"I just don't see myself as a travel writer. I can't. I don't"

Her statement is a refusal to be packaged. “Travel writer” is a shelf label, a marketing tag that promises itinerary, spectacle, and digestible epiphany. Robyn Davidson’s work resists that economy. Movement, for her, is not a genre but a method of thinking, a discipline of attention, a test of ethics. The desert is not backdrop; camels are not props; the people she encounters are not characters in a tourist narrative. To adopt the label would risk smoothing the edges of experiences that were hard-won, ambiguous, and often unspectacular in the ways that sell.

The clipped cadence, “I can’t. I don’t.”, turns the refusal into a boundary. It carries fatigue with being asked to stand in for a category and a quiet insistence on protecting the messiness of a life lived between places. “Travel writing” historically carries a colonial gaze, a tendency to domesticate the unfamiliar, to transform encounter into consumption. Davidson’s journeys attend to power, to the ethics of representing others, to the fact that moving through a place confers responsibility. Accepting the tag would invite readers to expect postcards; she prefers field notes and doubt.

There is also self-definition at stake. Labels fix what is inherently fluid. Her preoccupations, nomadism, home as a provisional state, the porous boundary between solitude and community, the education of the senses, are not subtopics of a tourism genre but part of a longer conversation about freedom and belonging. The resistance to the label is not a claim of superiority; it is an aesthetic and moral stance: don’t turn inquiry into itinerary.

Her line asks readers to meet the work without preloaded expectations. Read for attention rather than destination, for relation rather than scenery, for the strenuous work of unlearning. To travel, in this sense, is to dismantle the self that requires neat categories. Naming it “travel writing” would close the circle too soon. The words refuse closure so that discovery can continue.