Ken, in the way that he does. The section’s title, ‘Redrawing the Maps’, originally comes from Geoff Dyer’s suggestion that ‘it is not enough simply to lobby for Berger’s name to be printed more prominently on an existing map of literary reputations; his example urges us fundamentally to alter its shape’.6
In 2012, as part of the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of Ways of Seeing and G., ‘Redrawing the Maps’ was the name given to a ‘free school’ in London that brought together an astonishingly broad range of people loosely inspired by Berger’s work to teach and learn from each other. With none of the rigidity the word might imply, Part I is a kind of syllabus, while Part II represents its application. The title of the latter is taken from one of Berger’s poems, ‘Terrain’. Here, the list of guides and maps gives way to the territory Berger uses them to navigate. Laid out in roughly chronological order, these pieces become less categorisable as they proceed, and less obviously ‘art writing’ about landscape. Yet ‘The Third Week of August 1991’ is among other things an attempt to understand the meaning of public sculpture in post-Soviet Europe. ‘Stones’ (2003) refracts contemporary Ramallah and its visual culture through some of the earliest sculpture – a cairn in Finistère. Finally, ‘Meanwhile’ (2008), the long essay that concludes the collection, defines our contemporary landscape as a prison. These pieces can be read as a sketch of art history – not that this is ever how Berger would describe his work – or as background for the individual texts of Portraits: in the sense of either the period in which they were written or the period they describe. ‘Without landmarks’, Berger writes in ‘Meanwhile’, ‘there is the great human risk of turning in circles.’
In the recent film The Seasons: Four Portraits of John Berger (2016), the actor Tilda Swinton notes that she and Berger share a birthday, 5 November (remember, remember). She reads ‘Self Portrait 1914–18’ (1970), his poem stressing how much the Great War shaped him, through his father, and the wider world into which he was born in 1926. Landscapes, then, is published to mark his ninetieth birthday. But, even alongside Portraits, it represents only a part of a much broader and still ongoing achievement – albeit one that it nourishes, and has been nourished by.
One aspect of this achievement which seems especially vital in 2016 is the great arc of Berger’s work that connects his decision to share the proceeds of his 1972 Booker Prize with the Black Panthers and his project on migrant workers, A Seventh Man (1975), through the Into Their Labours trilogy, which explored where these workers came from, and into the present via And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984). There he writes,
Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time. That industrialization and capitalism would require such a transport of men on an unprecedented scale and with a new kind of violence was already prophesied by the opening of the slave trade in the sixteenth century. The Western Front and the First World War with its conscripted massed armies was a later confirmation of the same practice of tearing up, assembling and concentrating in a ‘no-man’s-land’. Later, concentration camps, around the world, followed the logic of the same continuous practice.
If, as Berger writes, ‘to emigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments’, then we are all in great need of new maps.
Tom Overton, 2016
IT WAS NOT a hotel. It was a kind of pension where, at the most, there were four or five guests. In the morning breakfast on a tray was placed on a shelf in the corridor: bread, butter, honey and slices of a sausage which is a specialty of the city. Beside the tray, packets of Nescafé and an electric water heater. Contact with the severe and serene young women who ran the place was minimal.
In the bedrooms all the furniture, made of either oak or walnut, was old and must have dated from before the Second World War. This was in the only Polish city which survived that war without serious destruction to its buildings. In the pension, as in a convent or a monastery, there was a sense inside each room that the two windows which gave on to the streets had been contemplatively looked through for several generations.
The building was situated on Miodowa Street in Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter of Kraków. After breakfast I asked a young woman behind the reception desk where the nearest bankomat was. She regretfully put down the violin case she was holding and picked up a tourist map of the city. On it she marked in pencil where I had to go. It’s not far, she sighed, as if she would have liked to send me to the other side of the world. I bowed discreetly, opened and shut the front door, turned right, took the first right again and found myself in the Place Nowy, an open market-square.
I HAVE NEVER been in this square before and I know it by heart, or rather I know by heart the people who are selling things in it. Some of them have regular stalls with awnings to keep the sun off their goods. It is already hot, hot with the blurred, gnat heat of the Eastern European plains and forest. A foliage heat. A heat full of suggestions, that does not have the assurance of a Mediterranean heat. Here nothing is certain. The nearest thing to certainty here is a grandmother.
Other sellers – all of them women – have come from the outlying villages with their own produce in baskets or buckets. They do not have stalls and are sitting on stools they brought with them. A few stand. I wander between them.
Lettuces, red radishes, horseradishes, cut dill like green lace, small knobby cucumbers which in this heat grow in three days, new potatoes, their skins, with a little powdered earth on them, the colour of grandchildren’s knees, stick-celery with its cleansing toothbrush smell, cuttings of liveche, which the men, drinking vodka, swear is an incomparable aphrodisiac for women as well as men, bunches of young carrots swapping fern jokes, cut roses mostly yellow, cottage cheeses, which the rags pegged to the clothes line in their gardens still smell of, wild green asparagus that the children were sent to look for near the village cemetery.
The professional traders have naturally acquired all the trading tricks for persuading the public that golden opportunities never come twice. The women on their stools, by contrast, propose nothing. They are immobile, expressionless, and rely on their own simple presence to guarantee the quality of what they have brought to sell from their own gardens.
A wooden fence around a plot and a two-roomed house made from logs with a single tiled stove between the two rooms. These women live in chatas like this.
I wander between them. Different ages. Different builds. Eyes of different colour. No two women wearing the same kerchief. And each one of them has found, as she bends down to cut chives or pull out dog-tooth weed or pick red radishes, her own way of protecting, of favouring, the small of her back, so that its intermittent aches do not become chronic. When they were younger it was their hips which absorbed the shock of events, now it is their shoulders which have to do so.
I peer into the basket of a woman who is standing without a stool. The basket is full of pale golden pastries, little pies. They look like carved chessmen, more specifically like castles, castles that could be stood either way up, their regular embrasures always at the top. Each one is ten centimetres tall.
I pick up one of the castles and realise my mistake. It is far too heavy to
