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Mara wanted the page to be fair . A magazine had asked for a short piece about a coastal town where she had stayed only a few days , and the old travel books on her desk showed her the usual shape . The writer arrives , marks what seems strange , and explains the place to people who will never see it . She could write that page before lunch . She did not trust it . She was copying a kind of travelogue tied to the years when European empires were expanding , written so readers at home could have the world catalogued . A curious traveler could still treat Europe as the measure of a proper life . People in such an account could become a display : unusual dress , habits called simple , land described as empty and waiting for someone else to improve it . In some Victorian books , African societies were called savage and Asian civilizations stagnant . Post - colonial critics argue that those words did more than insult . They helped make foreign rule sound like common sense , as if the people on the page could not govern themselves . The same critics gave the pattern a name . They speak of the Other : a person or a place treated as deeply unlike the writer , and therefore open to judgment . In that pattern , the visitor stays briefly and still writes as the voice that knows . What local people say reaches the reader only after it has been sorted into the writer's own categories . A market , a feast , an argument in a doorway : each one arrives already explained . In those pages , the people who live there do not get to end the sentence . Mara heard that habit in her own draft . She had called the town authentic and off the beaten path , as if the residents were keeping still for her . She had praised a host as simple and kind , and she had not asked what the host wanted visitors to understand . A backpacker hunting a real experience , a guest who expects personal service in a distant place , and a traveler who wants a hard journey in wild country can all repeat the old pattern without planning to . Wanting to look closely is not the same as having the right to define a culture . She struck out the line about authenticity . What she could defend was smaller . She had been a guest for a few days , she had liked the evening market , and she did not know the town's arguments . She left space for her host's own words and asked , before she sent the piece , whether any of her sentences were fair to keep . The page was shorter . It no longer pretended to be the whole story .
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