"In this collection, we follow the author on a journey to discover how place, language, and diaspora shape culture. Miller explores different ways of knowing and the ways in which these methods of understanding conflict and overlap. Through this, he lays out a path to decolonizing Caribbean geography and identity. This collection is as much for the poet as it is for the cultural anthropologist, philosopher, and linguist in us all."
Publisher Carcanet Press
Publication Date 2014-05-30
Section Poetry / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Maddie C.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781847772671
In this collection, acclaimed Jamaican poet Kei Miller dramatizes what happens when one system of knowledge, one method of understanding place and territory, comes up against another. We watch as the cartographer, used to the scientific methods of assuming control over a place by mapping it, is gradually compelled to recognize—even to envy—a wholly different understanding of place, as he tries to map his way to the rastaman’s eternal city of Zion. As the book unfolds the cartographer learns that, on this island of roads that “constrict like throats,” every place-name comes freighted with history, and not every place that can be named can be found.
