Page - 145 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Birgit Englert | On the (Im)possibility of Writing a Travelogue 145 In illustrating my drawings or being illustrated by them, the passages in this book attempt to cap- ture sensorial memories — selected of course, and slightly rationalized — of that first experience of Ethiopia: notes based on the facsimile pages, letters and diary entries, and translated and adapted transcriptions of recorded interviews. By raising the possibility of conceiving of the written passages in his book as illustrations of his drawings, Ramos explicitly underscores the equality of written text and sketches and the non-hierarchic relation between the two main elements of his travelogue. Both text and sketches are themselves highly heterogeneous, however; in the above quote, the transgeneric nature of Ramos’s text is clearly addressed. But the sketches can also be seen as transgeneric in the sense that text is not merely present as a part of the image in the more narrow sense. As I will show below, annotations and comments ‘outside’ the image are also a constitutive part of the sketch as they appear in the Portuguese versions. In the English version, however, Ramos deleted much of the text in the sketches, an aspect that I will take up again below. Let us now turn to how the relation between written text and the visual actually plays out. Relations between written text and sketches The written text in the first part of the book, titled ‘An Ethiopian Travelogue’, is presented in the form of diary entries, i.e. the subchapters are headed by a certain location and date. This section is only partially based on Ramos’s actual travel diary, though. The entries are put in chronological order, with the exception of the first, which is dated 9 June (1999), dedicated to the day Ramos returned to Lisbon. His friends’ reactions upon his return and the mismatch between their expectations and the author’s experiences brings up, right from the start, the issue of how to deal with representations of Africa, which pervades the book as a whole: My audience implicitly assumes that the Ethiopia from which I have just returned is still the same Upper Ethiopia that was described by Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century. In their ques- tions I sense the fuzzy shadow of the Christian emperor “whom we call Prester John” and the mar- tyred spirit of Cristóvão da Gama, which still seem to pervade Portuguese ideas about that remote country, though now partly overwritten in the palimpsest of memory by the extreme poverty and starvation with which Western television networks daubed Ethiopia while it was immersed in a horrific civil war during the 1980s. (Ramos 2018: 29) The entry ends with the remark: ‘My trip to Ethiopia was never intended as a search for fanta- sies of the European mind. But they tormented me when I returned home’ (Ramos 2018: 31). By contrasting his audience in Lisbon’s expectations with his own intentions, Ramos posi- tions himself from the start as an author who is unwilling to fulfil his readers’ expectations, both with regard to what he says about Ethiopia and with regard to the form that travelogues are expected to take. This certainly applies to the role played by the sketches but also to the focus of the text — to Ramos’s taking his time ‘to arrive’ in Ethiopia. In the first entries of the travelogue, it seems that while Ramos is physically present in Ethiopia, his mind has not yet arrived; he is not actually writing about Ethiopia but using the country as a space from which to remember and reflect on other journeys and other literature. He writes that travelling is a process that opens one’s eyes, that allows one to begin to see — a metaphor that fits well with his own process of actually arriving in Ethiopia (cf. Ramos 2018: 39).