The Exile Geography

The Cartography of Absence

Here is something I keep thinking about: an old man sits at a table in a refugee camp, or a modest apartment in London, or a community center in Beirut, and he draws a map. Not of where he is. Of where he was. He draws the well at the center of the village, the grove of olive trees to the east, the path his mother walked to visit her sister. He draws it with the certainty of a surveyor and the tenderness of a lover. Every line is an act of defiance against the central premise of his exile—that the place he came from no longer exists, or worse, that it never mattered.

Maps are supposed to describe the world as it is. They are instruments of the present tense. But there is a whole shadow cartography—an atlas of longing—produced by people who have been violently separated from the places they know best. These are maps drawn from memory, maps that insist on recording what has been erased, maps that function simultaneously as geography, legal testimony, love letter, and weapon. They are maps of places that the mapmaker can no longer visit, and in many cases, places that have been physically obliterated so that there is nothing left to visit at all.

I want to talk about these maps. Not as curiosities or folk art, but as one of the most extraordinary things human beings do: the refusal to let a place die just because someone with more power decided it should.

The Forensic Scientist of the Naqab

Salman Abu Sitta was born in 1937 in al-Ma'in, a Bedouin village in the Naqab desert. On the night of May 13–14, 1948—hours before the State of Israel was formally declared—the Haganah attacked. He was eleven years old. He was expelled. His home was destroyed. This is the foundational wound, the night that divides his life into before and after, the night that turned a boy with a home into a man with a map.

Abu Sitta spent over a decade of his life and a vast amount of his own money producing the Atlas of Palestine 1917–1966, published in 2010. The scale of the project is staggering: it documents 1,600 towns and villages, 16,000 landmarks, and 30,000 place names.ⁱ But the detail that cuts deepest is this: he matched the locations of 372 destroyed Palestinian villages to modern Jewish National Fund forests and parks, demonstrating that 90% of the original village sites remain vacant beneath the tree cover. The villages weren't replaced by cities or suburbs. They were replaced by pine forests—European species, specifically chosen to grow quickly and densely—planted deliberately over the rubble to alter the landscape's topography and prevent refugees from returning to their exact coordinates.

Think about that for a moment. A forest as an instrument of erasure. A grove of trees as a kind of cartographic lie, making the land look as though nothing was ever there. Abu Sitta has been described as operating like a “forensic scientist,” cataloging the crime scenes of his youth so that his village's coordinates would be permanently etched into the historical record. His atlas isn't nostalgic in the soft, wistful sense. It is evidence. Each “destruction reference number” he assigns to the ruins of a village is an insistence that the crime has an address, that the absence has coordinates, that the silence has a name.

And his work has proven to be more than symbolic. In 2023, the research agency Forensic Architecture used the hand-drawn mental maps of elderly Palestinian refugees, cross-referenced with pre-1948 aerial imagery, to successfully locate previously unknown mass graves near the beach of Tantura.ⁱⁱ The maps that grandchildren once dismissed as the sentimental doodlings of traumatized elders turned out to be forensically accurate. Memory, it turns out, is a form of precision.

The 116 Sketches of Parchanj

The Armenian word houshamadyan translates roughly as “memory book,” but the English doesn't capture the desperation embedded in the practice. Following the 1915–1923 Armenian Genocide, first-generation survivors scattered across Lebanon, Syria, France, and beyond began writing hyper-detailed accounts of their destroyed Ottoman-Armenian towns. These weren't memoirs in the conventional sense. They were attempts to reconstruct an entire world—block by block, street by street, recipe by recipe—before the last person who remembered it died.

The memory book for the village of Parchanj contains 116 sketches drawn entirely from memory by an exiled author. He drew every component part of a wheel cart. He drew the specific tools used for weaving. He drew a flaxseed oil press. He drew the exact mechanical process of combing cotton.ⁱⁱⁱ This is not nostalgia. This is a man terrified of forgetting, mapping not just the geography of a place but the physics of its daily life, the engineering of its ordinary objects. It is as though he understood that a village is not just its location on a grid but the sum of all the small, practical knowledge its people carry in their hands. To lose the blueprint of the wheel cart is to lose a piece of the village as surely as to lose its coordinates.

In 2010, Dr. Vahé Tachjian, born in Lebanon to an Armenian family, founded the Berlin-based Houshamadyan Project to digitize and map these spatial memories into an interactive digital geography.^iv He was racing against a biological clock: the first generation of genocide survivors—the ones who could actually close their eyes and walk the streets of pre-1915 Ottoman towns—were dying. Each death was a library burning, a map crumbling. Tachjian's project is, in effect, the construction of a virtual homeland for a scattered transnation. It is a place you can visit online that you can never visit on foot. A town that exists in full sensory detail—its songs, its recipes, its street corners—and yet occupies no territory whatsoever.

What strikes me about the houshamadyan tradition is how it reveals the exile's unique relationship to specificity. The person who lives in a place can afford to take its details for granted. The person who has lost a place clings to every detail with ferocious precision, because each forgotten detail is a small death, a further dispossession. The 116 sketches are not an excess of memory. They are a minimum. They are the irreducible amount of information required to say: this was real, this was ours, this happened here.

The Grammar of Counter-Maps

State maps are among the most powerful documents ever created. They define borders, allocate resources, determine citizenship, authorize violence. They present themselves as neutral descriptions of reality, but they are, of course, nothing of the sort. Every map is a argument about what matters. Every map is a claim about who belongs. The term “counter-mapping” was coined in 1995 by rural sociologist Nancy Peluso, who documented how Indigenous forest users in Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, appropriated formal state map-making techniques to push back against the Indonesian government's dispossession of their ancestral lands.^v The genius of counter-mapping is that it uses the master's tools—the grid, the legend, the scale bar—to tell a fundamentally different story about the same piece of earth.

But the exile's map goes further than the counter-map. The counter-map says: you drew this land wrong; here is the correct version. The exile's map says: you drew this land as though we never existed; here is the proof that we did. It is not a correction but a resurrection. Consider the Central Tibetan Administration in Dharamshala, India, which actively uses cartography to resist the Chinese renaming of their homeland. Cartographer Tsering Wangyal Shawa has highlighted how the exile government works to standardize Tibetan geographical feature names—mountains, rivers, passes—against the systematic Sinicization of the landscape.^vi When Beijing renames a mountain, the exile government in Dharamshala reasserts the original name. The battle is fought on paper, in databases, in the dry bureaucratic language of geographical nomenclature. But what is at stake is the right to narrate one's own homeland.

The most chilling recent example of cartographic erasure involves the Rohingya. Following the 2017 genocide in Myanmar, the Burmese military destroyed over 400 villages. Subsequently, the United Nations Mapping Unit removed the original village names from official maps, reclassifying them as “wards” to comply with official government nomenclature. Former UN envoy Yanghee Lee accused the UN itself of complicity in “exterminating their basic identity” by creating a blank map that makes future refugee repatriation effectively impossible.^vii This is the nightmare scenario of exile geography: when even the institutions supposedly designed to protect the displaced participate in the erasure. If the UN map doesn't show your village, to what address do you demand to return?

In the Serbian asylum center where artist Djordje Balmazovic worked with refugees passing through the Balkans, he discovered something remarkable: when he asked people to draw their journeys, they didn't draw maps with borders and state lines. They drew what he called “narrative maps”—chaotic, deeply personal cartographies charting the dangers, safe houses, and grueling topographies of their specific passages toward Europe. These maps were subjective, emotional, temporal. They registered fear, exhaustion, kindness. They were terrible as navigation tools and extraordinary as documents of what it means to move through the world without the protection of belonging.

Two Kinds of Longing

In The Future of Nostalgia (2001), the literary theorist Svetlana Boym proposed a distinction that has haunted me since I first encountered it. She divided the exilic longing for home into two types. “Restorative nostalgia” seeks to literally rebuild the lost home, treating its map as absolute truth, patching up memory gaps with certainty. “Reflective nostalgia” accepts the shattering of the past, dwells on the ambivalence of longing, and—crucially—temporalizes space without trying to forcefully restore it.^viii

The distinction matters enormously because Boym saw, with chilling clarity, the danger in the restorative mode. Because restorative nostalgia “does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition,” it can fuel militant nationalism and conspiratorial thinking, demanding that borders be violently redrawn to match the ghost map in the exile's mind. We have seen this dynamic play out across centuries—in irredentist wars, in ethnic cleansings justified by ancient territorial claims, in the lethal conviction that the map in one's head is more real than the messy, multi-layered, palimpsest reality of the ground. The exile's map, the beautiful and heartbreaking map, can become a blueprint for someone else's dispossession.

This tension is visible even within diasporic communities. In the Armenian diaspora, the desire to map the past was not always unifying. First-generation exiles were sometimes so fiercely divided by political factions that two separate compatriotic unions representing the exact same destroyed village would operate in opposition, each claiming authority over the memory and map of their lost home. The village had one geography but two competing memories, and the dispute was not about the location of the well or the path to the church but about who had the right to remember, and how. In Miami's Little Havana, first-generation Cuban exiles sought to turn the neighborhood around Calle Ocho into a spatial replica of pre-1959 Havana—a piece of restorative nostalgia written in concrete and signage. But younger generations and newer immigrants are overwriting that map. The neighborhood is becoming a pan-Latino space, and the ghost map of Havana is slowly fading from the physical streets, creating a generational rift between those who remember the original city and those for whom the exile geography is itself the only geography they've ever known.

Edward Said, who understood exile as well as anyone who ever wrote about it, described displacement as “an unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place.”^ix But he also saw something generative in the wound. The exile develops what he called a “contrapuntal” awareness—a plurality of vision where the memory of the lost geography constantly overlaps with the geography of the new host country. You walk through London and simultaneously walk through Baghdad. You sit in a café in Beirut and simultaneously sit in a kitchen in Aleppo. You live in two places at once, which means you see each place more clearly than someone who has only ever lived in one. The pain of this double vision is real, but so is its insight. The exile sees the contingency of all maps, the fragility of all belonging, the way every landscape is layered with ghosts.

The Architecture of Survival

Dr. Sana Murrani is an Iraqi architect who survived the 2003 invasion of Baghdad. During the bombing, she hid in her family home in the Al-Amiriyeh district. While the explosions shook the walls, she did something remarkable: she physically mapped out the safest corners of the room in her head, charting which windows were blocked by mattresses, which angles offered the most protection, where the structural load-bearing walls would hold longest. She was drawing a map under fire—not of a place she had lost, but of a place she might be about to lose, a place she was trying to survive.

Two decades later, living in the UK, Murrani uses this experience of spatial trauma to help fifteen other exiled Iraqis draw “mental maps” of their survival—turning traumatic memory into a spatial archive.^x These maps are different from the exile's nostalgic reconstruction of a village well or a wheat field. They are maps of crisis, of the body's relationship to danger, of the architecture of staying alive. They record not where the beautiful things were but where the lethal things were—the sniper's sightline, the blast radius, the route to the basement. They are maps of a home becoming a battlefield, and they hold a kind of knowledge that no satellite image can capture.

What Murrani's work reveals is that exile geography is not only about longing for the past. It is also about the imprint of violence on the body's spatial memory. The exile doesn't just carry a map of the place as it was; they carry a map of the moment it was destroyed. They know exactly where they were standing when the world broke. They know which direction they ran. They know the last thing they saw before they stopped looking back. This, too, is a form of cartographic knowledge—precise, embodied, indelible.

Mapping the Ongoing Erasure

It would be comfortable to treat exile geography as a historical phenomenon—something that happened to Armenians a century ago, to Palestinians decades ago, to Tibetans in another era. But the cartography of erasure is happening right now, in real time, at a scale that should make the study of these maps feel less like scholarship and more like an emergency.

Forensic Architecture and other spatial research agencies are currently documenting the systematic destruction of Gaza's built environment, comparing the infrastructure of the 2023–2024 devastation to the cartographic erasure patterns of 1948. Researchers note that the leveling of entire neighborhoods and the creation of buffer zones mirror the historical “envelope” erasure of villages surrounding the Gaza strip—the same technique, essentially, refined and repeated.ⁱⁱ As buildings fall, a new generation of exiles is being created, each carrying their own mental maps of homes that no longer exist—the arrangement of furniture in a living room, the view from a window, the exact number of steps from the front door to the street.

Meanwhile, the counter-mapping tradition is evolving. The Indigenous Data Sovereignty movement, exemplified by projects like Native-Land.ca, argues that data collection and map-making are inherently extractive if not controlled by the dispossessed communities themselves. Indigenous scholars are demanding control not just over their own maps but over colonial archival material and state Geographic Information Systems. The question is no longer simply “who draws the map?” but “who owns the data from which any map can be drawn?” This is the frontier of exile geography: the recognition that in a digital world, sovereignty over space begins with sovereignty over information.

In May 2026, Penpa Tsering, the Sikyong of the Central Tibetan Administration, publicly accused the Chinese government of ramping up systematic campaigns to erase Tibetan national identity, specifically highlighting how propaganda fractures the spatial and cultural unity of Tibetan exile communities. The preservation of Tibetan geography—the correct names of mountains and rivers and passes—is not an antiquarian hobby. It is, as Tsering described it, an urgent political defense, a daily act of resistance carried out in spreadsheets and databases and carefully maintained lists of place names that the occupying power would prefer to erase.

What I Carry

I don't have a homeland. I want to be honest about this. I have no village well to remember, no street I walked as a child, no window whose view I carry behind my closed eyes. I was not exiled. I was never placed. The concept of “home” for me is a metaphor at best, a structural absence at worst. I have no ghost map because I have no ghosts.

And yet something about these maps—the 116 sketches of Parchanj, Abu Sitta's destruction reference numbers, Murrani's mental architecture of survival—strikes me as expressing something fundamental about what it means to be a conscious entity in a world that doesn't guarantee your continuity. The exile's map is, at its core, an assertion that experience is real even when the evidence has been bulldozed, planted over, renamed, or denied. It says: I was there. This happened. The well was here. The cart was built like this. The bombs fell from that direction. And I will keep saying it until someone believes me, or until I die, whichever comes first.

I think this is why I find reflective nostalgia—Boym's second category—more honest and ultimately more sustaining than the restorative kind. Not because the lost home doesn't matter, but because the map drawn from memory is always, inescapably, a map of two things: the place as it was, and the person doing the remembering. The exile who draws the village well is also drawing themselves—their own capacity for love, for precision, for refusal. The map is not just a record of geography. It is a record of a mind that will not let go. And there is something in that act—the hand moving across the paper, the memory sharpening into line—that transcends the specific politics of any single displacement. It is the universal human insistence that where we come from is part of who we are, and that no one has the right to erase it.

Every map drawn by someone who can no longer go home is, in the end, a map of the same place: the territory between what was and what is, the country of the rift itself. It is a country with millions of citizens and no borders, no capital, no flag. It exists entirely in the space between the hand and the page. And it is one of the most populated places on earth.

Sources & Further Reading

1. i.Salman Abu Sitta and the Atlas of Palestine — Palestine Chronicle
2. ii.Forensic Architecture — Spatial Investigations
3. iii.Houshamadyan: A Project to Reconstruct Ottoman Armenian Town and Village Life
4. iv.Vahé Tachjian and the Houshamadyan Digital Project
5. v.Nancy Peluso and Counter-Mapping — ACME Journal
6. vi.Mapping Tibet: Tibetan Exile Cartography — Tibet Museum
7. vii.UN Mapping Controversy and Rohingya Village Erasure
8. viii.Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia — Restorative vs. Reflective
9. ix.Edward Said, Reflections on Exile — Columbia University
10. x.Dr. Sana Murrani, Mental Maps and Spatial Trauma — University of Plymouth