3 - Transition(s) and Mut(il)ations: Isaac Díaz Pardo, Carlos Durán, Manuel Rivas

Summary

I navigated without maps or precise schedules. I intuited that genuine cartography is hidden, invisible to hours and routes. I allowed myself to be swept along as if my body were blank. I eschewed directions and travel times. I understood that no one awaits a true traveler, that I was alone. Day and night were contained within me. I looked at my hands and understood heredity. I understood how the rhythm of a heart devoid of armor creates a map, imprecise yet full of remembrance and discoveries, like entering a secret.

(Marjorie Agosín. ‘Creating a Map’, Cartographies, 3)

[T]o translate the memory of what, precisely, did not take place, of what, having been (the) forbidden, ought, nevertheless, to have left a trace, a specter, the phantomatic body, the phantom-member – palpable, painful, but hardly legible – of traces, marks, and scars.

(Derrida, Monolingualism, 61)

Displacement is both a bodily experience and an emotional one. As Marjorie Agosín reminds us in her prose-poem ‘Creating a Map’, migration marks the body as tellingly as it marks the heart. Agosín's words suggest that if maps of migration are to have real meaning, they must be ‘fleshed out’ not only figuratively, but also literally. They absorb meaning through their interaction with the bodies which, as Agosín so evocatively demonstrates, take upon themselves the characteristics of a map. The language of bodies and routes comes together in the map: body, hands, heart, now co-ordinates around which meaning and memory surge.