Confessions of a Cartographer in Crisis
I’ve been asked if I have a Christmas Tree. I said “no, I don’t.” Instead, I have this. I made this map to end the year, too. It reminds me of home, and I miss it very much.
It is shattered by empires, lashed by storms, dragged by war, and drenched in blood, especially those of the poor, peasants, and the indigenous peoples. Maybe this is our lot, our One Hundred Years of Solitude.
There is a lot of feelings about my country, and the roots are deep. We bully those we love; love our bullies; bully all the bullies we hate; bully those who are not as happy as we are in our universe. We choose funny leaders who make us happy and elect bully politicians who kill in our name.
We are a happy nation. We are a bully nation.
We are the Feel-ippines.
For me, feeling and caring about it means mapping, thinking, talking, and writing about it. It meant doing fieldwork in dangerous places (imagine high waves and unexploded ordnance); being misunderstood; called an asshole; almost getting kidnapped by the military; and hacked and followed by unknown people.
It’s been 10 years since I started being a geographer of the Philippines. In that experience, the Philippines that I saw at both the community and structural level is not the Philippines that is being advertised. That is very difficult for me to accept, even for the foreseeable future, because I’d like to believe that something could be done about it in a transformative way.
But maybe the issue, too, is I care too much and overthink because of my bias that my world begins and ends here, this beautiful and dangerous archipelago that was called the Philippines, when it shouldn’t.
Maybe, I’ve been making too many maps about it. One should know when to rest and stop.
Happy holidays, my love, and may you find your happy place in this bully universe.
