Read an Excerpt

The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion

Carcanet Press Ltd

    The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion


    i. in which the cartographer explains himself

    You might say
    my job is not
    to lose myself exactly
    but to imagine
    what loss might feel like –
    the sudden creeping pace,
    the consultation with trees and blue
    fences and whatever else
    might prove a landmark.
    My job is to imagine the widening
    of the unfamiliar and also
    the widening ache of it;
    to anticipate the ironic
    question: how did we find
    ourselves here? My job is
    to untangle the tangled,
    to unworry the concerned,
    to guide you out from cul-de-sacs
    into which you may have wrongly turned.


    ii. in which the rastaman disagrees

    The rastaman has another reasoning.
    He says – now that man's job is never straightforward
    or easy. Him work is to make thin and crushable
    all that is big and as real as ourselves; is to make flat
    all that is high and rolling; is to make invisible and wutliss
    plenty things that poor people cyaa do without – like board
    houses, and the corner shop from which Miss Katie sell
    her famous peanut porridge. And then again
    the mapmaker's work is to make visible
    all them things that shoulda never exist in the first place
    like the conquest of pirates, like borders,
    like the viral spread of governments


    iii.

    The cartographer says
       no –
    What I do is science. I show
    the earth as it is, without bias.
    I never fall in love. I never get involved
    with the muddy affairs of land.
    Too much passion unsteadies the hand.
    I aim to show the full
    of a place in just a glance.


    iv.

    The rastaman thinks, draw me a map of what you see
    then I will draw a map of what you never see
    and guess me whose map will be bigger than whose?
    Guess me whose map will tell the larger truth?


    v. in which the rastaman offers an invitation

    Come share with I an unsalted stew
    an exalted stew of gungo peas and callaloo
    and let I tell you bout the nearby towns
    the ways and chains that I-man trod
    how every road might buck yu toe
    down here in Babylon.


    vi.

    after Kai Krause

    For the rastaman – it is true – dismisses
    too easily the cartographic view;
    believes himself slighted
    by its imperial gaze. And the ras says
    it's all a Babylon conspiracy
    de bloodclawt immappancy of dis world –
    maps which throughout time have gripped like girdles
    to make his people smaller than they were.


    vii.

    But there are maps
    and then again, there are maps;
    for what to call the haphazard
    dance of bees returning
    to their hives but maps
    that lead to precise
    hibiscuses, their soft
    storehouses of pollen?
    And what to call the blood
    of hummingbirds but maps
    that pulse the tiny bodies across
    oceans and then back?
    And what are turtles born with
    if not maps that break
    eggs and pull them up from sand
    guide them towards ocean instead of land?


    viii.

    I&I overstand, for is true that I-man
    also look to maps drawn by Jah's large hands
    him who did pull comets cross the sky
    to lead we out from wicked Pharaoh's land.
    At noon when sun did hide the high
    graph of stars, the cosmic blueprint
    of I&I freedom, is Jah who point our eyes
    to well-bottom an say blink and blink until
    you see again the spread of guiding galaxies.
    Babylon science now confirm – stars too
    are 'black bodies'. I&I did done know this
    already – that up there is Jah-Jah's firmament
    full of light and livity.

    A Prayer for the Unflummoxed Beaver


    so unmoved by the boat's slow approach – the boat
    drifting across the flat green acre of water; a prayer
    for these acres of water which, in the soft light, seem firm;
    the squirrels, however, are never taken in;
    a prayer for the squirrels and their unknowable
    but perfect paths; see how they run across
    the twisting highway of cedars but never crash;
    a prayer for the cedars and their dead knees rising
    from the water like tombstones; a prayer for the cedar balls
    that break when you touch them and stain
    your fingers yellow, that release from their tiny bellies
    the smell of old churches, of something holy;
    a prayer returned to the holy alligators – you owe them
    that at least, for just last night when you thought
    of Hana Andronikova you asked them to pray
    with you, knowing that their prayers are potent;
    at night the grass is full of their red eyes; a prayer
    for the grass which the alligators divide
    in the shape of a never-ending S; you lean over
    to pull some into the boat; in Burma
    this is called ka-na-paw, and can be cooked
    with salt and oil; a prayer for the languages
    we know this landscape by; for the French
    as spoken by fat fishermen, the fat fishermen
    who admit to the water – We all dying.
    You understand? Savez? A prayer
    for the dying that will come to all of us
    but may it come soft as a boat drifting across the bayou.
    May it find us unrattled and as unflummoxed as the beaver.


    For Hana Andronikova (1967–2011)


    ix. in which the cartographer travels lengths and breadths

    Give him time and he will learn the strange
    ways and names of this island: the clapping ascent
    to Baptist; the thankful that takes you up Grateful Hill –
    Grateful Hill just round the corner from Content; will know
    the rough and proud to Boldness and Blackness;
    the painful chains to Bad Times; the long and short
    to Three Miles, Six Miles, Nine Miles, Eleven Miles
    whose distances, incidentally, are unrelated
    to each other; he'll know the haunting that takes you
    through Duppy Gate; the slow that goes to Wait-a-Bit;
    the correct etiquette to Accompong, even to
    Me-No-Sen-You-No-Come; will know the grunting path
    to Hog Hole; the struggle required for Effort; the potholed
    roads to Shambles, Rat Trap and Putogether Corner;
    as well, the cartographer will know places named
    after places – how this island spreads out as a palimpsest
    of maps: for here is Bethlehem; here is Tel Aviv; here
    is Gaza; also Edinburgh; Aberdeen; Egypt; Cairo;
    and here is Bengal; Mount Horeb; Albion; Alps;
    they say – all of here is Babylon.

Place Name

Me-No-Sen-You-No-Come. In plain english: do not enter without invitation. For consider the once-upon-a-time adventures of rude pickney answering to name Goldilocks – nuff-gyal, self-invited into house of bears, assumed at once her colonial right to porridge, to beds and to chairs. The baff-hand child went in just so, not even a token offering of honey, and just like that proceeded to bruck up things. If only she had pennied the secret names of places. Me-no-sen-you-no-come: without invitation, you're not welcome. Or else, come in as you please – just know that this ground, these bushes, these trees observe you with suspicion many centuries deep.

x. in which the cartographer asks for directions

Sometimes the cartographer gets frustrated when he asks an I-formant how to get to such and such a place, and the I-formant might say something like –

Awrite, you know the big white house at the bottom of Clover Hill with all the windows dem board up, and with a high shingle roof that look almost like a church?

Yes, the cartographer says.

And in front the house you always see a ole woman, only three teeth in her mouth, and she out there selling pepper shrimp in a school chair with a umbrella tie to it. And beside her she always have two mongrel dog and one of them is white and the nedda one is brown?

Yes, I know exactly where you mean, the cartographer says.

And in the yard there is a big guinnep tree that hang right out to the road, so school pickney always stop there to buy shrimp and eat free guinnep?

Yes, yes, the cartographer insists. I know it.

Good, says the I-formant. Cause you mustn' go there.

    xi.

    At other times he is amazed
    by the hems and haws
       and shrugs of our roads –
       how they never run sure, but seem
         to arc, bend or narrow, just so
         an avenue will turn on itself

    as if to give you back a place
    you have just come from.
       Lady Musgrave's Road was laid
       in its serpentine way
         so that Miss Musgrave
         on her carriage ride home

    would not have to see
    a nayga man's property
       so much bigger than her husband's
       own, she did not want to feel
         the carriage slow and know
         her driver had just then turned

    his face to Devon House,
    a thing wet like pride in his eyes,
       and nodding to himself yes,
       is Missa Stiebel build dat. And to think
         that such spite should pass
         down even to the present

    generation – should dictate
    the thoughtless,
       ungridded shape of our city,
       the slowness of traffic each evening –
         to think that one woman's pride
         should add so much to our daily

    commute – this is something
    the cartographer does not wish
       to contemplate. Still, he wonders
       if on his map he made our roads a little
         smoother, a little straighter, as if in drawing
         he might erase a small bit of history's disgrace.

    A Ghazal for the Tethered Goats

    Sometimes in Jamaica, the roads constrict like throats
    and around each green corner – the tethered goats.

    They are provision from a god that craves
    the sacrifice of sons. If not, the tethered goats.

    They bleat all night who did not know the size
    of abbe seeds and their own beings – these tethered goats.

    They do not go to war but send their skins.
    How sweet, the repercussion of tethered goats.

    Kids tremble at the sound of gumbeh drums
    and of their futures. How meek the tethered goats.

    Their bellies run for sweetness, and their mouths
    are full of awful doom – these tethered goats.

    But how they stipple this island, from Trelawny
    to Saint Ann to Saint Andrew, the tethered goats.

    Roads


    The secret roads and slaving roads,
    the dirging roads, marooning roads.
       Our people sing:
       Alligator dah walk on road
       Yes, alligator dah walk on road

    The cow roads and cobbled roads,
    the estate roads and backbush roads.
       Our people sing:
       Go dung a Manuel Road
       Fi go bruck rock stone

    The marl roads and bauxite roads,
    the causeway roads and Chinese roads.
       Our people sing:
       Right tru right tru de rocky road
       Hear Charlie Marley call you

    The press-along, the soon-be-done,
    the not-an-easy, the mighty-long –
    so many roads we trod upon
    and every mile, another song.


    xii. in which the rastaman begins to feel uncomfortable

    So wide is the horizon as seen
    from the flung-open windows
    of Rose Hall Great House
    that one can observe
    the clear
    curve of the earth.
    For the cartographer
    the sea becomes
    a glittering parabola,
    an arc
    of shining measure;
    for the rastaman it is
    an upturned dutch pot,
    the one unwittingly shined
    by Anansi's wife, a silver tale
    of greed in the midst
    of famine,
    the tragic
    fullup of big-men's belly,
    the wash-weh
    of small people's magic.


    xiii.

    You see, the rastaman
    has always felt uneasy
    in the glistening white splendour
    of Great Houses; uneasy
    with the way others
    seem easy inside them,
    their eyes that smoothly scan the green canefields
    like sonnets,
    as if they'd found
    a measure of peace
    in the brutal
    architecture of history.


    xiv.

    But the cartographer, it is true,
    dismisses too easily the rastaman's view,
    has never read his provocative dissertation –
    'Kepture Land' as Identity Reclamation
    in Postcolonial Jamaica. Hell!
    the cartographer did not even know
    the rastaman had a PhD (from Glasgow
    no less) in which, amongst other things, he sites
    Sylvia Wynter's most cryptic essay: On How
    [We Mistook the Map for the Territory,
    and Reimprisoned Ourselves in
    An Unbearable Wrongness of Being ...

---

Excerpted from The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion by Kei Miller. Copyright © 2014 Kei Miller. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---