I often find myself thinking about the road that I used to take from school back to my house in Palestine. We lived on Al Tirra, and our school was on Al Ameen Street, Bireh. The school stood on a low, steep hill, while our house was on a gentle, elevated incline. I remember how, after school, we would often run down the slope and grab laban, or chocolate milk, before my mother picked us up. She would park at the end of the road and then take a right turn, to the main street. From this point my memory becomes faded and out of focus. The next memory I recall is the car driving up a slope, turning at the corner of another store, making another right and heading down the street to our house.
I drew the two lines of the journey – from the school to the store, then from the other store down to our house – from my imagination. Then, I tried to match these two lines with what I see on Google Maps: a road much more convoluted, with more turns, populated and overshadowed by buildings that I don’t remember. My memory and the infrastructural basis of the sketch do not match the road as revealed by the Google coordinates of the school and house and the overall route mapped out by Google Maps. Tools such as Google Maps and GIS reconstruct routes of a homeland that many Palestinians have not been to before – the homeland of their imaginations having been affected by colonization activities.
While they are tools of navigation – more specifically for spatial understanding and for real-time tracking of directions, estimated arrival time and traffic – they are also oculocentric, relying on the act of seeing. They reinforce visuals that are primed to be seen and occluding the unseen, permitting them to remain unseen.
As I look at the two diagrams, the sketch and the Google route, I realise these paths are not part of lands to be analysed and observed. These landscapes are also looking at their observers. While reduced to basic graphics, they are sites of sharing lived experience. They are not natural terrains to be drawn and calculated; they are witnesses to collective memories and to histories of violence and survival. Therefore, to look at a map, or even a simple sketch, through the lens of the cartography is to question its veridicality. As the writer Jorge Luis Borges observes in the short story ‘On Exactitude in Science’ about the map-territory relationship,1 maps reduce the representation of not only lands but also realities. These maps conform to the discipline of geography while neglecting the realities of access and those who are unable to claim rights to both.
At the core of the nonconformist, non-deterministic process of land surveys lies a central question: What are the rights to space-making and spatial imagination? How can we visualise land through maps and the tools of map-making while incorporating Indigenous knowledge? As Palestinians reclaim their agency in map-making, how can these tools of design become a vehicle for liberation from the material and evidentiary regime of map-making, which has been purposefully constructed to accommodate biblical imagination or colonial agendas, adhering to and even forming the building blocks for modern surveying techniques? The process eschews practices of border-making, creating instead a map that aligns with lived experiences through Palestinians’ own practices of documenting the land. In particular, the Indigenous ways of knowing the land are expressed through the symbols of tatreez.
What follows is a variegated map that serves as both an introspective reflection on my time spent in Ramallah through tatreez symbology and an extrospective outlook on the future of map-making – one that reconciles traditional knowledge with new means of visualisation. It begins with my recollection of the contours and topographic lines of the landscape surrounding my house and the city I lived in, Ramallah. While my memory is fragmented, almost blurry and out of focus, I do remember the steep contours and topographical landscapes of Ramallah, which are reimagined as the backdrop. On the far outskirts of the city, barren lands, sparsely vegetated in the higher territories, were being cleared for settlements. On the other hand, I remember the landscape of the cedar trees on the far side of where we lived, Al Tirra. The trees stood tall, serving as a living testament to colonial aggression. I also recall the road leading to Al Bireh, lined with olive groves, which remain resilient and rooted in the ground. Both are captured through the tatreez symbols of vegetation, unique to the city itself.
After all, memories are frail and can fail us, but a collective effort to imagine and document the land will not. They are an attempt to re-stitch the visual landscape of Palestine, imagining how we can visualise the materiality of its geography through Indigenous kinship. This challenge confronts the colonial legacy of cartography and its present-day implications, especially when we continue to rely on the grammar of these mapping techniques. While landscape becomes a form of resistance, design is a means to that end. This is where the tools of design are repurposed and new aesthetics of image-making and map-making collide, forming an assemblage of voices, narratives and experiences that reflect Palestinian landscapes, grounded in Indigenous knowledge. It transcends the mere adjectives and nouns of colonial cartographies, evolving into more than just a map of absence. It is now present in the remembrance of the material and symbolic landscape of Palestine, as I know it and as it could be – offering a vision of a land that is both lost and reimagined, yet to be fully liberated.
To Our Land
By Mahmoud Darwish & translated by Fady Joudah
To our land,
and it is the one near the word of god,
a ceiling of clouds
To our land,
and it is the one far from the adjectives of nouns,
the map of absence
To our land,
and it is the one tiny as a sesame seed,
a heavenly horizon . . . and a hidden chasm
To our land,
and it is the one poor as a grouse’s wings,
holy books . . . and an identity wound
To our land,
and it is the one surrounded with torn hills,
the ambush of a new past
To our land, and it is a prize of war,
the freedom to die from longing and burning
and our land, in its bloodied night,
is a jewel that glimmers for the far upon the far
and illuminates what’s outside it . . .
As for us, inside,
we suffocate more!
