The Rhetoric of MovementExploring the Art of Mapping in Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion

  1. María Alonso Alonso 1
  1. 1 Universidade de Vigo
    info

    Universidade de Vigo

    Vigo, España

    ROR https://ror.org/05rdf8595

Journal:
Oceánide

ISSN: 1989-6328

Year of publication: 2019

Issue: 11

Type: Article

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More publications in: Oceánide

Abstract

The idea of transit is paramount to approach Jamaican-born and U.K.-based poet Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, a collection of poems that challenges the traditional notion of diaspora. Through the errant consciousness of a twofold poetic voice, Miller explores the changing experience of migrant subjects within a new world-order. Throughout these poems, transnational movements shape an island that yet has to be mapped. Mapping is regarded as the art to make something visible. This is what a poetic divided-self, the Cartographer and the Rastaman, discuss about while considering Zion, a transcultural metaphor that stands for both Western and non-Western imageries. Contrasting poems that sometimes mirror and sometimes contradict each other, and which are written either in standard or Jamaican English, advocate for the need to travel in order to map the world. These dislocated poetic voices found in the text will to unfold history to illustrate the way in which transnational identities are remapping the world anew.

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