Faith Adiele is a travel memoirist and founder of the nation’s only writing workshop for travelers of color. Meeting Faith, her account of becoming Thailand’s first Black Buddhist Nun, won the PEN Open Book Award. She is a Senior Editor for Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel and co-editor of Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology. Her essays have appeared in travel anthologies, including The Best Women’s Travel Writing, for which she penned the 2009 introduction. The PBS documentary My Journey Home tracks her travels to Nigeria to find her father and siblings.
How did you get started traveling?
I was born into it! My parents met at college in the Pacific Northwest. My mother is the daughter of Finnish and Swedish immigrants. My late father was an international student preparing for Nigerian independence. After my father returned home, my grandfather threw my pregnant mom out. I was born in a home for unwed mothers, which threw my mom out for being radical. So we started traveling —across town, back to her university, down to California, eventually up to my grandparents’ farm in Washington State. When I was a kid obsessed with living museums, my mom and I crisscrossed the USA by train (still my favorite mode of travel). As a teenager, I did exchange and study abroad programs—a week in Mexico, a year in Thailand—anything to get out of rural Washington!
How did you get started writing?
My mom claims I started writing at age two-and-a-half. She assumed I’d become a penniless poet, which was fine by her. I published my first story at age fifteen but stopped writing at college. Traumatized by my experiences there, I flunked out and fled back to Thailand. I started keeping a journal in Southeast Asia, so travel is how I learned to write again.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
Someone sent me a call for a proposed anthology of black women’s journals. I submitted twice, both times receiving an encouraging rejection with a request to send more. The only journals I had left were those from my time as a Buddhist nun in Thailand. I didn’t think anyone would be interested in such an esoteric experience, but the editor, Patricia Bell-Scott, loved them. W.W. Norton & Sons picked up the anthology, and Ms. Magazine featured my piece and photo. I started to receive fan mail, which made me question the purpose of personal narrative. What could I —and readers—gain sharing my journey? I started to write about my breakdown and moving into the Thai forest. Folks said my plan to include the journal entries in the book’s margins was nuts, but Norton ended up buying the manuscript in auction, and PEN awarded Meeting Faith best memoir of the year.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
I’m an introvert without journalistic training. If the setting is gorgeous or the situation unusual, I just soak it up, reluctant to check facts and follow the story.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
I’m s-l-o-w. As a travel memoirist (not to mention a dreamy Pisces!), it takes me a l-o-n-g time to figure out what I want to say about a place and longer even to write. By then, I’m someplace else or working on something else. Or there’s been a coup.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
Other than being slow, it’s being brown. Despite the fact that folks of color are the most traveled —and most visited— demographic on the planet, that we’re witnessing a global Black Travel Movement on social media, and that Black Americans alone spend $40 billion dollars annually on travel, the traditional travel writing industry is still segregated. That means a minority of white leisure travelers from the USA, Europe and Australia define the genre (and by extension, the world). It’s a battle being a brown woman who conceptualizes travel differently, trying to challenge Western privilege and the colonial gaze and imperialist language in the tropes the travel industry recycles.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
Hell, yeah (clearly I should have studied Vagabonding better)! I grew up poor; I’m a Bad Buddhist with too many material needs; I don’t have a financial safety net. So I teach full-time and then blow much of whatever I’m able to save, on travel.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
For figuring out how (not) to travel, I return to A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid’s angrily brilliant anti-travel essay, and Alain de Botton’s sensory meditation on The Art of Travel.
Five books that helped me prepare for or process my trips to Nigeria to find my father and siblings include the hilarious Transwonderland by Noo Saro-Wiwa, possibly the first African travelogue by an African woman; Elaine R. Lee’s groundbreaking anthology, Go Girl!: The Black Woman’s Book of Travel & Adventure, which includes one of my first travel stories; two Black American women’s pilgrimages to Ghana, the classic All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes by Maya Angelou and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route by Saidiya Hartman; and Dionne Brand’s multi-genre meditation on Africa, the Caribbean and Canada, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging.
Four books that helped me write about living in Southeast Asia include Michael Ondaatje’s multiracial, multi-genre Running in the Family, the book that inspired me to become a creative nonfiction writer; Migritude, Shailja Patel’s brilliant mélange of family history, post-colonial politics, performance and migrant journeys; Rudolph Wurlitzer’s Buddhist grief pilgrimage Hard Travel to Sacred Places; and Andrew X. Pham’s Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape & Memory of Vietnam, which interweaves his family’s escape from Vietnam with his own return journey by bicycle.
Platforms like On She Goes and Panorama, where I have a column, are really redefining the genre. My former student and teaching assistant. Bani Amor is a major force in decolonizing and queering travel writing culture, and also runs an online POC Travel Book Club. I’m proud of the many stars of the Black Travel Movement like Oneika Raymond and my friends and sister Nigerians, photographer Lola Akinmade Åkerström and blogger Gloria Atanmo.
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
Think about the power of travel writing —it’s a fantastic opportunity and a real responsibility. I routinely see the industry celebrating work that recycles thoughtless Heart of Darkness and Out of Africa tropes, that uses exotifying Orientalist terms, that posits transactional relationships as true cross-cultural engagement. Hell, that clearly didn’t bother to do basic fact-checking. If you’re going to write about people who don’t look like you, read people who don’t look like you. Read travelers from the global south. We’re experiencing an amazing renaissance in African literature right now, so why am I finding lists called” Books to Read Before Your African Safari” that don’t include a single African author? Use travel writing to be part of the solution.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
I mean, c’mon—it’s travel plus writing! I love my travel self, I love the kindness of strangers on the road and I love the challenge of trying to capture something so ephemeral on the page. If I do it right —if I research like an historian, investigate like a journalist, question like an essayist, understand like a sociologist, paint character and place like a novelist, tell story like a griot, craft metaphor like a poet, making meaning like a memoirist— it has the potential to change someone’s understanding of the world. And I’m changed too.
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