The son of an illiterate Greek islander and an Irish officer in the British army, Lafcadio Hearn was raised in Dublin before landing in decidedly un-Oriental Cincinnati, Ohio. He settled, initially at least, for “the Orient at home.”īut where was home? Mostly in books, it seems, the refuge of misfits and wanderers. For Hearn, the goal was not India but the “Orient” and if the Orient proved too far afield, he allowed, something African or West Indian would do. It is a familiar traveler’s fantasy, best elaborated by Walt Whitman in his poem “Passage to India” (“Doubts to be solv’d, the map incognita, blanks to be fill’d”).
By this he meant he wanted to be the first to travel to and describe a world unknown to Western eyes. “I would give anything to be a literary Columbus,” Lafcadio Hearn once wrote. As part of our continuing series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry, Deborah Baker, whose fourth book The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, was recently published, writes about Lafcadio Hearn’s lifelong engagement with capturing the experience of near-at-hand but exotic cultures:
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