Lucie Azema, born in 1989, is a French travel writer with a no-ifs-and-buts style and irrepressible curiosity, who over travelling prefers to live places, stop awhile, linger, even for years. Precisely what she did in Lebanon, Iran, Turkey and India. Reading her two interesting and at once radical books, Les femmes aussi sont du voyage. L’émancipation par le départ (Flammarion, 2021) and L’usage du thé. Une histoire sensible du bout du monde (Flammarion, 2022), you realize that Lucie principally likes to break down false beliefs and overturn gender stereotypes linked to the safety and freedom of lone women travellers, rejecting the idea of travel as a male prerogative. “If men tell of adventures that they’ve never lived, women live adventures that they’ll never tell”, she immediately makes clear. For Azema, to travel is to live the world, to occupy a space that we women “would easily have been able to take up, had we been men”. This feminist approach is at the basis of the author’s reflections in her second book, in which she has chosen to recount the incredible “road” followed by tea over the centuries. Forever on the move, much talked about, tea is a drink that is also quite misunderstood: it’s not true that tea is a British tradition; on the contrary, tea came from East to West, “in the opposite direction to the great waves of travel in history”; moreover, tea and its rituals, the encounters it creates, open a window onto the present moment, allowing us to reconnect with ourselves and others. While waiting to drink a good cup of tea in person with Lucie Azema, we chat online, imagining we are sitting over a cup of Gyokuro, one of the teas we both prefer, also known in Japan as “jade dew” because of its chlorophyll taste and colour of springtime meadows. Because as Lucie told me, tea is “a little boat that takes us far away”.
VP: Imagine drinking tea with a famous traveller from the past. Who would you choose?
LA: That’s a magic power I’d like to have. If I could, I’d choose Alexandra David-Neel, no doubt about it. Recently, I visited her home in the south of France for the first time. Now it’s a museum and I was moved to feel her presence so alive in that house. If I was to drink tea with her, it’d definitely be a tea with dri [female yak] butter: a Tibetan speciality that she loved to drink on her extraordinary travels.
VP: After reading your first book Les femmes aussi sont du voyage, I took it for granted that you’d choose a woman. But if it had to choose a man, who would it be?
LA: Jack London holds an important place in my life. His blow-you-away writing and hard life, totally given over to writing and travel, are a great source of admiration for me. Then again, I’m not sure he drank much tea!
VP: Your new book tells both the story of tea and its travels and the drink’s bond with travel culture. Can you explain what this bond is?
LA: Tea is above all a story of roads and journeys. This is how it came into existence: by leaving China and travelling with camel trains along the Silk Road. It allowed people to meet and build bridges between different cultures. Tea has also followed darker roads, the roads of slavery for example, even more so thanks to the Europeans’ addition of a certain ingredient—sugar—to their drinks.
VP: In Italy and France, or the West in general, we don’t have any tea-based rituals. There’s no lengthy preparation, or “tea houses” which instead exist in many countries of the Middle East for example. Why is the suspension of time usually connected to these moments so important?
LA: Part of tea’s natural baggage is the euphoria of adventure and encounters, yet paradoxically it is drunk in moments of calm, sitting down, suspended in time. Adventure isn’t continual movement in space; there have to be rests, oases. There can be some more difficult moments, breaks that have not been prearranged. This is how tea contains the history of our humanity; and it is this tension between nomadism and sedentariness, which we all have to deal with, that I wanted to explore in L’usage du thé.
Quick aside: the title of Lucie Azema’s book is L’usage du thé. Une histoire sensible du bout du monde, making reference to L’usage du monde by Nicolas Bouvier, translated into English as The Way of the World. Bouvier’s book, written in 1963, is the tale of his roaming the Middle East in a Fiat 500 Topolino, from the Balkans to Pakistan by way of Iran. It is a fundamental text for travel literature and equally as important for Lucie Azema as we can see from the numerous references to it in her book.
VP: If I’m not wrong, the title of your book is a reference to Nicolas Bouvier?
LA: The Way of the World is one of the rare books written by a male traveller that really struck me, not just because it’s a literary gem. Nicolas Bouvier and Thierry Vernet travelled to places that are incredibly important to me (Iran in particular, and Turkey) and drank lots of tea. Moreover, their way of travelling was just what I look for too: working to stay longer in a place and learning the language too. There’s the idea of a sedentary lifestyle inside the adventure that’s vital for me.
VP: Where were you when you wrote this last book?
LA: Between Georgia, where I burrowed down in the middle of winter, Turkey and France. And in Italy for a while too, where I had to resist the delicious coffee! Drinking tea is a way of bringing people and cultures together, “of reconnecting with ourselves and others”. It is particularly so in some countries where you’ve lived, such as Iran and Uzbekistan… In central Asia, where hospitality is key, tea is drunk from a Russian samovar, so the tea can be prepared in big quantities and be kept warm for unexpected guests. There’s a samovar in every home in Iran and Uzbekistan and it’s an important part of everyday life, with a real social function.
VP: You wrote: “Tea is a drink forever on the move, it goes from East to West, in the opposite direction to the great waves of travel in history” and then: “It’s exactly what tea did: it left, went back and, in the meantime, got caught up. But it has always been transformed by contact with others”. Can we say that tea is a transformative drink?
LA: Tea has evolved to embrace the lands and cultures that it has crossed. It isn’t drunk in the same way in China or Japan—where it’s a very aesthetic, silent drink—as in India, Iran or Britain. The way this drink is consumed has changed radically following its contact with others, something which is a lot less true for coffee, for example. The idea of purity is alien to tea, and that is what makes this drink so fascinating.
VP: What do you mean by saying it’s not “pure”?
LA: I mean that tea is a drink that has flourished in otherness, in contact with lands alien to where it originated from (China and Japan). As a result, it has evolved and in certain ways improved. I see it as a metaphor for the human being: humanity has evolved by moving and coming face to face with otherness. There is no language, culture or cuisine that is “pure”. It’s historically wrong to think this. It seems even more important to remember this at this moment in time, when nationalism is becoming more and more toxic in Europe and elsewhere.
VP: What kind of traveller are you? In your first book you make an important declaration: “In reality, in many ways I’m not a traveller at all. I’m seduced much less by the crossing than drawing into port. My love is for arriving more than leaving”.
LA: Yes, I love lingering, going back to the same places, developing a routine abroad. It teaches me more about myself and others. I love losing the compass points of everyday life, even though at times it can be a bit humiliating. I get the impression that it’s only by leaving behind the comfort of our compass points that we manage to come closer, even if it is only for a moment, to pure freedom.
VP: I know that your favourite teas are from the Sencha or Gyokuro families, “pretty jade green” Japanese teas “that conjure up the salty scents of the sea”. I adore them even though I’ve never been to Japan.
LA: It’s hard to explain why we like one tea or another so much. It has to do with reminiscences, smells, images of certain places. I like the salty tones of Japanese teas and the deep vegetable tones of Chinese green teas. I also like Iranian tea because it reminds me of friends and places that I love. The same goes for the way of making Indian tea with milk and spices. I like the idea that a cup of tea is like a little boat that takes us far away.