Renga Exercise

Prompt #1: What marks an exploitative from a non exploitative inter cultural experience?

I guess exploiting someone in a cultural experience comes down to truth. If you are offering a cultural experience to someone who is unfamiliar with your culture, you have freedom to make up an experience and charge them money for it. I remember on year 9 camp, the school payed for us to listen to a white Australian man explain Indigenous Australian culture to us. He was using someone elses culture to make a quick buck, and didn’t even bother to learn much about it anyway, I still think some of the information he gave us was pretty dodgy.                        

It was all about boomerangs and didgeridoos. To us, that’s all it needed to be. It was fun, not knowing about the earthly culture and the history behind it. To us, it was all dreamtime. 

Sometimes I’ve known people to exploit their own culture too, all for money. That’s the beauty of the tourism industry I guess. When I went to Thailand with my family, in year 11, it was exciting to ride in the tuktuks and get our nails painted and argue with some guy over the price of a t-shirt. We payed good money to ride elephants, all in the name of experience. We watched their heads get bombarded by sticks. I held a baby tiger in my arms and smiled for the camera, with a milk bottle in it’s teeth. We didn’t know it was sedated. Once again, it was an experience, and we payed good money for it. 

The streets of Thailand are filled with white tourists adding boom to their industry, thriving in the hot weather and the heat of their excitement. They will reach into their pockets with ease, drawing out money, cameras, and guidebooks, all which place a veil over their truth as a tourist. Tourism is a trap; a specified pattern that is subconsciously entrenched in us - us being Western tourists visiting cultures that don’t belong to us. Excitement and curiosity are the purest feelings tourism extrapolates, but it is the respect that needs sharpening. Awareness is another one. That comes with research. 

The reason inter-cultural experiences are so named, is because they constitute a crossroads at which two different identities meet. The exploitation of this experience is what happens when the two identities fully cross over. Where are you? Whose land is this? What are the traditions of this place? These are all questions that should be asked, with a sharp awareness that this is not your home, and the people you meet - they are not subjects of your imagination. You are a tourist in a culture, not a local who have roamed the lands and know every corner, every crack, every bump. There is a fine and dangerous line between the two.

It is one thing to write a fiction on a place where you have done research ad another to create elements to fill in the holes of your story. One might argue that it is merely fiction, it’s supposed to be a figment of imagination. That it is okay to conjure a mirage on a place so full of history yet to be explored by you.

There are many marks of everything, which is to say, to answer this, we’d need to know what intercultural actually entails—to ensure it is not a relationship where one is sitting, wishing to be entertained, or where by one is sitting and listening, for their own gain. Social, cultural and financial capital, have deep effect on the goals of each party that is moving to meet one an other. Where each person identifies and life experiences intersect will have a great influence on this equations. Peoples ideas of morality and ethics will have a deep effect on this idea.

Prompt #2: Everything here is too bright. 

I want to close my eyes and open them in the dark of his bedroom. I want to be woken by his restless breathing and lie awake in the quiet night, cocooned in sheets and tangled doonas. The dreams don’t follow me, there. I am not surrounded by light that eats away at my vision and makes me lift my hand to cover my face. The darkness gives way to the warmth, lets me go places that show me clearly what I am. My thoughts are always miraculous. I climb onto him. He groans, and I delight in the sound. Stationed here, is my place. I know the static of darkness pervades me to go further. He is waiting. I cannot do it. Tonight, I only entice and withdraw, that is the ice. My ice. I give him a freeze, as he centres me, and I soak down through his skin. And he evaporates like the thinnest rain. I am Power. I am the lost Cause. I fall silent Sex. Men are a sort evil, I think. I often think of them as a light that won't go out. I often think of them as a curse. I often think of them as wet dough. I often think of them as heartburn. I often think of them as an empty cup. I often think I am very angry, then not angry enough when it is time to use it. Everything here is too bright. Which is to say, everything here wishes to illuminate but it is not just him. He is the darkness that I wish to bury, change and light back up. His lack of colour scares me but in turn my over powering brightness is probably, no definitely, scaring him. Where is the middle ground? Fuck me just turn the light off. Please, just turn off the light. If that’s all I’m ever given, let it be that. Everything here is too fucking bright. Don’t let me see. Light reveals truth. Hide it. 

In the first piece, the first three paragraphs share a theme of observing the ways we have been trapped or tricked by tourism. They share a light and anecdotal voice, which makes it read as though they were all written by the same person. In the fourth paragraph the piece gets more serious and reflective, asking questions rather then telling a story. The following paragraphs follow this shift making the piece more reflective and critical than anecdotal. The language used is really different and the change in author is now clear. 

The second piece has a really dark theme of escaping from the light in order to escape from inner demons or something. I don't know, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The theme stays pretty consistent without, focusing on being afraid of seeing yourself and facing reality.