as Luxor and the Bardo national museum. “Tourists” are – the stereotype goes – affluent, superficial westerners who can afford to travel for mere diversion without caring much about the places they visit.
But “tourist attractions” are not just full of shallow westerners taking selfies. Visiting the vast, eerie ruins of the El Badi palace in Morocco, we shared its grandeur with hundreds of joyous local school kids. This is as much a place for local people as for “tourists”. And even the “tourists” don’t necessarily come out of mere selfishness. We might actually be trying to expand our horizons.
Source from http://www.theguardian.com/
