Eye Errant: Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way To Zion and the geopoetics of the senses

Abstract

This article discusses Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion through the lens of visuality and multisensory poetic performance. Reenacting the tradition of map critique in postcolonial poetry, Miller both decries the map’s instrumentality to colonial dominance and reflects on the map’s utility in creating and communicating spatial knowledge. The two purposes are intensively manifested in his deployment of the visual vis-à-vis other senses. Enmeshing its capacious trope of visuality within a synesthetic poetic texture, Cartographer both revolts against the visual scheme associated with colonial cartographic regulation and erasure, and refashions the eye into a crucial means to affirm and empower underprivileged peoples and cultures. Ultimately, Cartographer illustrates how poetry conducts postcolonial critique through animating and cultivating the senses in a way that gestures beyond the binary of domination and resistance. Miller’s cartographic inquiry materializes in a geopoetics actively foregrounding its multisensory engagement, which begets “eye errant” as a paradigm of geo-cultural knowledge that negotiates rather than imposes, recognizes rather than misrepresents.