Though I have yet to encounter him in the real world, I can imagine a simple-minded sort of localist who condemns “travelers.” He’s a front porch fundamentalist, if you will. He takes his localism literally, and he makes it a list of rules, which forbid him from leaving his vicinity and define that vicinity with mathematical precision. He completes an exhaustive numerological study of the complete works of Wendell Berry, and concludes that no one should travel more than 29.6 miles from home. He wonders what “localism” means if it does not mean “not traveling.”
His is a useless localism, to be sure. But surely his question isn’t useless. What does localism mean if it doesn’t literally mean “not traveling”? Can localists also be travelers, or is the localist sensibility necessarily prejudiced against what quite a few books praise as the noble “art of travel”?
When I was a college sophomore I spent a semester abroad in the Middle East. It was quite a leap. I grew up on a family farm in Indiana. Now I was living in a Cairo apartment, hitchhiking to desert monasteries, talking politics with Palestinians and Israelis. It was the proverbial life-changing experience, and after graduating I wanted more. I went backpacking in Europe, then I spent a couple of years in Toronto. After that, nearly four years in South Korea (with lots of trips to other countries in the region), followed by a random move to Portland (Oregon), where I lived for two years before finally “settling down” to a PhD (in Boston). And I call myself a “localist.”
The intern for that study abroad program was a graduate student named Joel Carillet. After our semester ended, we all went home; but Joel kept traveling, and in twenty-three years he hasn’t stopped. I’ve traveled; Joel is a traveler. While he has a kind of “home base” in Tennessee, he doesn’t have a permanent home. He lives everywhere, making his modest living as a photographer. And yet—strange to say—I can think of few people with a more localist sensibility.
I’ve stayed in touch with Joel over the years. A few years ago he came to Dubuque to give a lecture for our honors program. We exhibited some of his photographs, a collection he titled “And Who Is My Neighbor?” The pictures come from all over the world, from danger spots and beauty spots, famous and not-famous, near and far, the Appalachian Trail and the Syrian refugee camps. Last year he came back, this time with photos from Ukraine. When he left, he was planning a second trip into the heart of that darkness.
On this last visit I put my question to him, the question about localism and travel, about home and “roots.” He was kind enough to write down some of his answers. He also selected a few of his photographs to accompany his words. They are scattered throughout the text below. He suggests that simply “to be in the presence of the world’s beauty and pain,” as he was when he took these pictures, is itself “to feel a sense of connection and rootedness.” Our exchange has been lightly edited for clarity.
Adam Smith: Can you tell readers a bit about your background? Where is home for you? How did you become a traveler—and what does “traveling” mean to you?
Joel Carillet: I was born in Austria to missionary parents and returned to the States when I was almost three. At age twelve, we moved overseas again, to Papua New Guinea. I returned “home” when I was seventeen.
Home has always been a complicated theme. I’m very drawn to the romantic notion of being at home in one place and community, but in reality, for me, this would require severing myself from the larger sense of home I developed at an early age.
My formative years were in more than one culture and community. I felt rooted in each place that I was, even if I did not feel that I belonged entirely to any one location or community. At age fourteen, I could feel at home barefoot in the jungle of Papua New Guinea accompanying friends from the village of Likan on a pig hunt, speaking their language, while simultaneously missing my best friend Ray in suburban Atlanta, reliving in my mind some of our memories together and looking forward to one day seeing him again.
After college (sociology/political science) and graduate school (church history) in Tennessee, I worked in Egypt for a year, then various jobs in DC for parts of two years, and then in late 2003 began a 14-month journey across Asia to write a book. I don’t think I expected to still be on the road so much nearly twenty years later, but that’s what happened. I began the transition from primarily writing to photography in 2006.
In “Making It Home,” the story of a soldier returning from World War II, Wendell Berry writes: “Once it had seemed to him that he walked only on the place where he was. But now, having gone and returned from so far, he knew that he was walking on the whole round world. He felt the great, empty distance that the world was turning in, far away from the sun and the moon and the stars.” Travel for me is a way to participate in life, not to escape it, and not merely to consume things/experiences. It is a way to explore the breadth of my neighborhood—the world—which seems especially important given how interconnected we are at this point in history.
AS: How can a life of wandering other people’s lands, of observing them from behind a camera lens, of doing without a permanent home, meet our permanent “need for roots”?
JC: Simone Weil speaks of the need for roots. I agree, and I feel it. But what does it require to be rooted in a place? Language, time, relationships, an inward sense of love? If I see Michy in Munich every five years, am I less rooted there than I am in a place I see every five hours or days or weeks or months? It would seem that I must be less rooted, and yet there is a power in that root that I find hard to explain. An imperfect metaphor: a root of a tree in a tropical rainforest receives rain many days of the year; a root of a desert shrub maybe only once in a blue moon. But both roots are vital and make life possible.
In 2019, I returned to the village of Likan in Papua New Guinea for the first time in 27 years. That’s a long time! But upon arrival my sister, father, and I were embraced. Elementary-age children took my hand and called me by my name and told stories they knew of me as a teenager. How can kids so young know so much about someone who left the area long before they were born? Because their parents and grandparents shared stories—Papua New Guinea is a storytelling culture. The effect on me: I was not a stranger here; I had roots. My life here was not merely past; it was ongoing through memories shared through stories, and through children I had never met reaching up to hold my hand and walk me through the village. I’m not sure I have ever felt at “home” in the same way when I returned to Tennessee.
In asking how a traveler maintains roots, one could turn the question around and ask a person focused on the local how he or she maintains a sense of place that is adequate for the twenty-first century, marked as it is by global interconnection.
AS: So how do you do that, then—how do you maintain those roots? What practices have you found necessary? What role does memory and narrative play?
JC: Memory, which is important to both Berry and me, is harder to maintain when one is global and often on the road. The stories are more scattered, as is the telling of them. It’s the opposite of weekly communion and remembrance. I wrote in my journal many years ago that sometimes my life feels like a series of events that never really happened. So how is narrative and memory maintained for the traveler? Three things come to mind:
1. Writing is imperative. I am floored by some of what I have forgotten and only remembered later because I had written it down. In one week in Ethiopia in 2010, for example, my bus hit a horse, I saw a church security guard beating a 13-year-old girl (and I intervened), a man ten feet from me was hit by a car, which broke his leg, and a bridge I needed to cross was destroyed by a flood shortly before I got there. A decade later, I had forgotten all but the bridge, perhaps because that is the only event I had a picture of. The memories of the others came back only after I read my journal.
2. Having home-away-from-homes that one returns to every few years. Practically speaking, in addition to Tennessee being a home base where I have roots (though lately they are withering), there are a handful of places around the globe that I return to from time to time and feel a sense of home. For example: Munich, Germany; Ko Phangan, Thailand; Jerusalem. There are friends in these places, and landscapes which by walking again I feel a sense of return, of touching a base, of finding a momentary center before I go out again. And I often feel that my friends in these places “get me” even more than many of my friends in Tennessee might; our time together, our reunions, nourishes my soul.
3. I don’t do this as often as I should, but sometimes I’ll sit still for, say, an hour, and imagine all the people around the world who have embraced me, shook my hand, kissed my cheek, etc. It is a way to recall, to be more centered, to feel a kind of rootedness and ongoing presence of people. Something like the Eucharist, but different.
AS: Berry often says that the relentless exploitation and expropriation we see both at home and abroad stems from an outlook that is too “global”—an inability to imagine or care about the real consequences of decisions. How is your kind of “global outlook” different?
JC: It sounds like Berry is referring to a kind of “global” that is prone to abstraction, which makes sense if you don’t know people beyond one’s borders. But this is foreign to me. My outlook, my mental map, is filled with names and faces and relationships, which nurtures an understanding of, and care for, the planet as a whole.
I can think of a couple of books that really capture this difference. Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between recounts his walk across Afghanistan in the winter soon after 9/11. He takes his time to see a place, with courage, and introduces us to society and culture through intimate encounters with ordinary people. His analysis of Afghanistan, including what Western intervention could and couldn’t achieve, was generally much better than those back in Washington or London who wouldn’t dream of traveling as he did.
Chris Cleave’s Little Bee: A Novel is a beautifully written book about personal relationships and global interconnectedness. It tells the story of the intersection of two lives, one Nigerian and the other English. If you’ve ever wanted to understand better how an immigrant or refugee might see the world, or if you’ve ever met someone in your travels and keenly felt the inherent awkwardness in how only one of you is privileged and safe, or if you’ve ever asked the question “Who is my neighbor?” you will likely love this book.
AS: What does the future look like? Will you ever “settle down”?
I anticipate still being on the road much of the next five years, continuing to document people and places and issues. During this time I also hope to begin turning my years of images and reflections into book form. But generally speaking, the future is a mystery to me, and I know the unexpected, whether it be a beautiful surprise or a tragedy, could be around any bend.
Postscript
Since the interview, I’ve had two more distinct experiences of home:
One was on a remote jungle hillside in Papua New Guinea, at the end of an arduous hike to a Dauntless dive bomber that had crashed in 1944 and had been discovered by locals five months earlier. To reach a crash site in a sweaty state of exhaustion, and then be the first American in eighty years to touch the aircraft, where the remains of the young American pilot were still in the soil beneath the upside down cockpit, is an experience hard to put into words. I have a more tenuous relationship to patriotism than many other Americans, but I have a deep sense of the sacred and history, and I felt it profoundly here. It was a feeling of home.
The other experience was in a cozy living room in Lviv, Ukraine. Five weeks earlier, on Easter Sunday, I had photographed dozens of strangers around the city, including a young woman named Anna sitting in a cafe reading a book. We spoke for maybe five minutes and then said goodbye. She followed me on Instagram and in the weeks that followed took note of my busy travel schedule around the country. She also knew that I was dealing with lower back pain. After about a month she messaged to say she would travel soon to Poland for a few days, and that she would like to offer her apartment to me for rest. A few days later I showed up at her door. I was met with an embrace, with caring words, with a cake and good coffee, and a quick tour of the apartment. We had only 15 minutes together before she needed to leave to catch her train, but when she closed the door behind her, I sat alone on her couch for quite some time, feeling a profound sense of awe and love and hope. This too was a feeling of home.
Image Credits: Joel Carillet
