I travel with purpose, a defiled passport, a pen, and with an insatiable curiosity of the world around me. I pack a list of questions in my invisible backpack, and some paper flags and pins courtesy of the Canadian government. I know I will always return home with more than I left. I come and I go. Arrive and depart. Departure feels like a denouement: the rolling up of worn clothes you tuck into your suitcase with fibers thick of the smells of the streets, the smog, the smoke, and the stains of your journey. The zipping of a zipper marks an informal conclusion and the closing of a chapter.

When departing from my most recent adventure in Hangzhou, China to my next destination in Southeast Asia, I packed poetry. I folded pieces of paper with scribbled notes on the back and neat lines on the front. In its entirety, these poems form a response to an inquiry about the relationship of the self to our external world, and an autoethnographic experience of eastern culture and nature. I chose performative ethnography because as Denzin (2000) states, “it locates and represents the gendered, sacred self in its ethical relationships to nature” (p. 404).

I wrote English haikus to document and explore my experience and paired the haikus with photographs I took in Hangzhou. Haiku is a classic form of Japanese poetry consisting of 17 syllables and underlined by the philosophy of Zen (Hakutani, 2009). Zen-inspired poetry equalizes and unites humanity and all things in nature, and the poet aims to achieve a state of unbiased, emotionless consciousness that parallels to the state of nature (Hakutani, 2009). I amended this traditional form to include my emotive reflections of disharmony between self and environment, east and west, and natural and contrived.

Autoethnography includes note-taking, memory work, narrative writing, observation, and interview as research strategies for reflexive exploration (Hamilton, Smith, Worthington, 2008), and displays multiple layers of consciousness and vulnerability (Ellis, 1999). Ethnographic poetry merges scholarship and art to further understanding and while it is far from the positivist paradigm (Maynard & Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010), this genre of research offered me the opportunity to accept and embrace my truths as valid and my experience as meaningful data.

My fieldwork concerned the nature in Hangzhou, the so-called “city of heaven” (Altenburger & Chu, 2006), and how this atmosphere shaped me, and my fear, bias, assumptions, and behaviour. These observations fueled my haikus and a larger metaphorical analysis of environment, adventure, adaption, and introspective and intercultural enlightenment. A mess of additional sub-themes, contradictions, and parallels exist. Maynard & Cahnmann-Taylor (2010) write, “Cultural practices, the argument goes, are inherently messy, even, inchoate or incoherent; poetry and ethnography as well should avoid too much system or symmetry, the suspiciously neat tying off of bows, too much can’t” (p. 6).

Maybe I’m inherently a little messy too. My fieldwork and writing displayed a clear juxtaposition of east and west. My western thoughts and words seemed excessive, inconcrete, and jumbled. I struggled at first with the eastern form of haiku. It is seemingly restrictive, and overly-ordered. However; as I explored tradition, nature, and acculturated, my writing and my experience organically mirrored shifts. I grew to be patient and precise with my words and find freedom and precision in form.

Travelers can use ethnopoetry to increase mindfulness and intercultural competence in addition to the many interdisciplinary applications for the cognitive, creative, and cultural aspects of haiku (Blaska & Merski, 1998). Unpacking my suitcase/knapsack (McIntosh, 1988) and my poems awarded me increased emotional intelligence, and understanding of my own awareness, and of the complexities and subtleties of culture and (wo)man’s relationship with nature. If writing serves as therapy (Wright, 2009), haikus were my treatment of choice in China. And as I travel through life and begin a new chapter, I bring a heartful consciousness that I can condense into 15 photographs that bear three lines and 17 syllables.

References: Altenburger, E., & Chu, G. (2006). Hangzhou: Heaven on earth. Focus on Geography, 49(2), 7-13. Blasko, D. G., & Merski, D. W. (1998). Haiku poetry and metaphorical thought: An invitation to interdisciplinary study. Creativity Research Journal, 11(1), 39-46. Denzin, N. K. (2000). Interpretive ethnography. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 3(3), 401-409. Ellis, C. (1999). Heartful autoethnography. Qualitative Health Research, 9(5), 669-683. Hakutani, Y. (2009). Haiku and modernist poetics. Palgrave Macmillan. Hamilton, M. L., Smith, L., & Worthington, K. (2008). Fitting the methodology with the research: An exploration of narrative, self-study and auto-ethnography. Studying Teacher Education, 4(1), 17-28. Kien, G. (2008). Technography = technology + ethnography: An introduction. Qualitative Inquiry, 14(7), 1101-1109. McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Maynard, K., & Cahnmann‐Taylor, M. (2010). Anthropology at the edge of words: Where poetry and ethnography meet. Anthropology and Humanism, 35(1), 2-19. Wright, J. K. (2009). Autoethnography and therapy writing on the move. Qualitative Inquiry, 15(4), 623-640.

Share this Story