The Accidental Traveller: Priscila Uppal’s Search for Her Fugitive Brazilian Mother

Abstract

People usually travel to foreign destinations because they are intrigued by them, be it their rich historical or cultural past, their lush landscape, or some other exotic element. This, though, was not what precipitated Priscila Uppal's 2003 trip to Brazil, a country that purportedly held no appeal whatsoever for her. Rather, the only reason the Canadian poet and novelist journeyed to South America was to meet her fugitive Brazilian mother, the mother who abandoned her and her brother as children and whom she had not seen for nearly twenty years. Uppal's impressions of Brazil are thus inevitably influenced by the fact it is the homeland of her truant maternal progenitor. Yet what makes her account of her transcontinental crossing in Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother so compelling is that she not only discovers she shares many personality traits with her mother and her family but also that, at times, she seems more at home in foreign Brazil than in her native land. That is, as I will attempt to show in my essay, Uppal's experiences in Brazil are profoundly complicated by her awareness that this alien and alienating country is also her ancestral homeland, problematizing the distinction between home and away. The discourse on travel writing continues to be informed by the idea that this "quasi-fictional genre" necessarily embodies a "colonial ethos" (Lisle 1, 20; see also C. Kaplan 2). As Debbie Lisle asserts in The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing, "the genre has always been implicated in the political logic of Empire" (265). Or as Mary Louise Pratt declares in her influential study Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, along with "enlightenment natural history, " travel writing helped "to produce a Eurocentered form of global or [...] 'planetary' consciousness, " which should compel politically-aware contemporary scholars to