auto ethnography: roots tourism and the minibus

I am a dual-heritage person, my father came to London as part of the Windrush generation in the 1960’s, he met my mother who is from Chester in Northern England in the squat scene in London. In Barbados, I use minibuses to get around. An integral part of the transport system in Barbados is performed by these privately owned minibuses that service routes. Mostly driven by men, you enter the mini buses and they all have different rules. Some you pay when you enter, others when you leave, some you’re responsible for closing the doors, others the door shuts automatically, some have buzzers, some you shout at the driver, some have conductors you give the money to, some don’t etc. The vans are custom fitted to the personal taste of the driver; some have coloured leather seats in blue, green and red, some have stickers of super heroes on the ceiling, some have light machines that make it feel like you’re stepping into a club, they all have sound systems that blare music; soca, pop, rock, raga, calypso or radio distortion if the radio doesn’t connect. The driver decides. You have entered their domain, and there is an ease from the locals with how they enter and exit the buses. It’s lived and embedded. I am observant on these journeys, watching keenly to know how to proceed, sometimes I get off a stop that’s near enough, just so that I can copy someone.


One day I am waiting for the minibus, they flash at me twice and as I approach the van door they ride straight past. I feel an intense spike of rejection that sits in my chest for a few moments, I assume someone within the cab is laughing at me. Later, I check with my Bajan friend and he says they blink twice to say they are full or they aren’t picking up passengers, I am relieved while also feeling foolish. I think about how simple interactions can become laden with complex associations that mirror illogical paranoia, social anxiety and imagined shunning.


I read Autoethnography as Feminist Method and find Elizabeth Ettorre’s way of iterating the feminist approach to research that includes exposing emotions being of use. I am particularly drawn to utilising painful experience for purpose, she states ‘For me, narrative methods generate useful ways of creating knowledge about individuals, collective agency and the interior language of emotional vulnerability and at times, wounding, which to me is the heart of good autoethnography’ (Ettorre 2017).


A few days into my trip I am encouraged by an alumni of visual anthropology and dear friend to mind dump after each day. For me this means writing unfiltered notes on conversations with my Bajan British family, day to day interactions with native Bajans, noting how I interact with the natural environment and being particularly cognisant of my internal dialogue. This approach is autoethnographically informed rather than strictly qualitative as I have no explicit training, allowing me to flow with my subjectivity that supports me to be a conduit of experience. Ettore states ‘Autoethnography exposes the numerous possibilities we have in borderland spaces and how in these liberatory spaces we are able to make sense of our flexible and multiple identities’ (Ettorre 2017). This difference is acute for me. I am able to create a flexible boundary that allows me to feel less emotionally ensnared by my subjectivity. I hold in one hand previous narratives of disjointedness and self-blame about feeling unfamiliar and out of place within my ‘homeland’, and in the other the vast historical trajectory that led me up to this point.


While researching for this paper I come across the term ‘ancestral tourist’ -otherwise labelled ‘roots’, ‘legacy’, ‘nostalgic’ or ‘genealogy’ tourist. This fascinates me and I find myself reading several studies exploring the concept (Io 2017), (Delacruz Combs and Johnston-Guerrero 2022), (Lorick-Wilmot 2014), (Băbăiță et al. 2018) (Josiam and Frazier 2021) (Tomczewska-Popowycz and Taras 2022) (Buhalis 2022). Most of them seem to agree that ‘Roots tourism is a type of tourism involving immigrants and their descendants who travel to their ancestral homeland for various reasons, including tracing their roots, visiting family and relatives, immersion in the culture of the ancestral society, and other leisure activities’ (Buhalis 2022). The motivations for making such a trip varies from ‘... a way to gain a sense of solidarity with people who still live there and to feel a sense of empowerment to have succeeded in a country of settlement’ (Io 2017) and ‘... to fulfill the desire and need for self-identity (Josiam and Frazier 2021)’. The studies, whilst using a variety of different terms, all agree upon the positive effects of these journeys on those who participate, and contend that roots tourism generally economically benefits the hosting countries.

Reading the chorus of journeying people from all over the world asking questions of authenticity, reclamation, decoloniality, lineage, and belonging naturally strikes a chord with me. What I find absent or poorly defined in the studies I read, is a description of the emotional process of such a trip. From a personal perspective I find the journey unsettling, unnerving, demanding, joyful and deeply satisfying at points. I come into contact with what could have been, reintegrating and forming new memories using the haptic and tactile, becoming closer to my father’s experience and expanding my idea of him and myself by proxy. In Otherwise World by King, author Dionne Brand is quoted saying  ‘The body is the place of captivity. The Black body is situated as a sign of particular cultural and political meanings in the diaspora.’ (King et al. 2020). Faced with the cartography of the land itself in Barbados and my tricky positioning of also holding White British genealogy, my Black(ish) body signals a duplicity of meanings. This is familiar to my Bajan family, as I am one of many mixed-race children in our family, but it’s however new for me within the context of the Fatherland in comparison to the Motherland.


This feeling is also interwoven with an expectation of an experience that will satisfy a sense of belonging. At moments on the trip I find the search for validation from my newly introduced relatives both thrilling and exhausting, and reflect on how it is likely similarly draining on them. This is partly due to the performative element of both the ancestral tourist and the receiving party who have to engage in this meaning making. It is also a process of decolonization that demands deep introspection as you are implicated in the impact on and relentless extraction from the Caribbean islands by the “big countries”.


I feel on the hunt for knowledge in both my interpersonal conversations and in relation to the environment that surrounds me. My perceptions are heightened as I take in new information and my internal landscape is transformed as I integrate my memories alongside the materiality of place. Speculation falls away when it crashes into reality, and for me this opens up greater questions of what having a relationship actually means in real terms; what responsibilities this new dynamic may also demand, what other possibilities of home could now be expanded on.