Mad Cartographers
▻http://www.aucegypt.edu/GAPP/CairoReview/Pages/articleDetails.aspx?aid=456
You go to the police station at four in the afternoon to declare that you exist…. You stand still in a street that devours you, just as you in turn devour your rage and defeat. What is homeland? To hold onto your memory—that is homeland.
— Mahmoud Darwish, Journal of an Ordinary Grief
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.
—Jack Spicer, Psychoanalysis: An Elegy
Mad Cartographers
Robert Neuwirth November 24, 2013
February 23, 2013, early morning: with no warning, armed state government officials descend on Badia East, a centrally located shack neighborhood in Lagos, Nigeria, and smash rickety houses and businesses to the ground.
In the days that follow, the Lagos state commissioner for housing is adamant that the eviction and demolition were a public service. “It’s a regeneration of a slum,” the honorable Adedeji Olatubosun Jeje told the New York Times. “We gave enough notification. The government intends to develop 1,008 housing units. What we removed was just shanties. Nobody was even living in those shanties. Maybe we had a couple of squatters living there.”
