Annie Koh

Maps lie

Earlier in spring semester, I joined a campus reading group. Otherwise left to my own devices, I’d only read non-fiction and scifi/fantasy.

We just finished What the Body Remembers by Shauna Singh Baldwin. Though the story revolves around the two wives of Sardarji, a civil engineer who carries (in a clever literary conceit) an internalized Englishman named Mr. Cunningham, and not Sardaji himself, he ends up getting some of the best lines near the end. He’s tasked with coming up with a proposal for his part of Punjab as Partition looms in late 1947.

Maps lie.

Surprising. He has never realized this before, but maps lie.

Maps lie, for their colours can show nothing of what a man feels when he says, “I come home.” They say nothing of the distance a man will ride to avoid passing through areas inhabited by another’s caste or quom, or the direction a man turns when he bows his head to pray. Maps lie. The artful cartographer separating where earth from sea with a simple line that refuses to tell that one does not end where the other begins, but continues, undergirding the sea.

They are an aesthetic achievement, that’s all. Essential preparation for the next map that will be drawn, essential for discussions and negotiations, but in themselves mere approximations of the terrain, aids to dreams of conquest, marking familiar places in the roaming of the mind.

Just a reminder for all of us cartographically obsessed, GIS-wielding planner types.

my father’s maps

[Via Slate, a map drawn by artist Alexander Calder]

My father writes the most meticulous directions. He uses street names, number of stoplights, and landmarks. I always took it to be a symptom of his engineer training and a need to build-in redundancy. After living in Seoul for five years and struggling with the general non-usage of street names (we navigate by subway stop exits and landmarks, sometimes ones that no longer exist like how I told cab drivers to drop me off at the “old district office”), I decided that his triple-threat directions were just a merger of American and Korean directional structures.

So as much as I appreciate Google Maps in all its satellite glory, I really adore the spatial oddities collected by the Hand Drawn Map Association.

It’s a situation we are all acquainted with: planning to visit friends in an unfamiliar part of the city, you draw yourself a rudimentary map with detailed directions. In March 2008, graphic designer Kris Harzinski founded the Hand Drawn Map Association in order to collect just such drawings of the everyday. Fascinated by these accidental records of a moment in time, he soon amassed a wide variety of maps, ranging from simple directions to fictional maps, to maps of unusual places, including examples drawn by well-known historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Shackleton, and Alexander Calder