Map-Making

Singapore, 1998. We are in a classroom. There is no air-conditioning. The air is warm and humid, and it is in the slow afternoon, in the final period before the end of the school day. The hour is long; the sun slants across the desks. Two 18-year-old schoolgirls are sitting at the table at the back of the room.

One girl is copying out the lines to T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ into a notebook; the other girl is covering blank pages with fantastical curlicues and tessellations.

The girls will grow up. They will move away from Singapore. They will each endure separate, unspeakable trials in their lives. But they will stay friends.

Map-Making is the physical embodiment of a promise two friends made to each other twenty years ago, in that classroom. The promise that one day, they would create something together, something that was borne of their friendship, and of their individual creative pursuits. The 18 year-old girls did not know who they were going to be. We’d like to think the 38 year-old women know a little better.

 

 

 

Map-Making is a 100-page book of photographs and poems about Singapore, a collaborative effort between the photographer Charlene Winfred and myself. It is published by the micropress I founded in 2016, Potts Point Press, and is issued in a limited edition of 100 signed and numbered hardcover books.

The title of the book is taken from a poem I wrote for Charlene years ago–a memory of us in Geography class. The poem was published in my second book, Peony, in 2014, and it is the final poem in Map-Making.

 

Map-making



for Charlene Winfred

Under the flicker of fluorescent lights

we pored over creased maps of places

we’d never heard of. You tore me a sheet

of graph paper and we set out measuring

the perimeters of plateaus, plotting out

the cross-sections of lonely knolls.

I much preferred it the other way around:

transposing latitudes and angles into clusters

of karst, tracing carefully in blue the meanderings

of some old river, shading in the isolation

of ox-bow lakes, far from the weighted delta,

near the blissful meeting of estuary and ocean.

You were always better at it than I was,

your skill evident in the delicate green

of mangroves, the dappled grey of salt flats.

At the end, we would sign our names like artists

in the corners then lay down our pencils,

the day’s journey mapped out and complete.

From Peony, 2014, Pitt Street Poetry

 

I am so proud to have worked on this with Charlene. We have not lived in the same place since 1999, and so this project is an accomplishment in itself, conceived of and worked on remotely, kept going by the determination, faith, and trust between two friends.

Friendship is a precious gift I know to treasure. Map-Making is our blood, sweat, tears, our hard-earned money, dreams, and hopes encapsulated in a book. We are moved beyond words to have made this, to be able to share this with you.

I head to Singapore in a few weeks to launch my new book of poems, Rainforest,  on 15 June at 7pm, at BooksActually in Tiong Bahru. I hope to see you there. If you would like to have a copy of Map-Making, please contact me. Copies are very limited.

 

 

I am looking forward to returning to the land of my birth, to see my grandmother again, and to once again eat the food I was nourished by from childhood. I will speak the language of my people again, breathe the heavy air, and step into my old self, like I’d never left.

I’ll be seeing you.

All images in this post copyright (C) Charlene Winfred Photography.