When I was nineteen, I moved to San Diego to skateboard. It was a stupid thing to do, but I was young and willing to sacrifice to see the world I had been watching in skate videos for most of my life until that point. This was in 2004, before smartphones and social media as we know it now—I didn't even own a cell phone at the time. I moved with three hundred dollars and a bag of clothes to live with two other guys in a garage in Chula Vista.
The first job I could find was a delivery driver for a party supply store. This meant I spent my weekends driving from birthday party to birthday party dropping off bounce houses and loading them back up again, which was truly a feat with only my back and a small dolly to get the job done. But, the job allowed me to skateboard Monday through Friday, and that was well worth the trouble.
It also allowed me to get to know the area. This was during the era of MapQuest. Some of you might remember this website, before GPS was ubiquitous on everyone's phone. The site provided detailed instructions and a small map that guided drivers from one location to another. I'd print one of these maps for each delivery, and on the way, I would keep my eye open for skate spots. San Diego was absolutely littered with them. When I'd see a spot, I would mark it on the map and add that map to the stack. I had an intricate system of symbols worked out for the type of spot and whether or not it had been featured in a mag or video. Legendary spots got a star next to them.
I wish I still had that stack of saved maps. If I could lay them over one another and trace all the streets and mark all the landmarks along with all the skate spots I'd have a perfect stamp from that time in my life, probably more representational than any photos from that time period--which I had also lost years ago. It was my own version of San Diego. But along with the maps I printed from the internet most of those skate spots are gone now, too, either torn down or skate stopped. Skateboarders know this better than most: maps are constantly changing.
I hadn't thought about my stack of maps in a long time, but after reading Adania Shibli's recent novel Minor Detail, I was reminded of them and what they'd meant to me at the time. Shibli's novel is told in two parts. The first follows an Israeli military officer after the second world war, and the second follows a Palestinian woman in present day. Both stories connect when the Palestinian woman reads an article in the news about a girl who had been taken from her family in the 40s, held at a military base and repeatedly abused before being murdered and left in the desert. The first half of the book details the military officer's days leading up to the injustice, and the second half shows the Palestinian woman's journey to find those details, thus the title Minor Detail.
The two stories create a layering effect. Quite literally, if the book sits with the cover facing up, the military officer's story lays over the story of the Palestinian narrator in the second half. This theme of layering is repeated most tellingly by the use of maps throughout the novel, the distinct lack of maps in the first half and the abundance of maps in the second.
As the unnamed narrator begins her journey she describes her maps in this way:
I take the maps I brought with me out of my bag and spread them over the passenger seat and across the steering wheel. Among these maps are those produced by centers of research and political studies, which show the borders of the four Areas, the path of the Wall, the construction of settlements, and checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza. Another map shows Palestine as it was until the year 1948, and another one, given to me by the rental car company and produced by the Israeli ministry of tourism, shows streets and residential areas according to the Israeli government. (p.70)
Shibli asks her reader to visualize these maps folded one over the other in the car, but it's hard not to see the visual as each map projected onto the other creating a superimposed map with indistinct origins. Here, a single map becomes legible for her purpose, but through the process of layering what becomes illegible are the initial sources. The map becomes hers and to a certain degree a representation of her in that moment.
There has been a lot written on the subject of legibility and illegibility in literature, but the thing I find most telling in Shibli's writing is the circular nature of what becomes illegible. Just as the origins of the maps become illegible, the narrator also actively hides her identity. She borrows a friend's ID card and uses a car rented by a different friend. She hides the fact that she is Palestinian in order to move through area checkpoints and gain access to the archives at the museum she hopes to visit.
Without revealing too much about the novel's ending, the thing that is revealed to the reader is a repeated process of erasure. What I find so gripping about Shibli's telling is how these repetitions show up like echos within certain institutions: the maps, the archives, even in the desert itself or at least the way the desert is managed by human hands. Each iteration is slightly diminished and harder to see.
Shibli's unnamed narrator tries to look closer at these echos, but falls victim to them just the same. The inevitability built into the narrative of Minor Detail, creates a sense of hopelessness that could feel unrelenting. And, it's true that the fiction points to systems of injustice that perpetuate through institutions of power. But Shibli's fiction also shows that even though her narrator has failed in her pursuit, her action of reclaiming space and repurposing institutional tools like maps can reveal what these larger structures suppress and ignore.
All this brings to mind a specific feeling I get when I'm driving around an area I'm not familiar with, a neighborhood I'm visiting for the first time or a part of a city I've never seen. The feeling comes when I find a ghost spot, a skate spot that looks like it hasn't been skated in years. The most common version of this is a curb that has a blackened section where to the untrained eye might look like someone spilled grease or oil along the edge of it. Sometimes these spots look out of place, and it makes me wonder about the area and what it must have looked like when kids used to crowd around the curb and take turns hurling themselves at it, sliding and grinding, cheering and laughing. The feeling I'm trying to explain is not that I know more about that area after finding a ghost spot, its that I want to know more about that area after finding a ghost spot. It shows there's more to it, that there are layers to a place and that any place is capable of holding onto multiple meanings, interpretations and understandings all at once.
Now, I'm not trying to say that skateboarding is a tool to fight oppression, but I see similarities in the practice of skateboarding and the practices of liberation suggested in Shibli's writing. So, fellow skaters and readers, don't ignore the spots we've lost. They might have more to say.