The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion Literary Elements

Poetry, philosophy

The poems are mainly set in Jamaica at an unspecified time, but near modern-day

There is an omniscient third-person narrator who occasionally appears to remark on the major characters, but most of these poems are from the perspectives of the two main characters, the cartographer and the rastaman.

Thoughtful, curious, evocative

The two protagonists are the cartographer and the rastaman, and there are no antagonists except the ambiguity of philosophy and the corrupt nature of man.

The cartographer and the rastaman disagree on the nature of reality, maps, and heaven, and they engage in dialogue in order to arrive at the truth, interspersed with descriptions of places and scenes of nature.

Having partially won the cartographer over to his view of Zion, the rastaman delivers a short sermon to him and the reader, exhorting them to live with Zion in mind, before delivering a closing benediction.

The rastaman's invitation to explain the nature of Zion and Babylon to the cartographer in the poem "v. in which the rastaman offers an invitation" foreshadows his eventual instructional soliloquy on the matter, both to the cartographer and to the reader.

“In the long ago beginning
the world was unmapped.
It was nothing really –
just a shrug of Jah
something he hadn’t thought all the way through” ("The Shrug of Jah")

There are many allusions throughout the book, most of them to figures and places relevant to those in Jamaica. For example, the first poem makes mention of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, whom the Rastafarians regard as the Messiah. There is also a later reference to Sizzla Kalonji, a popular Jamaican musician, among others.

The rastaman sees the physical world as irredeemably corrupt in its entirety. He uses the imagery of Babylon, the Biblical "city of Man," to represent the world. It's an apt image: Babylon is famous for being morally corrupt and extravagantly indulgent in pagan luxuries and pleasures, and that pretty well describes the world. This imagery implies the rastaman's hope in a better, supernatural world for the future.

The cartographer wishes to reach Zion, the legendary city of Heaven, but he wants to do so by exploring every part of the globe until he finds it, which is paradoxically counterproductive because Zion isn't a physical place.

The philosophical disagreement between the cartographer and the rastaman parallels the real-world conflict between the ideologies they represent and the continents from which they come.

“the hem of Selassie’s trousers
brushed the dust of Babylon.” ("Groundation")

“On this island things fidget.
Even history.” ("What the Mapmaker Ought to Know")