“Pura basura, los que hacen mapas no saben que la Amazonía es como mujer caliente, no se está quieta. Aquí todo se mueve, los ríos, los animals, los árboles. Vaya tierra loca la que nos ha tocado, Fushía.”
-from La Casa Verde by Mario Vargas Llosa
What good is a map for a person on the unmapped move? National Geographic provided little help on a forty day camel drive across the northern Sudanese desert headed to Egypt along the Wadi al-Milk towards its meeting with the Nile south of Dongola. What good did its marked locations of El Wuz, Es Sayfiya and Soteir do for me when I only wanted to know where I was in relation to Bint Um Bahr (Daughter of Mother of the Sea), ‘Idd Ahmad (Ahmad’s Hand-Dug Well), and Jabal Abu Fas (Father of the Axe Mountain)- these names given to me by the trail boss Khairallah. (For more, see my January 10 entry). As much as I wanted to know where I was going, I needed to know where I had been. And KhairAllah would not tell me. Instead he laughed and said, find out when you get home.
The matter of misguided mappiing came into focus again at this year’s Kochi Biennale when standing before the silk-embroidered street scenes, made from threads pulled from fine dupattas, by Bapi Das, a Calcutta artist and former auto rickshaw driver whose pieces recreate what he has seen through his windscreen, most often grids of roads and back alleys he traversed by night.
His work Missing Route was particularly touching of my thoughts about home and abroad. In this case, its what he sees in the rear view mirror- his arm and half torso- and in his mounted mobile phone screen with GPS pulled up. This is what lies behind and before him- but not where he is.
His piece Lost in Transition still in its embroidery hoop does give this information. A man stands under a traffic light at 27th Street, his empty rickshaw beside the urban grid of red arterial roads, yellow residential streets, and green parks But this almost seems a puzzle page, asking for the shortest way to drive his yellow and green rickshaw through the yellows streets to the green space of home.
