Gulfs of (in) Meaning
On the arbitrariness of place names.
Map courtesy of Mapquest’s “Name Your Own Gulf” generator.
Given the shit currently flooding the zone of Trump 2.0, it’s impossible to keep up on all the enormities and outrages and simple “WTF?” moments barraging us. At the same time, it’s interesting to see which particular in(s)anities stick in the mind. For me, one of the big ones has been Trump’s geographic revisionism.
The most obvious example is the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, but Trump has otherwise exhibited what we might identify as an intuition of cartographic arbitrariness. He has done so with his insistence on Canada becoming the 51st state, referring to our 9000km-long border as “an imaginary line.” On that point, at least, he’s not wrong: borders might at times follow natural boundaries like rivers or mountain ranges, but the act of saying “HERE is my country, THERE is yours” is at root an imaginary distinction. Which is not, I should hasten to add, to say that it’s thus an insignificant or unsubstantial distinction; national borders, like constitutional law and other elements of the social contract, are manifestations of the collective imagination. With enough people agreeing to their reality—along with the legal and political armature to maintain and enforce that reality—such acts of imagination take on the substance of reality.
Although not, as we see in the present moment, without contestation. Trump’s fantasy of annexing Canada has had the equal and opposite effect of re-entrenching Canadians’ national ideation. And the insistence on calling a certain body of water The Gulf of America is at once risible and a frightening expression of MAGA’s imperial ambitions. For what better tool of ownership than naming? (Given his penchant for slapping his name on things, it is mildly surprising he didn’t just call it The Gulf of Trump.) It has always been the stratagem of imperial powers, to rename conquered territory and oblige the native inhabitants to identify it by the new names and new maps. Such indeed is the central conceit of Irish playwright Brian Friel’s brilliant play Translations, which is about a British surveyor mapping a region of County Donegal in 1833 as part of the British Empire’s Ordinance Survey. All of the local place names, which are mostly simple literal designations in Gaelic (“the tall hill,” “the green hollow”), are bastardized and Anglicized in a grand act of semantic colonization.
Place names tend to be freighted with history. To make this point with my students, I will ask: what is this piece of land on which we live? The city of St. John’s, in the region of the Avalon Peninsula, in the province of Newfoundland. Each one of those names can be unpacked at length; in the more abbreviated form of this lecture riff,1 I ask where we get “Avalon,” and why this part of the province has that name? A few of my students will reliably be familiar with Arthurian legend and identify it as King Arthur’s final resting place or, conversely, where the Lady of the Lake comes from. Yes, I say: and given that the evolution of Arthurian legend is one the goes from pagan myth to being thoroughly Christianized, by the time we get to the final versions of the stories, Avalon effectively becomes synonymous with the Christian Paradise. Which, as it happens, was what led Sir George Calvert to bestow the name. On receiving a royal charter in 1623, Calvert named it "in imitation of Old Avalon in Somersetshire” wherein were planted “the first fruits of Christianity in Britain.” He hoped that this new province would become, like its namesake, “a paradise of Christendom.”
Spend a few moments researching almost any place name and you’re likely to find complex and sometimes surprising histories.2 But such histories help remind us that place names are always arbitrary, sometimes deriving from benign common usage and convention, sometimes imposed as a declaration of power and ownership, often some combination of both. Renaming or reverting to old names is as much an aspect of decolonization as it was imperial diktat, as we see with Bombay, Burma, and Rhodesia becoming, or returning to, respectively, Mumbai, Myanmar, and Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Trump’s other principal geographical incursion is a case in point: the highest mountain in North America has long been known by the indigenous Koyukon peoples of Alaska as Denali—a name literally translating to “the tall one.” In the late 19th century, a gold prospector dubbed it Mount McKinley in honour of the then-presidential candidate (and, shortly after, the 25th president) William McKinley. Though McKinley never visited Alaska, much less saw the peak bearing his name, the U.S. government officially recognized it as such. In 2015, the Obama Administration changed it back to the more appropriate Mount Denali (which the State of Alaska had already done, forty years earlier). Trump’s re-renaming seems at once a typically petulant gesture—because, obviously, identifying something by its indigenous name is just wokeness, pure and simple3—as well as one signalling his change of affinity from President Andrew Jackson to McKinley, because of the latter’s association in Trump’s mind with tariffs.
David Frum4 points out in The Atlantic that there’s something of an ironic self-own in the Trumpian insistence on “The Gulf of America.” Such bodies of water, he points out, have always been named not because they belong to the nation in the name, but because they were the sites of exploitation, conquest, or subjugation. Mexico didn’t call it the Gulf of Mexico—Spain did. Likewise, the Bight of Benin was not named by the people of Benin but by the European sailors—slave-traders, mostly—who crossed that water to get to African shores. “The Indian Ocean,” Frum writes, “The Java Sea. These were labels chosen not by the Indians or Javanese, but by European seafarers en route to India and Java.”
What might seem like an exception, he continues, isn’t an exception at all: the “English Channel” was named by the Dutch in the 1600s; the English, by contrast, called it the “German Ocean” as it was their gateway to the markets of the Rhine Valley. But “[b]ecause the English relied on superior Dutch charts for a long time, the Dutch name stuck—despite the efforts of some English geographers to replace the name with the more romantic and less objectifying ‘Narrow Seas.’” The point, Frum emphasizes, is that “[b]odies of water are typically named by dominant nations not after themselves, but after the subordinate nations on the other side.”
In some ways, this doesn’t matter. The expanse of water nestled in the crook formed by North and South America’s contours is indifferent to our naming. I could name it for my cat, but I don’t have the power or influence for the “Gulf of Catesby” to be anything more than confusing for the people I speak to. In other ways, however, these sites of semantic struggle are both vital and illuminating. Next week in my second-year American Lit class, we start Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), a novel preoccupied with the practices of naming. Morrison signals this crucial theme at the outset when she tells the story of Not Doctor Street, a site of significance in the Black neighbourhood in which the narrative mostly unfolds. It was the street on which the sole Black doctor established his office, and so was popularly referred to as Doctor Street. So common did this usage become that residents forgot the original street name and sent letters addressed Doctor Street, much to the annoyance of the Post Office. Finally, the Post Office sent a notice around that the street should be called by its official name and not Doctor Street. At which “Not Doctor Street” became the standard appellation, in defiance of the Post Office’s directive.
Without going down the rabbit hole of Song of Solomon’s awesomeness (possibly I’ll save that for a future Curriculars post), this brief and amusing digression serves to allegorize the resistance to power imposing names and thus identity. In the name of not going on too long here, I won’t enumerate all the ways we see that at work presently; suffice to say examples are easy to come by. And however small the act of defiance is, calling the Gulf of Mexico anything but the Gulf of America at least affords a certain satisfaction.
NOTES
“St. John’s” obviously speaks to the Christian European history of those who colonized this region, but it’s also worth noting that there are nearly seventy Johns sanctified by the Catholic Church. Whoever named the settlement—popularly attributed to John Cabot, but this is disputed—opted for the most obvious, John the Baptist.
When I first moved to Newfoundland, I would get annoyed that my mother habitually pronounced it NewFOUNDland, which will earn you dirty looks. I mentioned this to a colleague, who informed me that I, also, mispronounced it. I said NEWfoundland, when in fact the correct pronunciation is NewfoundLAND. “Like underSTAND,” she emphasized, then clarified, “It’s an anapest”—denoting the metric foot comprising two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one. Breaking this down for my students, I suggest that the third, correct pronunciation is also the most benign. Starting from the premise that calling this new territory “new” and “found” is itself an act of erasure of the indigenous inhabitants, I say (with my tongue only partly in my cheek) that emphasizing LAND places the stress on the least problematic part of the word.
And sometimes not—sometimes place names can be charmingly literal, as with the two most prominent universities in England, whose towns are named for a ford in the river where farmers could cross with their oxen, and a bridge over the River Cam.
And also of course because he can’t miss a chance to erase Obama’s actions.
There is no greater indicator that we currently inhabit the Darkest Timeline than the bewildering fact of how constantly I find myself in enthusiastic agreement with David fucking Frum. There is no more vitriolic Trump-hater than a never-Trump conservative, and I am here for watching Frum aim his considerable rhetorical gifts at our common enemy … but it still feels very, very wrong, and I would very much like to return to the timeline in which reading him reliably makes my blood pressure spike. Strange bedfellows, etc.