By Nuzhat Biswas
My map consists of four different layers. The first two layers broadly chart the trajectories of the two principal characters of the novel, Lafala and Aslima, across Africa, Europe, and America. I have mapped placenames onto specific geographic locations where possible, for e.g., ‘Marseille’, ‘Marrakesh’, ‘Immigration Hospital’; and used polygons to illustrate placenames that are more ambiguous, such as ‘West Africa/bush’, ‘Aslima’s lair’, etc. I have also drawn lines in between placenames to indicate travel, by land or by sea, where relevant. In these layers, I have also paid particular attention to instances where Africa is evoked through the characters’ past. I have used this to explore the way the physical settings of Europe and America are overlaid by the projected space of Africa.
Drawing on Zainab Cheema, I have shown parallels between Aslima and Lafala’s trajectories and the trans-Atlantic and trans-Mediterranean diasporas. This is made clearer through the third and fourth layers of my map, which roughly illustrate the topography of these diasporas. The different layers of my map also illustrate the intersections between Lafala and Aslima’s trajectories and the alternate diasporas they represent, hinting at the possibility of a ‘transdiasporic alliance’ (Cheema 175). But the map also illustrates the rupture of such an alliance through the divergence of their paths; Aslima is contained within the space of the Mediterranean and cannot turn back whereas Lafala is able to ferry between West Africa, Europe, and America and eventually journey homewards.
Palimpsest
In my map, I began by exploring the interplay of setting and projected spaces by mapping instances in which Africa or conceptions of Africa are evoked by Lafala or Aslima, despite their being physically rooted within the geographic setting of Marseille or New York. When Lafala wakes ‘in the main ward of the great hospital’ in New York (marked on the map as The Immigration Hospital), he is almost immediately transported back home to Africa: ‘Once again in the native compounds of the bush with naked black youth…’ (McKay 3; emphasis mine). Similarly, after Lafala has returned to Marseille, he enters a cafe near the docks (marked on the map with a polygon) where he makes ‘a sketch of his native village as he remembered it with a road cutting through the bush and a European house dominating the huts’ (McKay 71; emphasis mine). Aslima too is described as holding ‘in the child’s chamber of her mind a picture of the Djemaa el-Fna, the great wild square of Marrakesh’ (McKay 44; emphasis mine). Barbara Piatti distinguishes between setting, which is ‘physically accessed’ by characters, and ‘projected spaces’ which are ‘constructed in the minds and imaginations’ of the characters ‘in the mode of memories, dreams, [and] longings’ (4). As the examples I have mapped signify, these evocations of Africa function as projected spaces overlaid on top of the physical setting of Marseille and New York.
The scenes I have cited are of a personal nature, tied closely to the characters’ specific memories. However, evocations of Africa and diasporic past can have wider and more historically significant implications. Standing before the Notre Dame de la Garde (marked as cathedral in the map), Aslima boasts: ‘She had heard the story of the warriors of the golden age of her people conquering all that romantic stretch of earth between the Pillars of Hercules and Marseille. And there was a legend that the cathedral was built on the site of a mosque, over the bones, maybe, of a marabout’ (McKay 69). Cheema writes that this has the effect of ‘transforming the city into a transhistorical palimpsest’, destabilising the topography of Marseille to reveal the ‘Moorish cultural flows’ that have shaped and constituted its existence (169). To signify this palimpsestic effect, I have marked the physical setting of the cathedral and the imagined space of the mosque on the same geographical location.
Diaspora
Cheema argues that: ‘Aslima embodies transhistorical Mediterranean diasporas through her miscegenated genealogy’, i.e., as the child of a Moor father and an enslaved Sudanese mother (168). In my map, we can similarly read Aslima as embodying these trans-Mediterranean diasporas. Aslima’s trajectory from Marrakesh to Marseille mimics these patterns of movement from North Africa to Europe and vice versa.
In Aslima’s exaltation of the Moorish conquest, she names a crucial intersection point between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean: the ‘Pillars of Hercules’ or the Strait of Gibraltar. Figured as the starting point of the Moorish conquest, it is also, as seen on the map, the meeting point of the Atlantic ocean, along which Lafala traverses, and the Mediterranean sea, along which Aslima traverses. Just as mapping Aslima’s trajectory more clearly allows us to see its parallels to the trans-Mediterranean diaspora, mapping Lafala’s trajectory also allows us to see its parallels to the trans-Atlantic diaspora. Lafala’s trajectory is largely triangulated between the three points of West Africa, Europe, and America, mimicking the triangular shape of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In my map, I have attempted to make these parallels clearer by adding additional layers to my base map which show the broad shape of these diasporas.
In this way, both Lafala and Aslima seem to ‘indicate two alternate historical currents of Black diaspora‘ (Cheema 171). By placing their trajectories onto the same map, we are able to see the intersection of these two diasporas within the space of the romantic relationship they strike up in Marseille.
Dis/entanglement
The entanglement of these two diasporic currents then represents the possibility of, in Cheema’s words, ‘a transdiasporic alliance’ (175). However, the ultimate divergence of Lafala and Aslima’s paths – initiated by Lafala’s betrayal and abandonment of Aslima – forecloses this possibility.
Though the trajectory plotted on the map ostensibly highlights Aslima’s mobility, this is not an entirely accurate representation. When we read each movement in conjunction with its textual context, which I have included in pop-up text boxes next to the relevant placenames, we see that these movements are inflected by gendered and classed constraints. Aslima is stolen from Marrakesh and sold into prostitution in Fez; from there, she is subsequently taken to Casablanca, Algeria, and finally, Marseille through male patronage. Even for her ‘passage back home’, she must depend on Lafala’s whim and money (McKay 123). This indicates that relying solely on computational methods such as AntConc analysis or plotting points on a digital map without contextualising them using the text can be misleading. As Johanna Drucker has said about distant reading: ‘Computers do not interpret; they simply find patterns’ (629). The task of finding meaningful patterns still depends on traditional humanistic practices of close reading and interpretation. Through ‘interpretative acts’ and ‘strategic human decisions’, I was able to yield and make meaningful the results of my initial AntConc searches for different iterations of ‘Africa’ to arrive at a more complex analysis.
This does not preclude the benefits of computational methods. By gathering, sorting, and plotting my data onto a digital map, I have also been able to visualise aspects of the narrative differently. Though a map of Aslima’s trajectory by itself cannot provide a deeper reading of the politics embedded within her movement, the constellation of georeferenced data readily shows her to be contained within the space of the Mediterranean. This is an aspect of McKay’s use of space which would be hard to arrive at through mere close reading, although close reading does help to support this interpretation. When Aslima’s lover is ‘transferred to a Far Eastern regiment…he was obliged to leave Aslima’ in Algeria where she meets the Corsican who ‘obtain[s] a passage to Marseille’ for her (McKay 45). Similarly, Lafala ‘secretly sail[s] away from Aslima and Quayside’ to return home, leaving her to be murdered by Titin and permanently confining her to Quayside, the ‘[m]agnificent Mediterannean harbor’ (McKay 127, 29).
The digital map, through its interaction of different layers, also allows us to visualise and compare Aslima’s trajectory alongside Lafala’s within a single frame. Unlike Aslima’s restricted locus of movement, Lafala’s map shows him moving ‘from Africa to Europe, from Europe to America’ (McKay 4). In mapping Lafala’s trajectory, which is more wide-ranging and trans-continental, I encountered the limitations of mapping a fictional narrative set in the 1920s-30s onto a contemporary map using a neogeographic tool such as GoogleMyMaps. To partially account for discrepancy between fictional narrative and its real-life counterpart, I tried to represent the shipping routes Lafala would have taken by cross-referencing a 20th century map of maritime shipping routes across the Atlantic (https://commons.princeton.edu/mg/the-atlantic-ocean-maritime-shipping-routes/).
Conclusion
Despite limitations, the digital map is a useful way of illuminating the treatment of space and movement within the novel. In this case, it has allowed us to visualise the layered nature of setting and space and draw parallels between wider diasporic movements and that of Lafala and Aslima. It also illuminates Aslima’s confinement to the space of the Mediterranean and inability to symbolically reverse the violence attached to the trans-Mediterranean diasporic movement she embodies. The map also allows us to see this in juxtaposition to Lafala’s movement across the space of the novel.
Works Cited
Cheema, Zainab. ‘Mooring Aslima: Afro-Orientalist Diaspora in Claude McKay’s Pan-Atlantic Mediterranean Modernism’. English Language Notes, vol. 59, no. 1, 2021, pp. 166–80, https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-8815049.
Drucker, Johanna. “Why Distant Reading Isn’t.” PMLA, vol. 132, no. 3, 2017, pp. 628–35. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27037376. Accessed 6 Dec. 2023.
McKay, Claude. Romance in Marseille. Penguin Classics, 2020.
Piatti, Barbara, Anne-Kathrin Reuschel, and Lorenz Hurni. 2013. Dreams, longings, memories–visualising the dimension of projected spaces in fiction. In Proceedings of the 26th International Cartographic Conference. 74–92.
→ Next Freedom and Hope: An Exploration of Aslima’s Story and Characterisation
