Cartographic Violence and hacha

Picking up, from Unincorporated Territory [hacha] I was overwhelmed. I flipped through it to get a gist of what I would be reading. There were maps, and graphics, and fragmented pieces, and bold enlarged numbers. I was completely puzzled by what I saw, but I was mostly excited to navigate, to move through, to dig into this work. I must begin by looking at the start of the text. Rather than a Table of Contents, Craig Santos Perez opens the book with a “Map of Contents.” The maps begin before the book itself. This phrasing, “Map of Contents,” would spark the beginning of questions I would later find myself continually asking throughout my reading of the text. These questions included, but were definitely not limited to, what does it mean to be mapped?, to be from a place that has been mapped?, to know those who’ve damaged your home took part in the mapping? to be the keeper of your land (plants, medicines, animals), your language (before it was forced from tongues to be drowned in a sea of English), and those who came before you?

I have always been enamored with cartography and I found my interest peaked again while reading from Unincorporated Territory [hacha]. One moment that drew me into this question of mapping was when Perez wrote about the preparations for a typhoon in one of the “from descending plumeria” pieces. Perez writes:

there was an early season storm. we took the usual precautions: boarded the windows. (i don’t want the kids to go, / my mom said when she returned from my sister’s room to check on her) unplugged the gas stove, placed towels on the bottom of the doors. and moved the furniture away. from the windows. i don’t remember the name. of the typhoon, but it was. mapped and monitored.

I placed emphasis on the last sentence, “mapped and monitored.” This storm, chaotic, unknown, and potentially dangerous, was mapped and monitored as a means of gaining a semblance of understanding and control over something inherently incapable of being controlled. This parallels the ways by which the US and Japan became determined to map and monitor Guam and those who inhabited the land. The poem continues with an italicized portion describing the ways in which a US military war cargo ship brought snakes that would invade and infest the island.

Perez places maps on the page, creating the immediate impulse to look (deeply and with intention) — in addition, images alongside poetry will almost always hold more weight as they are analyzed in tandem with the words. What happens when one attempts to render land on a page? There is violence in taking a 4 dimensional world and flattening it to a 2 dimensional one. In doing a little research I found a definition of “cartographic violence” it reads,

“cartography – as a means of identifying the boundaries of the sovereign state’s territories as well as its core features, a means of asserting ownership, sovereignty and legitimacy – emerged as a political discourse concerned with the acquisition and maintenance of state power. To map a territory means to formally define space along the lines set within a particular epistemological and political experience – a way of knowing and dominating – transposing a littleknown piece of concrete reality into an abstraction which serves the practical interests of the state, an operation done for and by the state.” (Off The Map: On Violence and Cartography by Mark Neocleous)

I thought it was pertinent to include this definition because it aligns well with how I read Perez’s work. I think this definition gets at the heart of the idea that the maps are an imposition of the wants, desires, and for the benefit of an invasive (colonial) force. The phrase “transposing a...piece of concrete reality into an abstraction” reminded me of a poem on page 16 which reads “geographic absence ~ “the old census records show” / because who can stand on the / reef / and name that / below water or sky / imagined territory ~” For me, this poem expresses the hubris of cartographers or anyone who would stand on the land and presume to create a document which could describe what’s embedded in each part. Thus, the “imagined territory” is the abstraction, is the map, is the false narrative fed through man’s fabrication of fictional boundaries on a page.

Before I end this post I want to think a little bit about how to “read” maps. In their own way they contain a language, with legends, at times colors, text (directional, informational, etc.). Maps become determinants of how people come to interact with a space. Perez includes this map of military bases which demonstrates the ways by which Guam as an island had become owned and used to serve the “practical interests of the state.” On the map you can see that barely any land is left for anything outside of these bases.

Alone this map could be interpreted in a variety of ways, used in the US as a show of strength (military, and global). But, in the context of this book it serves a vastly different purpose. In a following poem (page 88) we get the definition of the word “tano” as “land, soil, earth, ground.” To see an image displaying Guam as a militarized island, and then to be reminded in the native language that Guam is a place of “land, soil, earth, ground” is a stark contrast that enhances how we read the maps and the poems, challenging readers (specifically American readers) to reexamine the ways in which we’ve been conditioned to believe in the “art” of cartography.