Non-Places
My last post got me thinking about non-places. By non-places I mean either places that once were and now cease to exist or places that only exist in the imagination but are somehow very real.
Of the real places that ceased to exist, I think of the last scene in the amazing film Underground. There is a family gathering and the ground underneath the table suddenly begins to crack and drift apart, separating the family members into difrent islets. It is, of course, a pretty straightforward metaphor for the divided Yugoslavia. It is also magical and unforgetable. Eastern Europe has several other cases. The most interesting one is the Republic of Naaru, which I first heard of on this episode of This American Life. Naaru has a wonderful story which deserves a post just to itself. The intersting thing about it, as a non-place, is that it’s a tiny island-state that, on top of being exploited to near-extinction by its own inhabitants, is soon to be swallowed by the rising sea-levels. In short, it is a place on the verge of becoming a non-place.
Of the fantastic non-places, the obvious would be Alice’s Wonderland, Peter’s Neverland, Narnia, Middle Earth, and so on. My favorite, by far, would have to be be Gabriel García Marquez’s Macondo. I’ll leave this gem to the Spanish speakers in the room:
José Arcadio Buendía, que era el hombre más emprendedor que se vería jamás en la aldea, había dispuesto de tal modo la posición de las casas, que desde todas podía llegarse al río y abastecerse de agua con igual esfuerzo, y trazó las calles con tan buen sentido que ninguna casa recibía más sol que otra a la hora del calor. En pocos años, Macondo fue una aldea más ordenada y laboriosa que cualquiera de las conocidas hasta entonces por sus 300 habitantes. Era en verdad una aldea feliz, donde nadie era maor de treinta años y donde nadie había muerto.
I can’t imagine a better description of paradise.
UPDATE: Cuba is also non-place, for the way it is remembered by those who left.
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