Mapping the Pacific

I was particularly struck by two terms from our reading this week: Smyth's cutting (which one could not possibly ignore given its repetition 10,000 times) and Moretti's legibility. At the risk of somehow conflating the two in some muddled mess, I'd like to attempt to discuss how they appear to work in tandem in my text.

On the first page of The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanigihara includes a hand-drawn map of her setting, the U’ivu Islands.  The map features images of the three island archipelago, including the forbidden island, Ivu’ivu, from both a bird’s eye angle and from above.  Also included are an inset of the islands in comparison to other islands of the Pacific:  Hawai’i, Kiribati, and Tahiti.  

The placement and rendering of Ivu’vu on the above map evoke a few ponderings:

1. The language utilized by Yanigihara most closely resembles Samoan, a Polynesian language, with other striking similarities to Hawaiian.  She calls her islands Micronesian, which belongs to another language group, and places them in an area of the Pacific that could be geographically considered either Polynesia or Micronesia.  In this way, she “cuts” from multiple Pacific cultures to make a cultural collage. Moretti, however, asserts that language can be the marker of a border crossing and thus a different narrative matrix. In inventing, or perhaps appropriating, language characteristics from multiple locations and positioning them in an ambiguous geographic location, is Yanagihara’s move merely meant to demonstrate the isolation of the protagonist or instead isolate the reader from the text?
   
   
2. The drawing of the island of Ivu’ivu closely resembles the basic model of the Hawaiian land division and agricultural system.  Here’s some historical context you didn’t know you needed in your life, but will now have:  In pre-contact Hawai’i, islands were divided into moku (districts), and smaller divisions from mauka (mountain) to makai (sea), thus forming a pie-shaped land plots ruled by one chief and containing all of the resources the community would need for sustainable living called ahupua’a.  Such land divisions were understood by the people through a marker at the ocean line, a wood carving of a pig’s head on top of a stone altar (ahupua’a= ahu (stone) + pua’a (pig)) all the way to the top of the mountain.  Thus, most simply, inward directionality meant mauka (toward the mountain) or makai (to the sea).  This is all say that the Hawaiians do not think of directionality in the same way Westerners in terms of north, south, east, west, etc, nor do they think the same way about borders. Yanagihara’s Ivu’ivuans likewise think differently about directionality and borders, in that they have no desire for anything outside their village. This issue of directionality invokes Moretti’s idea of legibility as a locus of departure and arrival, as he suggests that Balzac’s narrative utilizes the “magnetism of desire ‘orients’ the city along the axis” (95).  Yanigihara’s native Ivu’ivuans, the “uncivilized” and little known tribe, lives atop the mountain reclused from the forest and so distant from the sea that many of the villagers had never seen it, making a fundamental difference between the Ivu’ivuans and their white visitors is their access and desire for departure.  When the white anthropologists cross into the Ivu’ivuan village, they intersect narrative matrices, and problems arise between the two groups in the process of attempting to discern them, thus proving illegible. 
   
   
3. In Yanigihara’s map, the inset of the “South Pacific,” in itself a cutting, as it removes a few islands from the grander scope of the Pacific.  Additionally, the inset is inaccurately labeled, as Hawai’i is not in fact in the South Pacific, as it is well above the Equator, and was most likely labeled as such due to the common misconception that Hawai’i is part of the South Pacific because of the popular movie by the same name filmed in the islands.  Furthermore, the inset map excludes other islands that exist between the ones presented, and also misrepresents the size, shape, and location of Kiribati.  Such a cutting, I can only imagine, is for the purpose of engendering “legibility” for what is a very “foreign” place for much of the world.  While many Westerners may not be familiar with Kiribati, they will more than likely know of Hawai’i and Tahiti.  A simple Google search on Kiribati will reveal that it is part of Micronesia, and thus these micro-nesians, these small islands, appear to feel a bit closer with these frames of reference.  
   
   
4. And just for fun, consider the map of the United States you probably grew up with (after 1959):

I cannot tell you the number of people that I have met in my lifetime who believed that Hawai’i was next to Mexico.  I am not kidding.  

5. Also, (and more fun), since I am the resident “expert” on the Pacific, I thought I'd share a few items on Papua New Guinea.  I wondered after reading Anderson and his discussion of Papua New Guinea/ Indonesia and museums, why I had seen so much Papuan art in museums in the US (like the Met in New York, or the Crocker here in Sacramento).  Well, turns out there’s a fascinating backstory about Nelson Rockefeller’s son going to PNG to have an adventure, collecting lots of art for his father’s museum, and then may or may not have been eaten by cannibals.  Amazing: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2582979/Cannibal-killing-finally-revealed-The-gruesome-details-Rockefeller-heir-gutted-cooked-Asmat-tribe-New-Guinea.html
   
   
6. Also, also, for a slightly more humanizing portrayal of the people of Indonesia/PNG with spectacular photographs:  http://www.beforethey.com/journey/indonesia---papua-new-guinea