“Neighborhoods fell to the militants in startlingly quick succession, so that Saeed’s mother’s mental map of the place where she had spent her entire life now resembled an old quilt, with patches of government land and patches of militant land. The frayed seams between the patches were the most deadly spaces, and to be avoided at all costs. Her butcher and the man who dyed the fabrics from which she had once made her festive clothes disappeared into such gaps, their places of business shattered and covered in rubble and glass” (Hamid 69).
The mentioning of a “mental map” in this passage immediately reminded me of the T-shaped map that was hidden within the footage in Pattern Recognition. Both maps hold importance in framing the significance of space and violence; by this, I mean that they revealed how violence shapes and re-shapes a person’s perception of space. In the case of Nora in Pattern Recognition, we see this in the line, “Her consciousness, Cayce understands, somehow bounded by or bound to the T-shaped fragment in her brain: part of the arming mechanism of the Claymore mine that killed her parents, balanced too deeply, too precariously within her skull, to ever be removed” (Gibson 315).
For both novels, there’s an intimate correlation made between violence and a place. By those standards, I would say that a clear, real-life example of this would be a soldier’s view of enemy territory. It’s a high alert observation of the area; the person is noting all the safe zones and danger zones until it becomes long-term memory for them. We see this same idea integrated into Exit West as Saeed’s mother keeps in mind the former places that she knows are now a hazard. Why describe this as a map though? Why not something else, like a maze of sorts?
Well, if maps are typically meant to be guides for traveling to and in-between spaces, then they may be the best objects to use in revealing the barriers in a space as well. In the case of Saeed and his loved ones, they need to see the defined lines between government and militant-owned territories.
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