Shahnaz Habib, a Brooklyn transplant with a serious case of wanderlust, offers a refreshing lens on the art of being a tourist, and ponders the journeys of adventurers, past and present, in her debut, Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel. Part social manifesto on the perils of having the wrong-colored passport, Habib's entertaining book includes reflections on citizenship, colonial history, and the transformative journey of motherhood.
Habib, a writing instructor at Bay Path University and the New School, is an award-winning translator of fiction from Malayalam, her South Indian mother tongue, into English. Though her hometown of Kerala is "a tourist paradise, a land of vacations," she grew up on the sidelines of the tourism industry and was raised on mythological stories that served as travel portals into faraway lands. She is especially captivated by the enigmatic Queen of Sheba, and her long and perilous journey to visit the kingdom of Solomon in Jerusalem. In her travels, the Queen was driven by the same innate curiosity that fuels the author's own desire to visit new places. Unlike the Queen of Sheba, though, Habib was severely limited by the "stigma" of her Third World citizenship, with travel often precluded by expensive, convoluted visa application processes. Eventually, she became a naturalized U.S. citizen, and shares with readers the complicated emotions involved in officially renouncing her Indian citizenship.
In a brilliant chapter on the history of passports, the author offers brazen examples of how these relatively recent forms of documentation were adopted by colonizers not to offer greater mobility but to prevent the wrong sort of people--that is, the colonized--from gaining entry. The aspirational experience of travel, she observes, depends on your identity. "To be a minority is to constantly orient yourself against the world," she writes, and it's an experience vastly different from traveling while armed with the "reflected glow of my husband's white American privilege."
Habib's evolution from a shy tourist tethered to guidebooks into a confident traveler is itself the transformation of a young immigrant unsure of her place in the world to a lifelong wanderer who knows she is entitled to go where she pleases. Entering the "foreign land called motherhood," she discovers anew her Brooklyn neighborhood, a joyful adventure full of the wonderment and spirit of mind-expanding travel.
Airplane Mode, brimming with curious travel facts filtered through Habib's witty, conversational style, is an insightful literary companion for explorers of all stripes. --Shahina Piyarali, reviewer
Shelf Talker: A Brooklyn writer shares entertaining travel facts, the colonial history of passports, and profound personal reflections on becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen.