A Question

EAVAN BOLAND

The poem here--"That the Science of Cartography is Limited"--was begun one February afternoon in Dublin. I was working in a room upstairs which overlooked the back garden, although at that moment there was almost nothing to see. I had the light on, my table was against the window. I had a long-sided notebook, dark blue, bought at the news agents in Dundrum village, and a simple ballpoint. Clean pages. The feel of plastic. The un-losable bulk and solidity of the notebook. It was the start of the nineties. There was talk of violence and resolution in Ireland, as there had been for decades. I can remember the uncurtained windows and the dark outside, the sound of my daughters in another room, maybe a television on downstairs. But these are surfaces. Once the poem was finished I could follow it back to another narrative, to a crisscrossing of memory and decision and private history.
     Explaining a poem is difficult. The method is inherently unreliable. There is too much instinct and error in the process to make its initiator a good witness afterwards. Akhmatova says of one stage in her poetry "my handwriting had changed and my voice sounded different." But such clear beginnings are rare. The truth is that every poem has a different hinterland: a terrain of chance and shadow, of images in life which stay put until they become images in language. This piece is about a hinterland like that, or at least about the guesswork involved in returning to it. If I engage in that guesswork, it will take me back further than the rainy afternoon and the notebook and the writing of this poem.
     There were no maps in our house when I was growing up, none that I remember. At least not in the obvious places where I saw them in other houses--on the walls, framed, or as pages open on a table. If there were I have no image of them. But there were maps at school. I went to a convent just north of London, beginning there a few weeks late when I was six years of age. I had just come from Dublin and the winter weather was starting to close in. Big, strange fogs swallowed the distances from early morning till dusk. The classroom had an ugly electric light which had to be on all day. On the wall in front of my desk was a map. The light turned it into a parchment-yellow with strange, rosy stains. It was a map of the world. Or more properly, a map of empire. The cracked linen unrolled from a wooden bar. The greenish seas edged up to big coral territories. Every day I sat there--six years old, then eight, then ten--always coming back to the same classroom for history, for science, for English, for religion. Always seeing a teacher in front of the map, speaking with certainty and precision. Often entering the strange illusion and that the teacher was mute and the map was speaking through her. Look what I own it said. See what you have lost.
     This poem begins--or at least I intended it to--where maps fail. The deliberate awkwardness of the proposition--that the science of cartography is limited--is built into the title and the title is the first line. Why do that? Because I wanted to start this poem, charged as it was for me, with a deliberate mouthful of reason and argument. I wanted to send it towards the reader the way an educator might send an account of empire to a class: announcing acceptable ideas with an illusory logic. Of course this is hindsight. There is never anything so conscious, certainly not in my mind, in the actual writing of a poem. Nevertheless, this was a known and volatile area for me: this precept of map-making, territory-owning.
      But if the ideas in a poem are difficult to get at, easy to simplify, the form is a more difficult proposition still. I could say that I am skeptical about poets writing about form, if I hadn't so often enjoyed a poet's account of why a word, or a line is this way and not that. In this poem, the form is relatively open. My background was in the lyric, and in the closed lyric at that. The Dublin of the early sixties where I first thought about poetry, first argued about it, first published it, was a powerful and closed world. The poem in the air, in the ethos, was a make-well lyric: stanzaic, rhyming, symmetrical in argument. This was the poem I had laboured to write in my late teens and at the start of my twenties--someone else's poem, not mine.
     If, on that dark February afternoon, it was my own poem, it was because a complicated, and hard to explain series of realizations had brought me there. I was, by now, in my forties. I had long ago grown restive with the closed models of Irish lyric poems--and British as well. My feeling was that they privileged the music and marginalized the voice. Since I had every instinct to go along with that when I was young, I had painfully and determinedly come to a more fractured and open-ended line and stanza, where the acoustics for the voice were better:
     
      When you and I were first in love we drove
      to the borders of Connacht
      and entered a wood there.
     
      Look down you said: this was once a famine road.      

     Those lines had an exact source for me. When I was first married, my husband Kevin--whose people had come from Mayo and who had had been brought up in Meath--pointed out the heartbreaking path of a famine road in a wood. The famine roads belonged to the second year of the Irish famine. In 1847, the Relief Committees, coming to Ireland from the economic councils of Lord Trevelyan and the British government, decided the Irish should work for their food. In the simple and most understated testament of heartlessness, they required strength of those who had none. Where those roads end in those woods is where those building them died.
      Did that terrible line, that mark of death in the woods, immediately join that other image--of the fogbound classroom, the map stained with power, the alien city and my first lessons in exile? Probably not. An image, in a poem, is a strange archive. The key is only partly held by the poet. The reader holds another part. The objective truth is hard to find and finally, probably unnecessary. But gradually, these fragments joined into something in my mind. I was certainly aware, long before I wrote this poem, that the act of mapmaking is an act of power and that I--as a poet, as a woman and as a witness to the strange Irish silences which met that mixture of identities--was more and more inclined to contest those acts of power. The official version-and a map is rarely anything else--might not be suspect as it discovered territories and marked out destinations. But the fact that these roads, so powerful in their meaning and so powerless at their origin, never showed up on any map of Ireland seemed to me then, as it does now, both emblematic and ironic.
     The poem had some other meanings for me as well. Those years-the eighties and nineties--were a time of debate in Irish poetry about the nature of the political poem. What was a political poem? Who was entitled to write it? But it was also a time when the resistances to women, to the unsettling of the Irish canon were very visible. There seemed to be a belief in more conservative literary debate that women might write the domestic poem, the poem about the suburbs, but not the mainstream Irish political poem. This poem is a small inventory of my views. The political poem was at its best, I believed-and Irish poetry had come to this late--when it was private at source. This is a poem with a deliberate domestic world, just hinted at, just quickly sketched: myself and my husband in a wood, looking down at those roads. It opens out into the considerations and darknesses which no domesticity, no household, no love and no security is safe from. The meeting of those worlds is entirely deliberate.
      This is not a long poem. Inasmuch as I could, I tried to put together the elements of voice with the sequence of the narrative. I began it one afternoon and within a week or so it was finished. Some definite articles were changed, some lines became shorter and others longer. Then I set it aside. Oddly enough, I never submitted it for publication in that year or the next. But I put it as the first poem in a book I published a few years later called "In a Time of Violence." I remain connected to it because it remains for me a small diagram of an argument most poets enter at some stage or another: who makes the destination, who marks the way, where is authority, and who will contest it? If there are no exact answers, at least there are questions. I hoped this poem would be one of them.