He Made His Own Map

 

In the winter of 1865, a man named Tomás walked a wind-scraped peninsula on the western coast of Ireland with surveying chains and poles. He worked for the British Ordnance Survey. His job was to revise the maps of Ireland — maps made necessary, in part, by the Great Famine.

The famine had killed a million people. Another million had emigrated. Whole villages stood empty. The land had been changed utterly and the British wanted it remeasured, renamed, set down in new maps.

Tomás was Irish. He had survived the famine. He was now employed to map the wreckage of it. And he could not sign his own name on the work. Irish workers on the Ordnance Survey were not permitted to do so.

He exists now in the very few records his great-great-granddaughter, the novelist Maggie O’Farrell, could find. O’Farrell’s new novel, Land, published in June 2026, is built from those fragments. It begins with Tomás and his ten-year-old son Liam on the peninsula, measuring what has been lost. In the novel, Tomás makes a discovery at an ancient spring — a place older than the famine, older than the colonizers, older than any of the names on any of the official maps. It changes him.

He quits his official work. He uses his family’s savings to buy land near the spring. He begins to make a different map — one in the Irish language, one documenting the dolmens and burial mounds and evicted villages and pre-colonial kingdoms the official maps had erased or renamed or ignored. A map of what was actually there, not what the colonizers wanted to record.

O’Farrell told NPR what drew her to this story: “What interested me was the people who neither died nor left — the ones who stayed in Ireland and survived.” The survivors. The ones no one wrote about. The ones who stayed on the land and tried to hold onto it.

Tomás could not sign the official map. He made his own.

In 1977, Ngũgí wa Thiong’o was a celebrated Kenyan novelist. He had published five novels in English, been shortlisted for major literary prizes, and was considered one of the most important writers in Africa. He had a faculty position at the University of Nairobi.

That year, he was arrested and imprisoned by the Kenyan government for a play he had co-written in Gikuyu, his mother tongue. The play was about the struggles of ordinary Kenyan people. It had been performed for a rural community, in the language of the community itself, and the government found it threatening.

He spent a year in a maximum-security prison. He wrote his next novel on toilet paper — in Gikuyu. When he was released, he announced he would no longer write novels in English. He would write only in Gikuyu, the language of the people he wrote about and for.

He said: “Literature emerging from and about Kenya was almost always about the experiences of the colonial elite, as if the peasant and working class did not exist, or at best existed only as colorful background.”

His decision was not romantic. It was political. Writing in English — the colonial language, the language of power, the language his readers needed to know to participate in the world colonialism had built — was one more act of erasure. To write in Gikuyu was to name his people in their own language, for themselves.

He wrote: “Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world.”

He also wrote: If you take away people’s language, you have taken away the tool by which they understand themselves.

Tomás made an unofficial map because the official map was a lie. Ngũgí wrote in Gikuyu because writing in English would have been one more act of the erasure he was writing against. Both men understood the same thing.

Writing is an act of naming. The named thing exists. The unnamed thing slips away.

The Power of Authors teaches: the author writing from genuine purpose writes what needs to be named. Not what the official record acknowledges. Not what the market is ready to receive. What is actually there, in the place the writer knows, among the people the writer comes from, in the language they understand themselves to speak.

Whole villages stood empty on the peninsula Tomás mapped. The official map recorded new boundaries. Tomás recorded the buried cist, the dolmen, the ancient spring, the evicted village, and the name the Irish had always used for the land. He named what had been unnamed by the official record. He kept it from disappearing entirely.

Ngũgí named the peasant and the worker and the rural community and the Gikuyu-speaking person who had no book written in their language about their life.

What goes unnamed in your world? Who are the people without a book written about their life in the language they live it? What place has been given the wrong name, or no name, or a name nobody who lives there ever used?

Write it in. Make your own map. Sign your own name.

Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.

The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.