Dark Continents

April 6 2018

I love old maps.

The artistry.

The singularity

of something inked by hand.

The thick vellum

of an object meant to last.

The heroic certainty they convey

despite all the guess-work,

as assured as the conquerors, and settlers

on their civilizing mission.

The exotic people, and romantic places

one easily imagines

where sirens beckon

and dragons lurk.

The possibility

of all that vacant space

beyond the known world.

Dark continents,

when the vast interior

was incognita

and oceans dropped over the edge.

Before we could look down from space

and the world seemed to shrink

and it was easy to believe

we were its masters.

Even the gas station road map

I found crammed in the glove box

of the old Buick hard-top

rusting out back.

Its paper brittling and fading and frayed.

Its accordion folds cracked.

The cramped notations

in my mother's hand

in sharp ball-point pen;

like a palimpsest

of best-laid plans.

The whole Eastern seaboard

from New York to Disney World

with its approximate coast

and darkly ruled interstates

and flatly rendered terrain,

guiding us

into the glamour and zing

of middle America.

As if towns and roads and rest-stops

were all that counted

from the commanding heights

of the 20^th century traveller.

My dad, a different man, with work on hold;

one hand, lightly on the wheel

a sunburned elbow jutting out.

My mother, navigating fretfully

who rode shotgun next to him.

And 3 boys, in the back bench-seat

jostling for room.

With me, the youngest, stuck in the middle,

legs hunched

over the hump in the floor

so my feet had nowhere to stretch.

Everyone sweltering

in the high summer heat,

before cars had air conditioning

and seat-belts were undreamt of.

Where I saw the first black man

I'd ever seen.

Except back then

we called them Negroes, or coloureds

and I probably stared.

Terra incognita, heading south,

following the map, deeper and deeper

into the tantalizing heart

of the dark continent.

Remember, this was early 1960s Toronto: a wintry and provincial Presbyterian city that was overwhelmingly white; hardly the vibrant cosmopolitan place it is today. So I really do think I saw my first African American on one of our family road trips south of the border. And I can only imagine Buicks when I think of this era, even though there is no rusting car out back. Not even an old road map, in fact. Although for young people today, navigating by one of those paper accordion-folded maps and not GPS would probably seem as ancient and inconceivable as a rare medieval one.

I do love old maps. I think they're beautiful. I admire the skill of their illustrators and engravers. I'm utterly mystified how they were made, at the plodding pace of human travel and without an eye in the sky. And I'm particularly in awe of the perseverance of the wilderness explorers who mapped this country, through interminable winters and black-fly season and down treacherous unmarked rivers into the unknown – unknown to the Europeans, that is.

I like the inversion that ends this poem. Historically, we in the west have patronized Africa: calling it the “dark continent” when really, it was simply we who were in the dark because of our ignorance. (Similar to “dark continent”, there is “the dark ages”: a period of history as dynamic as any other, no doubt, but which we have regarded as benighted simply because of our own lack of knowledge. And going back to Africa, one might also consider how the distortion of the standard mercator projection significantly under-represents that continent, making it appear relatively smaller than it should be.) So applying “dark continent” to America is both self-deprecating – a gentle swipe at my own ignorance as a young boy – and an ironic comment on the darkness of the civil rights era, and perhaps as well on the bourgeois sensibility and superficiality of middle America and tourist culture. (Terra incognita also has a certain resonance with terra nullius, the self-serving theory that the newly discovered lands of North America were unoccupied, and so free for the Europeans to claim as their own.)