“Airplane Mode:” not all travelers head in same
Like exercise, f lossing and college, travel has long been held up as an incontrovertible good — an essential part of the modern human experience. Lately, though, there’s been some pushback from the smart set, if not the jet set.
The staycation, a word Mer r iam- Webster has traced to World War II advertising, lost any remaining stigma during pandemic lockdowns, with the air suddenly clear of traffic pollution and birdsong audible in one’s own backyard. In The New Yorker last summer, philosopher Agnes Callard laid out a “Case Against Travel,” prompting a flurry of avid, even angry, rebuttals and calls of “clickbait” from people who enjoy going to unfamiliar places, some pounded out indignantly from the road.
And now lands “Airplane Mode,” by Shahnaz Habib, a lively and, yes, wide- ranging book that interrogates some of the pastime’s conventions and most prominent chroniclers.
Beginning with the assumption that “travel” is a pastime at all, rather than a potentially violent upheaval, or a battle with bureaucracy. “Only Americans, British, Australians and Japanese travel,” a carpetstore proprietor tells Habib when she visits Konya, Turkey, a variation of an edict she heard, with more condescension, in graduate school: “People from the third world do not travel; they immigrate.”
Habib prefers the term “third world” to its more politically correct alternatives, she explains in a passionate afterword, praising a certain “audacity of its unwieldy internal rhyme” that Steely Dan has also noticed. She is a translator who has worked for the United Nations, and the English language is a source of sensual fascination. She considers the oft- criminalized practice of “loitering,” for example, “so close to littering and its suggestion of something that shouldn’t be there and bringing also to mind the lottery and the gamble of waiting for something to happen.”
Habib was born in Kozhikode, India, and grew up in an “unhistoric” district in the seaside city of Kochi: a jumble of fish markets, sewing and hardware shops that she thanks Robinson Crusoe for ignoring. Her father, like Macon Leary in Anne Tyler’s “The Accidental Tourist,” hates to travel, preferring his familiar bed and reading online news. He declined a drive- by past the White House (“Why? What is there?”) and declared a helicopter trip over Manhattan “eminently avoidable.” He gets to know foreign destinations by inspecting their fruits and vegetables. I love this guy.
Habib marries a white Amer ican man, who blithely assumes a babymoon to Paris while her green card is in process will not be a problem. “It is impossible to tell a good story in which your primary antagonist is paperwork,” the author writes, but she’s wrong. The couple’s quest for an Advance Parole, a forbidding- sounding travel document for noncitizens, plus a French visa that will let her go on this simple trip — “a video game with higher and higher levels of form- filling” — is domestic tragicomedy of Lucy and Desi proportions.
Constrained at least intermittently from roaming the world, Habib finds ways to be transported, figuratively, from where she lives in Brooklyn. Postpartum, she takes long, aimless bus rides through its neighborhoods with her new baby, alert to how motherhood makes her less vulnerable to male attention. ( So much more of this to look forward to!)
She is a prodigious and skeptical reader, posing the queen of Sheba in contrast to Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero With a Thousand Faces,” for example, or noting the marginalized characters in the colonialisttinged detective novels of Agatha Christie and wondering about their stories. She analyzes guidebooks, from Baedeker to Lonely Planet. “Every time I pick up a guidebook, Lucy Honeychurch and Miss Lavish fight for my soul,” she writes, referring to characters in the E. M. Forster novel “A Room With a View,” who, respectively, depend on convention and serendipity as they journey. ( How nice, by the way, to reclaim “journey” from New Age babble.)
Even watching “The Great British Bake Off,” “perhaps the feel- goodest program in the history of television,” is occasion for Habib to consider how slavery, after forced travel under the most atrocious conditions, enabled the sugar trade.
As for other travel writers, she seems through with Paul Theroux and is scathing on an article by Evan Osnos in The New Yorker, about an all- inclusive Chinese package tour of Europe, on which he was the only white man.
But “Airplane Mode” is far from a castigating, joyless book — just one that urges readers to be alert to the world’s injustices and impending catastrophes as they take their pleasure jaunts. Habib reminds us that Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate, was detained in 1999 on his way to speak at Davos and notes how the passport has increasingly become “a transactional commodity rather than a national identity.” ( Indeed, for every pandemic staycationer, it seemed there was another applying for a second passport.) There are surprising detours about bougainvillea, leeches, carousels.
She is conscious of how climate change will transform travel — Venice, anyone? — and how travel has changed the climate, something that most Million Milers just don’t want to think about. ( My husband’s decision to drastically reduce his f lying on ecological principles has riled family members, provoked gasps at cocktail parties and has cost us at least one treasured friendship. Me, I’m happy just to stay home binge- watching the great Smithsonian Channel series “Air Disasters,” a weird immersion therapy for aviophobes.)
When Habib does get away from it all, she is a ruthlessly honest and funny observer, comparing her “feeble herbivorous voice” to the slashing adventuresomeness of an Anthony Bourdain; admitting to craving Thai food on a trip to Spain and then exploring the forces that made it available there; confessing that she doesn’t actually enjoy visiting monuments.
Interestingly for a book that takes its title from an iphone setting, “Airplane Mode” doesn’t much discuss how little super- compasses like Google Maps, Yelp and their ilk have Changed Everything Forever when it comes to travel. But in an era when souvenirs are all but obsolete, every trinket on Earth available in a click, it’s a lovely little snow globe, shaking up hardened perceptions.