THE WORLD IS A STAGE

SOUVENIR THAT SPENDS YOU: REFLECTIONS ON HOW CULTURES TRAVEL

MICHELE GISUAT

October 21, 2025

What happens when “culture” itself becomes contraband—something declared at the border, weighed, and misread? Michele Gisuat’s essay explores the strange alchemy of cultural exchange: how meanings mutate in transit, how gifts become contagions, and how travelers are remade by what they try to carry home. Through fable-like encounters—a market trading in memories, a ministry devoted to misunderstanding—she turns exchange into both metaphor and mirror. This is not about tourism or trade, but about how ideas, gestures, and stories migrate, shedding ownership along the way. In Gisuat’s hands, cultural exchange is not a transaction; it is a transformation that spends you.

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At the border they asked me what I carried, and I answered without thinking: “culture.” The guard frowned, then smiled, then stamped my passport with something that looked like an insect smashed on a windshield mid-flight—or perhaps a Rorschach test administered by a tired psychologist at the end of the world. The wings were still trembling, the body flattened into an emblem that refused to settle. When I tilted the page, it shimmered like oil, or bruised skin, or the residue of a language that had tried to cross and failed. Later, in town, I showed the stamp to others. Each gave me a different reading. One swore it was the sign for rain. Another said it was a curse. A child whispered it was her grandmother’s face. It is a curious thing to arrive bearing something as weightless and overpacked as “culture.” I half expected customs to weigh it, charge duty, confiscate it, or discover I didn’t have any at all.

The customs stamp of the subconscious—declare what you see, and risk confession

The road into the country braided through hills shaped like punctuation. With every turn I thought I could parse a sentence from the landscape; with every turn the clouds smudged it out, as if the sky were grading my comprehension with a heavy blue pencil. The driver hummed the road’s melody, the way drivers do when they merge with the machine. “What tune is that?” I asked. “Not a tune,” he said. “A translation.” We entered a tunnel and the translation grew louder, metallic, insectile. When we emerged on the other side, a different melody had taken hold—same road, different grammar.

In the hotel, my suitcase had gained weight. I had added nothing, but inside, my books were misbehaving: margins wiped clean, lines I had underlined erased as if they were ashamed of their new importance. In one volume, the text had rearranged itself overnight into diagrams of rooms I had never entered. Another book had exchanged its sentences for a list of smells: wet stone, library dust, boiled sugar, the sudden bitter of a match struck in wind. I closed the covers as if I were shutting a feral animal into its cage. There is a stage of travel in which everything around you is absurd and everything inside you is precise. After that, the reverse.

Out on the street, the city directed itself with an invisible baton. It was late afternoon; shadows were rehearsing. Children flew kites that had no strings, yet the kites obeyed, slowing at corners as if responding to a forgotten command. In the square, a stall sold photographs of things that hadn’t happened yet—there on the table were tomorrow’s funerals, next year’s weddings, a ship that would later sink but was still floating in the picture, pleased with itself. People bought these futures and tucked them into their shirts, close to the heart. “Insurance,” the seller explained. “Against what?” “Against what’s already occurred.” I nodded as a scholar, baffled as a person.

Every trade begins as translation: You offer metal, receive myth, and call it even

The market—not the open-air one with tomatoes and meat, but the other market, the famous one—hid behind a theater, then behind a curtain of laundry snapping in the wind. You didn’t so much enter as get admitted, like a patient. Here, the currency was variable. “We accept memory,” said a sign. “Also rumor, rumor’s older brother, silence, and certain family recipes.” A woman offered me a thimbleful of cobalt. “For luck,” she said. “Luck is a color here.” “What does it cost?” “Do you have a memory you aren’t using?” I was tempted to hand her the afternoon I’d wasted last month arguing with a taxi driver, but I sensed that wouldn’t count. I reached deeper, into the inventory of small, neglected memories—ah, there: a patch of lawn at dusk, a sprinkler ticking, a moth larger than my hand. I handed it over. She bit it with her teeth, testing its authenticity, then placed it under the counter. “Good,” she said. “Very good. You have been careless, which is to your advantage.” In return, she pressed the thimble of cobalt into my palm. When I looked again it was a beetle, iridescent, alive.

You can learn a great deal about a place by studying what it steals. In this market, people traded for things they already possessed but could not use. A man exchanged the smell of rain for a way to remember his brother’s voice. A girl bartered her fear of water for a story about a house that never faced the same direction two days in a row. The stories were different sizes. Some you could fold into your pocket. Others required a friend to carry the other end. An elderly woman lugged a rumor that had outgrown her; two boys took turns holding the tail.

When foundations forget their language, translation begins at sea level

There was a stall of gestures. “We rent them,” the vendor said. “Own them and they spoil.” He offered me a shrug with far-reaching implications, a wave that meant three different goodbyes, a nod that closed a door. The gestures were wrapped in tissue, labeled with dates and small cautions. I rented a pause. It was light, almost transparent, and fit in the palm like a coin. “Careful with that one,” he said. “It amplifies whatever surrounds it. Pause near certainty, and certainty doubles. Pause near doubt, and you may not find your way out.”

The Ministry of Misunderstanding occupied a handsome building with a broken clock in the pediment. People queued politely. No one knew the time, and everyone knew it precisely. I joined the line without intending to. Inside, I took a number and sat. The walls displayed diagrams of exchanges gone wrong—a seed swapped for a story that sprouted into a courtroom; a handshake that multiplied into a chorus of accusations; a borrowed melody that returned as an illness you could whistle. The clerk called my number, ushered me forward, and stamped a form I hadn’t filled out. The stamp looked familiar: the insect smashed on a windshield mid-flight, wings splayed like quotation marks, torso like an incomplete character from an alphabet that lost interest in itself. “What does it certify?” I asked. “Consent,” the clerk replied. “To what?” “To being changed by something you haven’t met yet.”

Bureaucracy with baroque ambitions: the kind of building that files your intentions for you

Most cities have a university; this one had many, and none were where you’d expect. The library was a bridge. Its books drifted along the river and nudged the pilings like eager dogs. If you wanted to read, you cast a line and waited. I caught a volume titled On the Ill Effects of Translation. It was waterlogged, the letters blurred, and yet the chapter headings remained sharp: “On the Ambiguity of Gifts,” “On the Ventriloquism of Ideas,” “On the Cure of Misuse.” I dried it in the sun, and as it dried it became a different book: The Itch of Similarity. “Be careful,” said a passerby. “Books in this city are camouflaged animals. They pretend to be other books until you focus.” “What happens when you do?” “They become themselves and run away.”

Someone must have told someone else that I could lecture, because the next morning an invitation slid under my door, written in a hand that might have been mine. “Speak tonight,” it said, “at the Hall of Echoes.” I checked the map; the Hall moved. Navigating required surrender. By afternoon it had followed me three blocks, and by evening it was behind me, clearing its throat.

The first audience of every idea—astonishment, terror, applause

The Hall’s ceiling was painted with a forest of ears. They leaned down to listen. Children occupied the front rows, their feet not touching the floor. They were practicing synchronized boredom that made the elders proud. I began with prepared remarks—the sort of remarks that fit in luggage and pass sniffer dogs—about the ethics of exchange, the perils of appropriation, the model of dialogue, and other abstractions that make speakers feel secure, like winter coats. The microphone turned my voice into something slightly chirped, the sound a kettle makes at low boil. The sentences marched out, saluting no one. The first echo came back wrong, and better. A child repeated my example and—without changing a word—made it say the opposite. Another child improved my metaphor by folding it inside out. Then the elders joined in, offering counter-echoes, and soon the room was a democracy of mishearing.

I abandoned the notes. “Suppose we consider exchange as a disease,” I said, “an illness contracted in good faith.” Nods, some laughter, a cough that felt scripted. “Suppose we consider it as a cure,” I said, “the treatment for having been too long oneself.” The echoes took their time with that one, kneading it like dough. An old man rose, leaned on his cane, and observed that in this city people emigrate from themselves every few years to keep things fresh. “Otherwise,” he said, “we become parts of speech.” The audience groaned appreciatively. The schoolteacher seated beside him corrected his verb tense.

After the talk, a woman in a green coat took my arm and led me outside. “You spoke well,” she said, which in this place meant I had been handled gently by the room. We walked in silence to the edge of the square, where a fountain rehearsed its sentences. She told me the city had a practice she thought I ought to see. “At sunset,” she said, “people gather to exchange shadows.” She pointed to a wall already warming with silhouettes from the low, patient sun. “You can trade your outline for someone else’s. A scholar for a dancer, a soldier for a seamstress, a child for a bird. Sometimes people return their shadows after a day. Sometimes they keep them for a season. A few never come back for their original and then, well, their old lives become rentals.”

We sat on a bench and watched. A man draped in the shadow of a ladder walked more carefully than he meant to. A pair of lovers borrowed each other’s outlines and immediately grew shy. A child with a shadow-cat darted along the edge of a building and then vanished, which alarmed everyone briefly until the cat returned, carrying the child’s laugh in its mouth. “Does no one worry about theft?” I asked. She looked at me with the pity we reserve for those who still think identity is a locked box. “Theft is a form of intimacy here,” she said. “It requires study.”

In the market of exchange, every gesture comes with its shadow, often better trained

The festival began the next night and ended whenever it liked. Drums trained in the slow art of pursuit circled the old quarter. When the drumming thinned, you could hear a flute learning to doubt itself. The music wasn’t entertainment so much as instruction in how to misremember. Dancers wore masks that looked like close cousins to their faces; sometimes the masks had the wrong expressions and persuaded the bodies to follow. Stalls offered small excitements for rent: a tremor in the left hand, a shimmer in the peripheral vision, a conviction that you were being photographed from the past. I rented a glance that promised and withheld in equal measure. “Return it before morning,” the vendor warned. “Glances kept overnight oxidize into grudges.”

A troupe performed a play with no dialogue. The actors carried signs that read, plainly, “This is a metaphor,” then swapped them for ones that read, plainer still, “This is not.” Audience members traded seats mid-scene so that the plot, if there had been one, changed owners. I wrote notes that dissolved into adjectives, then into weather. When the wind gathered a rumor into a funnel and blew it down a side street, everyone cheered at the clean escape.

In a narrow alley I met the Archive of Exchanged Things. It was a person, not a place, and he insisted he was temporary. He wore a coat sewn with pockets, each pocket labeled in a hand too neat to be fully honest. “I keep what people give,” he said, “until the giver forgets they gave it.” He showed me: a vial of pretend tears, a coil of hair from a head that had never been shaved, a ticket to a train that takes you to a city full of versions of yourself who never left home. “What happens then?” I asked. “I return it,” he said. “But sometimes,” he added, “I return it to the wrong person.” He smiled, inviting accomplicehood. “Mistakes,” he said, “are how a culture breathes.”

Days unhooked from the calendar and walked around. I took long walks that were shorter than intended and short walks that changed their mind halfway. “Direction is a mood,” explained a passerby, seeing me consult a map that looked guilty of something. I stopped expecting angles to add to ninety. At crossings, I watched traffic negotiate with itself. Once, two buses arrived from opposite futures and refused to let each other pass until a child counted backward from a number no one had reached yet.

Rivers teach diagnosis. The main river here had three currents stacked like layers of glass. The surface carried boats and gossip. Beneath, a second current flowed in the opposite direction, transporting arguments, grudges, and unfinished sentences. Divers surfaced mid-dispute, gasping “however” and “nevertheless.” At the lowest layer, a third current only moved at night, dragging what had been unsaid toward the estuary, where salt corrected everything. “Don’t swim there,” my informant told me, indicating the seam where two currents collided. “You’ll come back believing things you cannot prove and knowing only those.”

Cultures, like rivers, correct themselves by forgetting their earlier course

Someone said there was an embassy for lost things. I found it by losing my way and following the loss as if it were a scent. The lobby was deserted; embassies keeping office hours in a country that measures time by interruptions never attract large crowds. On the wall a motto: WE GUARANTEE NOTHING BUT RETURN. A bell sat on the counter. I rang it. A woman appeared who might have been the same woman in the green coat, or her remainder after subtraction. “What have you misplaced?” she asked. “My old certainty,” I said, “that culture is a gift we exchange, politely.” “Ah,” she replied. “We can issue a certificate of temporary replacement.” She typed, stamped, slid me a paper. The stamp again: insect on glass, wings spread like the quotation marks around the word exchange. “Keep that with you,” she told me. “When you encounter certainty again, show it this certificate. It should back away.”

On the seventh day, the city gave me homework: “Visit the School of Borrowed Names.” It was not a school in any recognizable sense. It was a courtyard where people sat in a circle and took turns introducing themselves as someone else, with full sincerity. An elder claimed to be a bridge. A boy said his name was Itchy. A woman announced she was “the smell before rain.” When it was my turn, I panicked and said I was “a visitor,” which was true, which is to say, wrong. The instructor, a person with a voice like a door closing softly, explained that names are tools, and that tools, when used well, change the user. I borrowed the name “Interruption” for the afternoon. It made people kind to me, but they kept looking over my shoulder.

In a café that relocated every few hours to avoid becoming too habitual, a rumor found me. Rumors in this country are not whispers; they are full-bodied creatures, polite at first, then insistent. This one sat in the chair opposite and ordered a drink in my accent. It spoke of a man who came to the city to study exchanges and ended up being exchanged for himself. I laughed, then realized the rumor wasn’t joking. “Do I get to choose?” I asked. “No,” said the rumor. “But you do get to keep the receipts.”

Where conversations cooled into customs and the sugar never dissolved in time

The longer I stayed, the lighter my luggage grew. Objects slipped from ownership into use. I forgot to lock doors and was rewarded with visits from neighbors carrying not casseroles but questions. “Is there a difference,” asked one, “between borrowing and believing?” Another wanted to know if the phrase “give and take” meant the same as “take and give,” or if order mattered. I began to answer, then saw that answers here were a form of payment and that I was overspending. At night the hotel’s hallways moved like a secret taught by repetition. I learned where I was by getting there again.

There is a chapel in the old quarter dedicated to mistakes. Not sin, not error—those have hierarchies—but mistakes, the ordinary sacred. People bring offerings of misbuttoned shirts, miscopied recipes, misremembered anniversaries, misfired arrows recovered from haunted bark. A plaque explains the theology: “A mistake is a door discovered by walking into a wall.” The faithful light candles and extinguish them immediately so that the smoke writes a sentence only the ceiling can read. I sat in the back and felt absolved of nothing in particular.

Not the door you sought, but the one that had been waiting for your misunderstanding to arrive

Of course there were scholars here, and of course they had their rituals. In one lecture, a professor held up a bowl and asked us to consider whether a borrowed bowl returns as itself. “It has been touched,” he said, “and the touch remains.” He paused. “To return an object is to return a version of yourself you cannot keep.” Students nodded the way people nod when their teachers have finally said something they already knew but needed permission to know in public. Outside, the wind rearranged the flyers advertising a concert of silence scheduled for a date that repeatedly changed under our eyes.

On what became my last evening, though I had not decided to leave, the city organized a farewell that felt like a rehearsal. People assembled on rooftops with lanterns that burned the color of 3 a.m. A procession of quiet moved down the avenues, bearing portraits of words fallen out of use. I recognized a few and bowed. A woman offered me a small box, closed by a ribbon tied in a knot that would require another person to undo. “For later,” she said. “Or for never. Both are acceptable outcomes.” I asked what was inside. “An unfinished sentence,” she said. “A good one. It stops exactly where it needs your breath.”

I dreamed that night of the border stamp. In the dream it pulsed like a small heart trying to learn a bigger rhythm. Each throb sent tremors through the passport’s paper, which absorbed them and pretended nothing had occurred. When I woke, the insect on the windshield mid-flight—the Rorschach of arrival—had copied itself onto the neighboring page. The two blots faced each other like mirrors misaligned and invented a third between them.

A map drawn when the world still believed in edges—the earliest form of cultural border control

Departure is a ceremony of pretending to reverse what cannot be reversed. The driver returned, the road retranslated. At the airport, the guard looked at my passport and said, “Ah.” Not approval, not suspicion, that third thing. “Did you enjoy your stay?” he asked, and I understood that enjoyment was not the unit of measure in use. “I changed,” I said. “Good,” he replied. “The exchange rate has been favorable lately.” He stamped the exit page with a mark that looked like a shadow shrugging in late sun. “Keep the receipts,” he added, which I understood as both bureaucratic instruction and folk wisdom.

On the plane, the city receded into its own abbreviations. I found the box in my bag, the one I’d been told to open later, or never. I waited until the cabin lights dimmed, then passed it to the stranger in the next seat. “Would you help?” I asked. She loosened the knot with the expertise of someone who has untied several lives. Inside, as promised, an unfinished sentence. It read: “Exchange is the trick of…”—and then it stopped, holding out its hand. I whispered a word, then another, then one that surprised me enough to wake the person across the aisle. The sentence accepted them graciously and grew a little more naked. I closed the box. The stranger leaned over, peered in, and smiled. “Oh,” she said. “A souvenir that spends you.”

Home—if I can call the place that received me—seemed to have been rearranged while I was gone. People spoke to me as if I understood, and to my amazement I did, though the meanings had become slightly translucent, the way leaves thin at the end of a season and reveal the blueprints of themselves. I noticed new stalls in the markets, selling habits by the ounce. I heard a melody in the background hum of traffic that had not been there before. When I hummed along, I caught myself improvising a counter-line, teaching the air how to breathe around it.

This is what I have learned, if “learned” is the correct verb for knowledge that keeps switching pockets: Cultural exchange is not a bridge, not a handshake, not a polite trade of equivalents. It is a contagion—benign, if we’re lucky—in which we are changed by contact we cannot control. It is theft we consent to in the hope that, in being robbed of ourselves, we might be released from the tyranny of our own inventory. It is a rumor that sits across from you in a traveling café and speaks in your voice until you must either confess or laugh. It is a market where you pay with the memory you most wanted to keep and receive in return a beetle that later, in your hand, becomes a sentence you did not know how to write.

All the world’s luggage is turning in circles, waiting for its rightful owner or a better story

And so: If exchange were fair, nothing would happen. If it were transparent, it would be boring. If it were safe, it would be useless. The blessing—call it that, or the curse—is that exchange is a Rorschach splattered across a passport, an insect on a windshield mid-flight, a blot you are asked to interpret until the interpretation interprets you. You will be told to keep the receipts. You will misplace them and find, in their absence, a proof stronger than paper. You will open a box you were warned not to open and discover not a gift but a gap asking for your breath. You will say a word you did not intend to say. It will become yours by the force with which it disowns you.

If I were to issue a certificate, like the Ministry does, I would stamp it with that emblem: the winged smear that is also a face, also a weather system, also a warning not to linger and an invitation to do just that. It would read: THIS CERTIFIES THAT YOU HAVE BEEN SPOKEN BY ELSEWHERE. And beneath, in smaller type: RETURN UNNECESSARY.

Michele Gisuat is a wandering essayist and occasional ethnographer of the imaginary. Her work traces how ideas migrate across borders and lose their passports in translation. She has written on gift economies, mistranslations, and the secret lives of souvenirs. She lives between languages.

Cover image: Luck as a color, belief as an insect—both prone to flight