ABSTRACT
As Derek Walcott heads into Midsummer alone, “far from the action, / past hedges of unaligned flowers,” he finds himself thinking about his fellow exiles. But he catches himself, asks why he should care what has happened to them, “when exiles must make their own maps.” 1 The agency proper to exilic map-making—an agency that has been so critical to this collection—comes here at the steep price of solitude. But the poet’s is a shared solitude. For in thinking of other exiles, Walcott advances a fundamental ethics to the experience of exile: that even as it is lived by one alone, even as we each alone feel the weight of its loss, even if in the complicated splintering of its diverse contemporary incarnations our experiences of it are vastly different, being displaced in the world is a condition shared by many. The cartographies of exile are landscapes navigated by many and projects undertaken by many. And the cartographic imperative proper to exile provides for a means of projecting outward the solitude, confusion, and longing that displacement so often breeds. It gestures toward the collective so that the cartographical necessity of exile is also an ethical compulsion, a reaching out into the world in order to build the shared space of the world around us.
