Excerpts from
Americas
By Thomas Boberg
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, naive 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.
Gunvor Ganer Krejberg
in Danish Literary Magazine 16
Extract from Americas:
I could see a little fish in a brook three thousand feet below. No, I was not about to fly off, not that there wasn´t plenty of space. What if I didn´t come back? I struggled with that eagle for some time, I had to work really hard to hold it down. Each time a bird crossed the heavens it strained inside me, wanting to follow. There was a pigeon on the wing right above me and I flapped my arms and jumped up and down, filled with the uncontrollable urge to dig my claws into it.
At last the eagle glided out of my body and joined another that had apparently been waiting by a clump of brushwood, then they both flew away. Soon they looked to be no more than shadows on the convex mirror of the sky. And I was myself again, more or less, the sun on the brink of slipping down behind the mountains.
A tawny-gold eagle soared over the ravine, I watched it for a while, all at once thinking of everything that I had lost. It occurred to me that I could have flown like that if I had not held back, if I had not been so bloody scared.
Translated by Barbara Haveland
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