Cartographies of Exile

A New Spatial Literacy

Karen Elizabeth Bishop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781134699674
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Literature

This book proposes a fundamental relationship between exile and mapping. It seeks to understand the cartographic imperative inherent in the exilic condition, the exilic impulses fundamental to mapping, and the varied forms of description proper to both. The vital intimacy of the relationship between exile and mapping compels a new spatial literacy that requires the cultivation of localized, dynamic reading practices attuned to the complexities of understanding space as text and texts as spatial artifacts. The collection asks: what kinds of maps do exiles make? How are they conceived, drawn, read? Are they private maps or can they be shaped collectively? What is their relationship to memory and history? How do maps provide for new ways of imagining the fractured experience of exile and offer up both new strategies for reading displacement and new displaced reading strategies? Where does exilic mapping fit into a history of cartography, particularly within the twentieth-century spatial turn?

The original work that makes up this interdisciplinary collection presents a varied look at cartographic strategies employed in writing, art, and film from the pre-Contact Americas to the Renaissance to late postmodernism; the effects of exile, in its many manifestations, on cartographic textual systems, ways of seeing, and forms of reading; the challenges of traversing and mapping unstable landscapes and restrictive social and political networks; and the felicities and difficulties of both giving into the map and attempting to escape the map that provides for exile in the first place.

Cartographies of Exile will be of interest to students and scholars working in literary and cultural studies; gender, sexuality, and race studies; anthropology; art history and architecture; film, performance, visual studies; and the fine arts.

Part I
Exilic Textualities

1 A Cartography of the Uncertain

The Maya Textual Exile

Nathan C. Henne

American Indians hold their lands—place—as having the highest possible meaning and all their statements are made with this reference point in mind … It is in this profound sense where one discovers self as opposed to the casual sense of where one just happens to find one’s self.

—Vine Deloria, Jr.

Maps delight. They unsettle. They reveal deep truths, not just about where we come from, but about who we are.

—Dennis Lawson

Mesoamerican Exile

The events surrounding the arrival of Pedro de Alvarado’s Spanish forces at the K’iche’ stronghold of Q’umarkaj (in present-day highland Guatemala, near Santa Cruz, el Quiché) in 1524 was traumatic no matter which of the wildly varied sources are consulted. In fact, the trauma had started years earlier with the arrival of smallpox and other diseases, the conquistadors’ frequent vanguard and strategic ally. It is hard to discern with any degree of certainty how many of the Maya K’iche’ were killed by this fastest and most lethal conqueror; but within one hundred years of Contact, close to ninety percent of the Maya were dead due to all causes.¹ It is likely that about half of the K’iche’ people had died from disease before the Spanish and their allies even arrived and before the famous battles of 1524 began; still, these battles are most often cited as the definitive event in the conquest of the K’iche’ people, and eventually of all highland Guatemala.² At least partially as a result of the previous trauma of disease, the ensuing battles between the K’iche’ and the Spaniards along with their American allies did not last even a week on the plains of Xelajú in the northwest Guatemalan highlands.³ Tecum Umam led the K’iche’ warriors, who may have numbered as many as sixteen thousand according to Bernal Díaz del Castillo; Pedro de Alvarado led the Spanish and their Tlaxcalan and Kaqchikel allies, whose numbers may have ranged anywhere from six thousand to fifty thousand.⁴ Soon the invaders had advanced to the K’iche’ capital of Q’umarkaj, where two weeks after Tecum’s death, Alvarado hung (or burned, depending on the source), the two remaining K’iche’ leaders and burned the city to the ground.

The popular Guatemalan imagination—both indigenous and nationalist—best remembers the heroic death of the K’iche’ military leader, Tecum Umam, as it has come down to us through the K’iche’ títulos and the Spanish relaciones, the two most cited sources in recreating the events of this military clash.⁵ This present chapter, however, understands the sacking of Q’umarkaj a few days after the military defeat at Xelajú as historical fulcrum, because here began the K’iche’ exile in its most far reaching forms.

To be more specific, among the most important casualties of Alvarado’s actions in Q’umarkaj were the Maya repositories of culture, including books, which were destroyed when he burned the city to the ground. These books would have represented the accumulation of centuries of knowledge in many fields. While my focus on the burned libraries might seem callous in the greater context of torture and death, the associated losses to Maya culture had an impact even greater than the vast quantities of information these books contained: this burning was the first step in the loss of a textual system that mapped the Maya self. The burning of these books began an exile for the Maya that would last several centuries; indeed, this exile of self through the loss of a textual system would prove irreversible in some senses.⁶

The relationship between the underlying philosophy of the textual system and the culturally specific mapping of Maya self is metaphoric, but also cartographical in its representation of space and place on paper. This system enacted, both in form and content, the fuzzy boundaries among the various realms that constitute Maya notions of place. Under the auspices of the Inquisition in the Americas, the destruction of the Maya books and the killing of those who could read and write the hieroglyphic script led to nearly five centuries in which no one in the great majority of the area in which the Maya survived knew how to use or interpret the script.⁷ In what follows, I show that because the Maya textual system enacted a form of mapping, the burning of libraries in the Maya areas marked the beginning of an exile whose sufferers indeed longed for other systems that could represent relationships with place in ways similar to those that had been lost.

The Maya hieroglyphic script is based on a syllabary, which is important (as we will see below) because unlike an alphabet, a syllabary represents sounds in the smallest units that can still be pronounced by humans. In the absence of this script, the Maya were deprived of an important cultural enactment of what I have called elsewhere a “poetics of the uncertain”: a philosophy that implicitly foregrounds the instability of all sets of human interactions with the world.⁸ The poetics of the uncertain unconsciously reminds people that languages—be they “natural,” scientific, mechanical—can only approximate reality. This poetics underlies all the systems of mapping that I trace in this essay: geographical maps, writing, and human interactions with other realms, such as nature, the dead, and the so-called “supernatural.”⁹

A poetics of the uncertain provides a pivot point because it gives way to the subsequent fuzzy boundaries that we see in the various Maya artifacts under consideration. Maps and a hieroglyphic system of writing provide the first two steps in this analysis because they show how marks on paper enact less defined divisions that situate the self in relation to the places in which people live and through which they move. According to a poetics of the uncertain, all human ways of understanding and representing various aspects of the world are inherently limited in that they fall short in capturing or explaining the ever-changing phenomena they are designed to describe. Languages can describe certain aspects of these phenomena, but they cannot incorporate the infinite and shifting sets of interactions that actually constitute what these events are. In other words, even the most precise language of science or math cannot hope to approach a totalizing explanation of, for example, the natural world because all languages are inherently subjective and none has access to the enunciation of all others at the same time.

In order to make sense to humans or other observers—mechanical or natural—all languages must 1) limit the aspects of the phenomena they will gather and translate; and 2) parse the continuum of experience into artificially discrete units. These two limitations ensure that the languages engaged do not capture or completely describe the phenomena as they exist outside of representation. In fact, this second condition—discreteness torn from the continuum of experience—itself constitutes the difference between language and experience. Certainly Western philosophers, from Vico to Nietzsche right up to Deleuze, have undercut the totalizing project of modernity by articulating these inherent limitations of language. But the poetics of the uncertain in Maya thought foregrounds these limitations in both the ways language makes meaning and in the ways its textual system represents it. Therefore, this poetics functions on several different levels—that of textual system, map, discourse, and cultural notions of the divine—that are, in the end, cartographic and directly related to the trauma of exile and subsequent attempts to negotiate that trauma.

The fall of the K’iche’ kings at Q’umarkaj in 1524 marked a turn because it exiled the Maya K’iche’ people from the cultural pervasiveness of this poetics of the uncertain, which resulted in various kinds of exile. Many were literally dis-placed when “[Alvarado] ordered the city razed to the ground and the inhabitants scattered in all directions.”¹⁰ The Lopez Ordenanzas further describe this forced, systematic relocation of the Guatemalan highland societies: “Since the religious instruction of the Indians is impeded by their residing in scattered homesteads around the countryside … all natives of this province shall congregate in the main towns, [and] build permanent homes of stone therein.”¹¹ Thus many sixteenth-century Maya in Guatemala experienced exile in a physical sense. That this exile may have involved only tens of kilometers, as opposed to the thousands of kilometers that modern Maya exile usually entails, did not make the consequent ruptures any less wrenching.

William F. Hanks takes this disruption of Maya space a step further by suggesting that their relocation rendered significant changes on not only physical spaces: “The imposition of a new system of municipal and residential space is a central part of the background against which [changes in] sixteenth-century Maya discourse must be understood.”¹² In his work, Hanks studies colonial-era Maya texts to trace the evolution in “discourse genres” that resulted from the reconfiguration of the spaces around the Maya. Specifically, he looks at how the forced relocations changed the way the Maya write, both then and now, given a different kind of participation in community relations.

Hanks makes the relationship between physical space and text a central part of his argument—one whose direction I alter to a significant degree to make my turn to the philosophical exile that I present in the conclusion of this chapter. He wonders how the change in place brought about changes in discourse; but I invert the causal arrow and consider how the change in textual system brought about a change in how the Maya subject saw the world and her place in it. Specifically, when the Spanish conquistadors and their affiliated armies (with clerics close behind) burned Maya libraries and other civic buildings; outlawed the use of their hieroglyphic script; and rounded up and killed those who wrote and read these books, the Maya lost an important way of mapping their identities and relationships around them. For this textual system itself, when extracted from Western philosophical contexts, functioned as a map of sorts. I do not mean that the textual system functioned in a literary sense, rather that the textual system enacted a kind of continuity, or a refusal of discrete boundaries, that we see on several levels in Maya poetics. The textual system spoke to a person’s perception of his space in relation to the things and people around him.¹³ As such, it helped constitute a person’s philosophical approach to what it means to “be” in the most fundamental sense.

Though surviving Maya intellectuals transcribed some of the hidden codices using an adapted Latin alphabet and salvaged some of the content, the new text was unable to map the nuances of their culture in the same way as the hierolglyphic textual system that had evolved with the culture. Therefore, the destruction of the hieroglyphic codices, as well as the readers and writers of these texts, triggered a unique type of exile because the textual system had helped map how Maya people thought about the relationship between themselves and the world around them. The textual system was only one casualty whose eradication had further consequences because its characteristics were linked to the lack of definitive divisions between self and non-self in Maya thought. These cultural conceptions differed considerably from Western notions of the self. Though the Western concept of the inviolable, individual self was not fully developed in the sixteenth century, it certainly had begun to develop, as the Protestant ethic underlying the Reformation evidenced. Whatever its level of development, there is no doubt that Western notions of self were significantly different from parallel concepts in indigenous thought. And these differences made philosophical exiles of the Maya.

As the other essays in this volume show, what we mean by “exile” has broadened significantly in recent years to include much more than traditional geographic displacement. Forty years ago, Paul Tabori theorized the notion of internal exile to suggest that marginalization within a home society functions much like external exile in significant ways.¹⁴ Nonetheless, the “internal” in Tabori’s formulation still referred to geographic boundaries; instead of being exiled outside of one’s nation-state, the exile is marginalized within those geopolitical boundaries. In other kinds of internal exile, exiles might remain at home, but be limited in the extent to which they can participate in public life or suffer a certain alienation due to political or social changes within a country.

My contribution here both dialogues with and extends beyond these broad concepts of exile. The analysis that follows begins with a traditional, geographic exile, but then moves to the psychological disruption of new cartographical practices that I read as an exile brought on by the forced change of textual systems in the sixteenth century, and finally to an exile of self related to the perception of one’s relationship with other realms marked by place. While each of these exiles is related to the others, the neuro-processes involved in textual exile grounds the main argument of this chapter: the exile of the Maya self. The link between writing and exile here differs from traditional links between the two; I suggest that the textual system itself functions as a map—the cartography of this volume’s title. And this is not a metaphorical map because it deals directly with descriptions of space through marks on paper. In this case, a forced change in literary script in post-Contact Maya communities brought about a disorientation in te...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Cartographical Necessity of Exile
• Part I Exilic Textualities
• Part II Geographies of Displacement
• Part III Lyric Exile
• Part IV Escaping the Map
• Notes on Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index