Part One: The Birth of an Idea
The idea of a map is infinitely intriguing to me. I recently read Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family and my favorite image to digest was the "false maps" (63) on his brother's walls. The idea that the geography of Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka, his family's home for generations) changed shapes depending on the interpreter / viewer / conqueror applies to my ideas about storytelling. The stories we tell may take one shape for us with one telling and a different shape with another telling. Whether or not they are "false" is in the hands of the teller.
I like thinking about stories as a landscape to be "discovered" or "explored," a landscape to be mapped - but there's nothing static in the act of telling or retelling. Just as the geographical boundaries and shapes of the maps of empire shift, so do the lines, boundaries and shapes of our stories.
This summer I want to get lost in a map, a map with a history of shape shifting. I will start by spending a week in the Czech Republic where I spent a year teaching on a Fulbright Exchange in 2003 - 4. My "adopted" Czech families (Kordovi and Jindrovi) not only introduced me to the natural landscape of their country but also to the cultural landscape. It was here in this land of fairy tales and velvet revolutions that I found this intrigue with borders. So much of my time there was spent hiking or biking along the border in the shadow of border patrol huts turned hunting blinds, hearing stories about how the shifting realities of borders and boundaries played into the lives of my friends who grew up there.
When I lived there, Madla, my Czech "sister" and I spent many weekends at her family's country cottage in Mezilesi, a cottage in Southern Bohemia that her family was "issued" during the Communist regime (many families were given cottages as a sort of pressure release - to assuage the sense of being stuck inside the strictly imposed borders). My Czech "brother" Honza showed me a map of his country from the Communist time. Czechoslovakia was surrounded by gray matter; the countries that bordered it were obscured by gray lines, lacked any distinct borders or geographical nuances and they were unnamed, discouraging thoughts of beyond. Near the Kordovi family cottage is a mountain called Kure or "Chicken Mountain" that we climbed many times. From the top of the mountain, the Kordovi and Jindrovi families would always point out the border with Austria, only a few kilometers away. Even 14 years after the fall of the Communist regime, my Czech families looked at that view with a longing. Madla explained how she grew up hiking to the top of that mountain, looking out towards Austria and longing to go there - talk about a forbidden fruit.
Madla was 13 when the Communist regime collapsed in her country and she remembers well the shift that occurred when her world became that much bigger. The landscape the she saw for years from the top of Chicken Mountain was no longer forbidden to her; she was free to discover the landscape she'd always had to make up stories about. I was with her the day the Czech Republic joined the EU in May of 2004 as we spent the day on our bikes border crossing. We rode along the gorgeous Czech / Austrian country roads crossing the border countless times. Border patrol wouldn't even check our passports and even though the other days of the year, they always seem so stuffy and severe, on this particular day of unification, the border patrol guards cracked smiles and allowed themselves to take part in their country's joviality. Madla's smile never lost its intensity as she relished her country's new connection with the rest of Europe.
So, that's what sparked my interest in the shifting borders in this part of the world. For the summer of 2008, I will be traveling back to Central /Eastern Europe. I'll start in CR, visit my Czech families, drink a pivo or two (or three or four...) in Prague, and bike in the borderlands. From the Czech Republic, I want to travel to Romania (for years, I've wanted to travel in Transylvania - being an alum of Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky) and parts of the former Yugoslavia: Bosnia - Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro. But, the itinerary isn't set in stone and we'll see how lost I can get. Lost is where I want to be.
