Incense

A late entry for @Squatbetty’s April Love Blippin’ Books Challenge #LBB4, for which the prompt was nonfiction. 

I mostly read fiction, but I’ve always dabbled a bit with travel writing and occasional biographies. Of course I have shelves full of non-fiction, but they’re more reference or browsing books which I wouldn’t tackle cover to cover. 

Over the past couple of years I’ve more consciously been engaging with the canon of classic travel writing and as always with canons have been confronted by the reality of white, male, western voices dominating the field. So I was happy to find this copy of one of Freya Stark’s works in the second hand bookshop in Skipton recently, and doubly so because it has the aesthetic qualities that only early Penguins can provide.

I won’t try to do justice to Freya Stark’s biography, but suffice it say she was, as it says on the cover, a woman of travel and adventure. The Southern Gates of Arabia is one of her earliest works, and covers a period of independent travel in Yemen in search of ancient incense routes.  Yes, it is a book of it’s times, a colonial text, but I found Stark to be more reflexive about colonialism and empire than contemporary male writers.

The Arabian Peninsula is not a part of the world I know much about. I’m a geographer, but I’ve never studies it. I’ve certainly never been there (or anywhere beyond the West). Reading the book has stimulated my curiosity to learn more. Stark offers fine, humanistic pen portraits of people, places and landscapes and it is clear that she did not seek to put herself apart from the local people she was travelling and staying with.  I will look out for more of her work.

On to the May LBB challenge.