Why Write About a Place That’s Not On the Map?

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The places and characters in this story are imaginary. The first are not found on any map, the others are not alive, nor have ever lived, in any part of the world.

I am sorry to say this having loved them as though they were real.

Natalia Ginzburg, Author’s Note, Voices in the Evening, translated by D.M. Low

When, in my mind’s eye, I clearly saw five women friends hugging and parting from each other after their habitual weekly gathering, going off in five different directions, I understood that they would not meet again. I immediately understood their relationship with each other and that their lives would be taking different trajectories. I had a sense of their landscape—which was theirs and separate from me—and that I might be able, through them, to investigate difficulties of human relationships, friendships, family, professional and public-facing selves within community. In the course of writing Benefit Street, I would come to understand that these five women on their map offered me a way to deeply consider the ways in which community and the world at large are broken, to consider experiences that are difficult, complex and oftentimes incomprehensible: political corruption, political persecution, torture, a disregard for basic human rights, for humanity itself, and the traumas of war that fling millions of people from their homes to places across the globe.

What, however, I only imperfectly comprehended at that moment imagining these five women separating and going off in five different directions was that I was going to have to invent a whole city around them.

The imagining of a fictional world that intentionally refrains from naming landmarks on a known map—think of the Thames in Dickens’ London or the streets of Mahfouz’s Cairo—offers different kinds of unique possibilities for understanding the space between the concrete and the abstract, between the specific and the general, between our individualized worlds and the universal. An imagined landscape that does not correspond to any extant map, cannot be google-searched or map-quested, presents a unique opportunity to explore and experience that which is not understandable, in part, because the writer of these kinds of work begins with a premise of not knowing.

The imagining of a fictional world that intentionally refrains from naming landmarks on a known map—think of the Thames in Dickens’ London or the streets of Mahfouz’s Cairo—offers different kinds of unique possibilities for understanding the space between the concrete and the abstract, between the specific and the general, between our individualized worlds and the universal.

In the case of imagining Benefit Street, an imagined landscape in an unnamed city in an unnamed country—a voice separate from me—began to tell the story about a world from which she has been displaced. De-placed. Before I had a clearer understanding of this map, I knew of the day-to-day lives of these prickly and wonderful, mouthy, and deeply intelligent women with bills to pay and classrooms to teach, and I understood that if I could tolerate this unknowingness about that space, if I could witness and listen to their stories, the stories of the world outside me, such as the mother clutching the hand of the child running to safety around gunfire, that unnamed city and an unnamed country would begin to emerge. I would be able to bear witness to what I was experiencing inside myself, saying what I might not have been able to explore of these difficult, complex, and traumatic experiences. These kinds of investigations in the imagination can assist us to find some kind of understanding when what is before us is incomprehensible and when it is unutterable.

Because when the geographies we carry inside us cannot be reconciled by the stories we’ve been telling ourselves, we must reinvent place. When the places we are trying to reconcile cannot be accessed, when memory is not giving it back to us, when these places are no longer accessible, when they are no longer there, or when to name them carries great risk or risks further displacement from our own self, when we cannot re-collect them. Then, in these moments of breakage, of trauma, in our microcosmic worlds and in the macrocosms of the worlds of which we are a part, believe we are a part, or deny we are a part—when the re-collecting and making story, of making sense, involves imagining the space, interior and exterior, houses and streets and shops of memory, of present, of past, in order to imagine the landscapes in which we might be able to express those parts of self that seem to be, that may be, that are unrecoverable—in order to re-collect the self, we must compose new story.

This kind of imagining opens spaces that allow one to consider the experiences, both in the personal life and in our life as citizens of this planet we call Earth, to find a way to dwell with what is difficult and to find a way to think about what’s conflictual and that which is traumatizing. There are, of course, other kinds of explorations that offer a similar kind of possibility. Psychotherapeutic processes, for example, allow one to step away from familiar milieus in order to create a zone in which one can express and unravel that which one cannot speak of in the familiar, day-to-day milieus because it’s not possible to express it there and to speak it there would perpetuate the pain and suffering. The child who is experiencing, for example, harassment, bullying, and abuse at the hands of the coach, the teacher, the relative, the religious figure, cannot tell of this abuse in those familiar milieus and must find and construct a new milieu in order to process it. The person who has been tortured cannot turn to community in which those torturers dwell and to speak would likely induce only more pain and more trauma. And what is to be hoped for is that there will be the liberation of telling one’s story in a world in the milieu that one has constructed oneself.

The invention of fictional worlds—whether one that calls upon the details of existing maps, such as Billingsgate as viewed by Pip from a vessel in the middle of the Thames or Modiano’s Paris, or whether it’s premised on an imaging that intentionally refrains from naming these landmarks, as in the case of J.M. Coetzee Waiting for the Barbarians, with its defamiliarized landmarks, with “the capital”—offers the possibility of telling a story of a world that no one else has imagined. In this, there is liberation for the writer, and the reader, to explore that which might otherwise be impossible to explore.

But what of this fictional world that resists naming landmarks the reader might experience as somehow familiar? What distinguishes it from other kinds of invented worlds? And why the need to invent a world, so to speak, out of whole cloth? What kind of explorations does it free us to make? What happens to our understanding if we can imagine a puppet carved out of a piece of wood who becomes humanized? Collodi’s Pinocchio is also a story about the high cost of an illiterate and ignorant citizenry, a story about boys lured away by the promise of riches and fun who are then transformed into beasts, in other words, the harsh realities of late 19th century Italy. When Pinocchio finds himself trapped inside the cavern of the Pesce-cane, that whale-like creature inside which he is reunited with Geppetto, do we need to geolocate map coordinates in the sea?

During the long course of writing Benefit Street, I asked myself over and over about what is accomplished with different kinds of imaginings. I understood from the onset that this work was going to be different from my previous works of fiction that had been imagined out of places that could be located on a map: Dawson, New Mexico, site of two disastrous coal mine disasters in the early 20th century or the location of San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti in 16th century Venice in a time of plague. Benefit Street, a book about displacement, about exiles and political refugees, and about the loss of a community and home that had been painstakingly constructed, about the growing repression within an increasingly authoritarian state, was written during a period of unending wars, specifically, the Iraq War, which lasted from 2003 to 2011, and the long involvement of the U.S. in the war in Afghanistan which ended last year. I understood that in Benefit Street, landmarks would begin to exist only in the telling, and that for its narrator, known places—with their sensory physicality, with the concreteness of their objects and dwelling places—no longer existed.

How these kinds of imaginings occur is, of course, a process that cannot be adequately described, in part because its invention occurs during the inventing of it. No matter how thoroughly we might commit to investigate the rational world of its natural processes—how does the neurocircuitry of our brains make our thinking—or however deeply and conscientiously we strive to understand literary traditions and the books that have made us writers and readers, questions about the arrival in this imagined zone where concept, senses, memory, sounds converge, will remain largely unanswerable. How does a moving image of five friends dispersing from an intersection in five different directions come together in my brain at that moment? How does the articulation of it, which comes together both in the moment and over the course of time become a sentence: “We walked quickly up Kader, and at the intersection where the three streets came together, we kissed each other on the cheeks and went off in five separate directions.”

Calvino has described the way in which we can imagine the intellect, images, language, literature, news of the day, memory, sensory experiences coming together in a zone of imagination which he called the fantasfera. In a 1985 interview with Italian writer and journalist Sandra Petrignani, his description of this zone followed the re-calling of a phrase from Dante’s Puragtorio: “Poi piovve dentro l’alta fantasia . . .” [Then it rained inside the upper fantasy]:

In this way the world is also made up of images, of thoughts: it is the
multiplied world, its images, its transfigurations. So therefore there’s always
a kind of cloud attached onto the world, a fantasfera, which is an atmosphere
created by our images of the world. [“In tal senso il mondo è fatto anche
di immagini, di pensieri: è il mondo moltiplicato le proprie immagini, le
proprie trasfigurazioni. Quindi sul mondo aleggia sempre una specie di
nuvola, una fantasfera, che è un’atmosfera creata dalle nostre immagini del
mondo.” Translation mine]

With the forcible abduction of perhaps as many as 200,000 children from their home country to another country, might this kind of thinking be a kind of imaging we’re in need of? With women arrested for having miscarriages. With the ubiquitousness of book burning. With a pandemic that will not go away. With the daily occurrence of pre-planned “random” mass shootings by broken young men in places we all know, for me two communities, Highland Park and Highwood, Illinois, places of childhood generativity which four grandparents and a great aunt came to call home after their displacement from an Italy not very far removed from the world Collodi imagined. These blinding times, perhaps, lead us to write about invented places so that we can find new ways to deeply begin to consider them. Can it be that works such as Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Collodi’s Pinocchio might even allow us to make some sense of the incomprehensible? The greatest aspiration for a writer, Calvino has said, is that the writer imagines a world beyond his, her, their own narrow world:

The highest test for a writer must be whether he can escape from
parochialism: of his country and society and also the parochialism of all
mankind. He must expand this vision, and, if possible, see things moving
on this earth as they might be seen from another galaxy.
Interview with Italo Calvino by Christopher Winner, “Seeing
from Another Galaxy,” Newsweek, September 12, 1977, p. 60.

Is it possible that what might just save us in these days, when we have just been wonderstruck by the first photos reporting back from the Webb space telescope, those astounding images of the Carina Nebula, lies in trying to re-dedicate ourselves to the imaginings of a kind of cloud attached onto the world while remaining physically rooted to this earth where we are currently living?

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