Last February, I facilitated a workshop series called Watery Maps. In these workshops, I asked participants to think about bodies of water that had shaped their paths through this life. These could be waterfalls, oceans their families had migrated across, the cup of tea they drank in the morning, their own bodies. It could be puddles they stepped over, tears they cried, beads of sweat on the forehead of someone they loved. I wanted to think together about the ways water makes and remakes us, and how we might map its fluid paths. We talked about how we might reclaim the act of mapping back from the state and from systems of surveillance, charting intimate, loving, goofy, resistive geographies of our own. I think about those workshops often, about how it felt to sit in witness to each other as we drafted love letters to oceanic bodies and created symbols, iconographies, and map keys for the stories we carry inside of us. About how each of us holds our own meticulous topographies, our own layered and complex geographies that bear little resemblance to the calculated generics of Google maps or a world atlas.
Lately I’ve been working with Andrea Olsen’s Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide. Olsen’s book leads the reader/practitioner through a series of writing and movement exercises to explore their relationship to soil, place, air, and other elements of landscape. In the first chapter, Olsen asks the practitioner draw a map of a familiar place, then tell their own story about home. I thought immediately about the Brooklyn apartment where I spent the first 17 years of my life. I started doing research to figure out what kinds of maps I might make - I looked on real estate websites to find that the one bedroom, 550 square foot unit had been drastically remodeled and set at gentrifiers’ rental prices. I combed through nineteenth century maps of Brooklyn and read accounts of how the entire neighborhood was originally meant to be part of Prospect Park. I looked at Frederick Law Olmstead’s layout map of Eastern Parkway and searched for information on the Black and indigenous people who had lived in the area prior to and during European colonization.
Ultimately, though I stored these findings away for future projects, I decided to draw maps only I could create. I wanted to reach back to what I had learned and taught in Watery Maps, to use mapping as a way to chart the way my child and adolescent body had moved through this interior. I wanted to map as a way of thinking through my own relationship to this space, shaped as it was by inherited stories of migration, settlement, home-seeking. To reject the empirical in favor of a different kind of knowledge. As Gaston Bachelard writes in Poetics of Space, “For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.”
In the first map, I thought about how I often moved back and forth between my apartment and the other spaces within the apartment building. During long winter days especially, my restlessness would often take me to the stairwells, into the lobby with a jump rope, into the living room to follow along with dance aerobics videos, in search of places to stretch and move. This is a map about spaces of repetitive movement, lines charting choreographies of exercise, play, and obsession.
For my next map, I thought about all the places in the apartment where I would peer out and see glimpses of neighbors, birds, squirrels, hear snatches of music and arguments and laughter. Spaces where the sonic and visual lines between inside and outside blurred. Whether through childhood nosiness or through the design of small urban apartments, these were sites of curiosity and connection. The peephole on the front door, the small gap under the front door itself, the living room window which faced the back of the neighboring building. I was unsure how to chart the relative location of these places - in my mind, they are connected by ever-shifting lines of sound and sight.
Thinking about these quick moments of connection or listening in led me to the question of privacy and interiority. Where did I practice holding my emotional interiors? Where did I learn early lessons about trust and protection of the self? Where did I store my thoughts? My next map was a sketch of various places I hid my journals, both on my body and in the body of the home.
There is a famous painting, often seen on fridge magnets or prints in Black households, of a woman sitting on the edge of a bed. Her shoulders are raised and her head is down. Her white nightdress falls between her knees. She looks like she is steeling herself for a long day or night, calming her nerves, gathering her wits. I have always wondered what the other rooms in her home look like - if she sits in them too or saves her most vulnerable moments for this bedroom. I wonder if there are children or a lover clamoring on the other side of the door. I wonder what she thinks of the materials of her bedsheets, if she’s ever paced the floor in worry or anticipation. I have always been drawn to art about interiors, specifically the heft and possibilities of the Black domestic space. Spill by Alexis Pauline Gumbs is one of my favorite books precisely because it dwells mostly within the interior space of the home, negotiated and precarious as “home” may be for the poems’ Black woman protagonist. A single apartment can hold multiverses of sound and sorrow, growth and memory. I want to use maps as a way to chart these things through the confusion of their overlapping contours. Maps of small corners, intimate moments, chimeric memories. Maps for navigating the self, and its homes, and its pasts.