Speaking to Maps and Furniture

The first chapter of By the Sea introduces one of the novel’s main motifs, exemplified by the moment when Saleh Omar explains, “I have always had an interest in furniture. Furniture and maps. Beautiful, intricate things” (Gurnah 19). I am interested in teasing out the complicated relationship that Saleh, a colonized subject, has to these items that Benedict Anderson shows “profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion” (1).

Anderson writes of “the alignment of map and power” (4), explaining how the census, map, and museum all worked to place colonies under surveillance by imposing externally produced categories and grids at the same time that the colonial state appropriated and reshaped local history to reinforce its sovereignty. These tools operate by means of their “emptiness, contextlessness, visual memorableness, and infinite reproducibility” (Anderson 8), reshaping the local, colonized peoples’ understanding or reading of their own history.

With this in mind, I’d like to turn to the case of the character Saleh Omar. As a colonized subject who is hyperaware of the nefarious history of maps and archeological items but nevertheless covets them, he at once reaffirms Anderson’s argument and pokes holes into it, or at least poses questions not addressed by Anderson. In the first chapter, Saleh repeatedly returns to his fascination with furniture and maps. The very first mention comes when he writes, “I have always had an interest in furniture. At the very least, it weighs us down and keeps us on the ground, and prevents us from clambering up trees and howling naked as the terror of our useless lives overcomes us” (Gurnah 3). In this sentence we see how Saleh’s colonial education may have shaped his understanding of himself, the image of howling naked in the trees perhaps alluding to the white colonizers’ image of the “savages” whom they conquered. Saleh sees furniture as a civilizing object. However, I believe there is another layer to this: Saleh is a displaced person; he writes this as he describes his daily trips to furniture shops in the small seaside British town where he waits for the decision in his asylum case. Furniture grounds him in the sense that it allows him to shape a place in the world for himself. The legacy of British colonial rule has objectified him and entangled him, homeless, in the midst of global imperial networks, but he finds a way to personally reappropriate British furniture to make his own fleeting home.

Saleh was in fact an antique furniture salesman back in Zanzibar, and he sold mostly to tourists. He understood the implications of his work:

[My countrymen] did not have the same obsessive need of them that my European customers had — to acquire the world’s beautiful things so they could take them home and possess them, as tokens of their cultivation and open-mindedness, as trophies of their worldliness and their conquest of the multitudinous parched savannahs. (Gurnah 20)

Likewise, he is aware of the ways in which colonial states used maps to assert their power:

I speak to maps. And sometimes they say something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable. (Gurnah 35)

The move from plunder to possession that Saleh describes is related to Anderson’s argument, the colonial state using maps and artifacts to retroactively construct a history that legitimizes their claims. Saleh shows us how the colonized subject is taught to read maps in this way; although he understands the historical forces at work in their production, he also learns to desire the world through maps. He first sees a map in school as a child, and this is a pivotal moment in his life, his teacher drawing a map of the world without lifting his chalk from the board. The British colonial education system introduces Saleh to maps, awes him with “the fluency with which [the teacher] created an image of the world for us” (Gurnah 38). He finds distant places beautiful because of their distance but knowable because of maps. His talking to maps is an attempt to extend himself to those places, to take on the act of colonizer that is not fully available to him, except as a colonized person submitting to the sovereignty of the colonizers. (His participation in the sale of local artifacts to Europeans is another example of this.) In the unsympathetic flashbacks of another character we also learn that Saleh was seen by some as a plunderer in his own community, acquiring the deed to a house that may or may not have rightly been his inheritance. The degree to which maps and furniture enable Saleh’s own plundering or submit him to the will of the colonial state is contestable.

Yet I wonder about what the maps sometimes say back to Saleh. Must his love of maps and furniture be wholly in line with the state-imposed “alignment of map and power”? Or is there a way in which his relationship with these objects attempts at finding a way out of the colonial system, at giving Saleh agency in the world, at placing or locating himself in a world where he sees himself as just another object possessed by Europeans? Furniture and maps won’t be able to extricate him from the network in which he’s been caught up, but maybe they help Saleh make a shield for himself out of his colonizers’ own tools.