Two Continents. One Soul

Poet Thomas Boberg has just published his second travel memoir. An odyssey of traveller’s tales drawn from the years 1980-1999.

By : Gunvor Garner Krejbeg

The image of two snakes intertwining could be said to constitute the visualized mantra for Boberg’s novel Americas. Two snakes, standing as a metaphor for the meeting of two cultures or states of consciousness. Or the two snakes which this memoir rediscovers in the gene, the foundation of all living things. Snakes that might for that matter go on intertwining to infinity. And while there are certainly plenty of snakes, insects and creepy-crawlies in these tales from South America, the scheme of Boberg’s travel memoir also twines this way and that. No educational journey this, no questing after departure or arrival, instead there is the cosmopolitan’s constant craving for experience and perception which, in Boberg’s literary hands, turns to absorption. Absorption in the journey. And it is not only the body that is on the move, the mind, too, is sent off on its travels by the psychoactive substance ayahuasca – a consciousness-expanding drug used in shamanistic rituals and extracted from, among other things, a plant whose stems just happen to twine themselves around one another, like snakes. Americas is a collection of 30 tales, each of which is allowed to stand as a one-off experience, with no overall narrative thread linking them together. It tells of journeys that range, in geographical terms, from the USA in the north to Peru in the south, with these points representing not only the opposite poles of his journey, but also the opposite poles of those cultural contrasts which shed light on one another and in so doing, help give the book its perspective. In the opening chapters the narrator reveals himself as young, naïve and seduced by the frenetic pace of American society and the pursuit of fresh highs. In the city, the narrator’s own sense of being dissolves – here travel equals escape. But when he is confronted with the truth-seeking shamanism that he comes across in Ecuador, Guatemala and Bolivia, as well as in Peru, his journey takes on a new dimension. Becoming an inner journey, in the course of which the narrator must face up to his fears. Americas describes an inward as well as an outward prospect, a journey that demonstrates the power of myth, a world of wonders. But above all else, this journey is a literary project which contemplates the relationship between words, travel and life: a relationship that proves to be a constant paradox, since here the narrator is travelling, not in order to reach journey’s end full of enlightenment and a new understanding of the world, but in order to write. And it is Boberg the poet’s highly visual prose that weaves together these travel memoirs of his – with a rhythmic, melodic verve.

Translated by Barbara Haveland