the cruelest journey summary

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Literature Review: The Cruelest Journey by Kira Salak

“No place is safe. Safety, itself, is an illusion.” Kira Salak

The women’s memoirs I’ve read since repatriating to the US have repeatedly disappointed me. Rather than travelogues about other cultures and a writer’s (small) place in it, today’s publishers churn out self-obsessive memoirs aimed at women as if we were interested solely in finding boyfriends and making babies with men of foreign accents. Women writing about living in Japan, Yemen, mainland China, and Hong Kong, for instance, focus on infertility or stealing husbands, treading nowhere near anthropological observations of the other cultures. Then there’s Kira Salak. She raises travel writing to the level of explorer writing.

“Since then I’ve sought out countries that are dangerous in order to reveal situations no one else is covering, like slavery in Timbuktu and genocide in eastern Congo. These tragedies are very emotionally difficult to witness, but if by shedding light on them I can improve even one person’s life, I feel it’s worth the risk,” she wrote in National Geographic .

The Cruelest Journey tells her journey kayaking solo six hundred miles down West Africa’s Niger River in an inflatable kayak toward the Saharan city of Timbuktu.

She begins her trip with a single backpack in a torrential downpour from the Malian town of Old Ségou. She reveals how Timbuktu fell from its zenith during the Songhai Empire’s reign from 1463-1591, when its academic and artistic riches were tantamount Florence’s during Europe’s age of Enlightenment until it was sacked by the Moors in the late 16th century, and how it’s come to be the rubble heap and tourist trap it is today.

Salak equips herself for the journey with the writings of 18th-century Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who twice labored over this course but perished along the way. Determined to follow in (most of) his footsteps, she shows us a place that time has all but abandoned. She witnesses polio and leprosy, voodoo priests and shamans, and abundant slavery, despite its being outlawed there. She kayaks through a pod of hippos like tiptoeing through a field of landmines.

She learns to discern the differences between tribes such as the Tuareg, the Fulani and the Bambarra, the Bozo and Somono. Most nights she stops at villages, learning to deduce which tribe lives there by characteristics visible from the river, if she can’t already discern that by how the village inhabitants react to her from the shore. Do they wave and exchange greetings, yell and threaten her, or watch her like a zoo animal” All the while she searches for commonalities, for ways of communicating and better understanding by speaking to them in Bambarra.

Thoughts on Male Travelers

One particularly enjoyable part of Salak’s book is her ability to alternately make fun of and admire male travelers. (Though admittedly her adoration of Park sometimes reads like Oriana Fallaci’s hero worship of Alekos Panagulis in A Man .)

“He doesn’t hide his distress, and his trademark equanimity fails him, revealing glimpses of a traumatizing ordeal. Many male adventurers of his time chose to hide such candor, opting instead for bravado or tedious ethnographical digressions,” he says of Park’s narrative of his capture by Moors. When the women among his captors repeatedly inspected his physique, they became particularly hands-on to find out if circumcision also applies to Christians. Park supposedly had some say in the matter, allowing only beautiful women the chance to inspect his white skin and naughty bits.

Gender Differences in Travel

“My gender will always make me appear more vulnerable. But to not travel anywhere out of fear, or to remain immobilized in a state of hypervigilance when I do, feels akin to psychological bondage. I do not want to give away that kind of power.”

She doesn’t decry this reality. She does in a way that can be described as literary anthropology. “The Somono fishermen, casting out their nets, puzzle over me as I float by. ‘a va, madame”‘ they yell.”

Each fisherman carries a young son perched in the back of his pointed canoe to do the paddling. The boys stare at me, transfixed; they have never seen such a thing. A white woman. Alone. In a red, inflatable boat. Using a two-sided paddle.

“I’m an even greater novelty because Malian women don’t paddle here, not ever. It is a man’s job. So there is no good explanation for me, and the people want to understand.”

Considering the death-defying adventure she’s chosen the reader wants to understand too. What would compel a person to take such a trip” She addresses this and the very fundamental things that, as I learned when living abroad, mark the difference between tourism and travel.

Why Embark on These Trips”

Concerning “what we look for when we embark on these kinds of trips,” she writes: “There is the pat answer that you tell the people you don’t know: that you’re interested in seeing a place, learning about its people. But then the trip begins and the hardship comes, and hardship is more honest: It tells us that we don’t have enough patience yet, nor humility, nor gratitude. And we thought that we did. Hardship brings us closer to truth, and thus is more difficult to bear, but from it alone comes compassion.”

Salak’s poetic prose, like the parallel narratives of her journey and Park’s, meanders throughout the book like the bends and curves of the Niger itself. “The late afternoon sun settles complacently over the hills to the west. Paddling becomes a sort of meditation now, a gentle trespassing over a river that slumbers. The Niger gives me its beauty almost in apology for the violence of the earlier storms, treating me to smooth silver waters that ripple in the sunlight. The current – if there is one – barely moves. Park described the same grandeur of the Niger during his second journey, in an uncharacteristically sentimental passage that provided a welcome respite from accounts of dying soldiers and baggage stolen by natives.”

Heading Into Deeper Water

Her deft handling of dynamics, coupled with the occasional sweetener of levity make The Cruelest Journey an energetic read. This Restless Books publication and Salak’s other books such as Four Corners: A Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea , traverse the depths of the human condition, weaves between fear and bliss, and blurs borders of time and place.

As Jessa Crispin points out in an essay in the Boston Review: “That the market has not sustained the work of other, more rugged, less self-obsessive women travel writers may have more to do with our expectations as readers than with any faults of their writing. We still look to men to tell us about what they do and to women to tell us how they feel.”

Meanwhile, for readers who like their water deeper, there’s the work of Kira Salak.

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The Cruelest Journey – Review

“ The Niger is more than a river; it is a kind of faith .” – The Cruelest Journey

Not only needing the adventurous and courageous spirit of a traveler, Salak also required the physical fitness and stamina to complete the goal at hand – a 600 mile paddle down the Niger River to Timbuktu. 

Kira Salak is very observational on her travels and as she feels all the feelings of joy and frustration on her journey she shared it all with us. From the exhilaration of starting the journey into the unknown, to the hardship, frustration, physical pain, and despair, to the final sprint, the exultation of completing the challenge set for herself and the strength she felt. She did express some flashes of western impatience but always tried to bring herself back to center and calm.

“I start to see with glaring clarity, how little I actually do need, and how strongly the West tries to convince me otherwise.” – The Cruelest Journey

I would disagree with her disbursement of cash when it seemed to be for no apparent reason. She gets angry when people ask for money yet she is (secretly) exacerbating the problem.  For more information on this topic read on in these links:

Uncornered Market – Should travelers give to kids who beg

G Adventures Responsible Travel Child Welfare Code of Conduct

National Geographic Sustainable Travel Tips

“ No place is safe. Safety, itself, is an illusion.” – The Cruelest Journey

It was interesting to learn about the Tuareg and how she describes them as the leisure class of Mali who do no domestic work and maintain slaves for that purpose.  With this extra time, they’ve enhanced their Music Culture .

“ I see that Timbuktu is better off left to name and fancy. It is a place that’s not meant to be found.” – The Cruelest Journey

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

• What did you think about the different tribal villages along the river and the unknown reception she’d receive from each village?
• Do you think the slave girls “started a business” or do you think they got sucked back into a dehumanizing situation?

FURTHER READING:

More Books on Mali

VIDEO: Salak’s four steps to prepare for adventure

The Vision Seeker’s article in NY Times Magazine

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THE CRUELEST JOURNEY: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu

Kira salak, . . national geographic, $26 (256pp) isbn 978-0-7922-9790-1.

Reviewed on: 10/18/2004

Genre: Nonfiction

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Book Review: The Cruelest Journey

The Cruelest Journey:  600 Miles To Timbuktu, by Kira Salak

Although the nation of Mali does not often cross my radar as an interesting place to read about, is a desperately poor country to boot [1], as someone who likes reading books about interesting travels [2], this book caught my attention, as cruel journeys are something that sounds very Nathanish to me at least.  And although the author’s religious beliefs and her openness to witchcraft were not something I greatly appreciated reading about, and her feminism was certainly off-putting, there was still much in this book to appreciate concerning the author’s concern for humanity and inhumanity and her clear-eyed look at what made Mali so poor and what kept it from making strides towards development.  The book comes from a National Geographic grant, and that is not an organization I have a great deal of fondness for despite my own great love of maps and geography, but the author herself has an impressive gift of eloquence and an interest in history and quirky people in history as she attempts to recreate one of the most notable journeys in history, that of the Scottish explorer Mungo Park, to whom she is a worthy successor in her own right.

This book is not an obvious contender for the most exciting travel book one could read, with about two hundred pages taking up numbered chapters of the author’s trip from Bamako to Old Sègou as staging for her trip and then the 600 miles north and east along the Niger River to Timbuktu through some of the most desolate and impoverished country in the entire world.  The author struggles through an injured hand as she kayaks by herself beside villages and adopts a certain pattern:  Canoe all day, find a friendly village and bribe its elder, and stay with a family overnight before repeating the cycle.  As the trip goes on the author runs short of food and has to deal with increasingly unfriendly people, as it is clear that some of the tribes of Mali are far friendlier than others.  She has intermittent meetings with a French photographer and his ginger girlfriend, but for the most part she is alone to observe the countryside and its people, animals, and plants, to feel the heat of the Sahara sun, and to muse upon the way that the country still very closely resembles how it was more than two hundred years ago when Mungo Park took his groundbreaking journey to explore the Niger all the way to the sea, though he died along the way.  Through the trip the author deals with violence and harassment, suffers some mishaps, explores Malian witchcraft and animist beliefs and charms, and buys the freedom of a couple of slaves at the conclusion before leaving the country.

What is it that makes this journey so cruel?  A great deal of Mali’s poverty appears to be its own fault, with horrific violence against women, blind hatred towards the United States, enduring slavery, and an endemic culture of bribery and corruption that actively punishes those who try to get ahead through entrepreneurial spirit.  The author is certainly strong-willed and clever, but one appears convinced that this author’s drive to travel in such dangerous and desolate territory springs from her own deeply painful personal experiences, and possibly even traumatic ones.  The author’s insight appears to come from a place of deep compassion with those who suffer injustice and if she can come off as a bit strident sometimes, she also shows herself to be a person who needs plenty of solitary time to read and reflect and loves the solitary nature of her slow journey by boat in one of the world’s longest rivers through one of the world’s most obscure and forgotten regions.  This book is not colored with nostalgia, but nor is it a screed against the people of Mali, but rather it is the observations and reflections of a clear-eyed and both friendly and wary world traveler who is driven by a rather intense desire to put the world at least a little bit more aright as it is within her power to do so.

[1] See, for example:

Mali’s Free Radical Problem

Book Review: The Traveler’s Atlas

[2] See, for example:

Book Review: Travels With My Donkey

Book Review: American Notes

Book Review: A Supremely Bad Idea

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The cruellest journey : 600 miles by canoe to the legendary city of Timbuktu

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Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles To Timbuktu Hardcover – November 1, 2004

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• Print length 320 pages
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The Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles To Timbuktu Kindle Edition

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A young adventurer with a history of seeking impossible challenges, Kira Salak became the first person in the world to kayak alone the six hundred miles on the Niger River to Timbuktu—"the golden city of the Middle Ages" and fabled "doorway to the end of the world."

While Salak ventures into one of the most desolate regions in Africa, looming as a reminder of the danger she faces is the fate of great Scottish explorer Mungo Park, killed on the same route in 1797. Enduring tropical storms, hippos, rapids, the unrelenting heat of the Sahara, and the mercurial moods of the river, Salak learns that little has changed since Park's time. When she comes ashore each night to find food and shelter among locals in mud-hut villages, tribes alternatively revere and revile her, and Salak, in turn, is equally fascinated and infuriated by the traditions she encounters. Surviving dysentery and rapacious pursuers, Salak arrives at her destination weak but triumphant, and achieves her ultimate goal of buying the freedom of two Bella slave women.

Unputdownable and breathtakingly suspenseful, The Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu is a beautifully rendered meditation on courage and self-mastery by an audacious and inspiring young traveler and wordsmith.