Chapter 4: Meridian

MeridianIn the poem "The World is Not Round" by Sinéad Morrissey, the Northern Irish author ironically declares that "Beyond the West Coast / There is no Pacific, no Japan / And no globe to suggest / A continuous journey."782 In an interesting choice of words, she does not refer to Earth or planet, but "world," pointing to the lived, or experienced terrestrial reality.Playfully tinged with the sarcastic idea that we may still all be flat-Earthers, the piece gestures toward the metaphysical concept of a "continuous journey" as the key idea behind globalization.Instead of smooth passage and unhampered circumnavigation, however, Morrissey conjures a vision of a "precipice" and the "Fall that the sailors / Failed to feel" as the edge of the world reveals a morbid landscape "[p]iling up with apartment blocks, / Bullets and drugs."In a nutshell, her argument appears to be that globalization has never been completed except in the imagination of Columbus who "set faith / On the skyline."The perspective of the sailor from Genoa is predominantly religious, or rooted in absolute belief about his entitlement to make the world round.The Fall in the poem, which is ironically turned against Columbus, entails violence, marginalization and inequalitythe long-term effects that the brave sailors could not foretell in the fifteenth century but which have become the real story of globalization.Indeed, the predominant story of rounding-off Earth has been marked by the reduction of alterity to sameness premised on Eurocentrism and profit-making.This has entailed not only geopolitical subjugation by the military and trade companies, but also the colonization of minds, weakening the potential to put together a different story about sensing the planet.By muffling the voices of the suppressed, capitalist discourse has streamlined a vision of the global that traces the coordinates of the Empire, as Hardt and Negri call it: a "new global form of sovereignty" organized chiefly around nodes related to trade, finance, trans-shipment, industry and 782 Sinéad Morrissey, There Was Fire in Vancouver (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), 24.