The globe irritated me. I could not kick it because it was stationed in a protective bracket and, although it was a ball like the others, didn’t look right, slanted at its axial angle. Even without its housing, a kick was unlikely: made of hard cardboard, it would hurt.
But I could spin it. And I did. I spun it so much that the little hole at the South Pole where it fitted at the bottom widened and threatened Earth’s place in the solar system. There were other attractions – some parts had nice colours – but nothing came near the boot of Italy and its ball, Sicily. That was one country worth looking at. Had I been around when Pangaea existed, I wouldn’t have been happy.
On the whole, the continents were not that taking. I liked Africa: its distinct shape and being smack in the centre made it easy to recognise; besides, I lived right at its end. The Americas had something going for them, but were spoilt by the messy bit between them. As for the rest, they didn’t resemble much, especially all those bits on the right in so much blue that they weren’t worth a look. Worse still were the two white bits, top and bottom, where they fitted into the stand.
School flattened my globe. Those coloured shapes, called countries, produced things – wheat, beef, gold – which had to be learnt, plus capitals, mountain ranges and rivers. It was called Geography, brother to History who was more evil, producing dates, wars and treaties. When high school presented the choice, I discarded both: languages seemed more useful than facts.
History has, however, caught up with me: troubles in my country stem from its past, which, like it or not, matters more and more and is not going away. Geography, too, has come back with vengeance: climate, a word spoken anxiously and often, is heard with trepidation and affects the way I live. Life on Earth seems a more serious undertaking than before.
It is also very different. Technologies have changed the way almost everything is done. Over the past three decades, communication, shopping, entertainment, learning, careers, pastimes and relationships have taken on a new character. It’s that much faster, driven on by technological innovation which has accelerated the pace of change, but had the brakes applied by COVID.
COVID started out east, in China, in a city few had heard of. Then it moved, across, and up, and down until there was hardly a place on the globe where it had not travelled. Roads stretched in silence, shops closed, skies emptied and cities grew quiet. People moved indoors. They watched screens, worked at them, played games on them. Many games were invented then, online ones which could be played solo or with others.
Towards the final stages of COVID, a new game, Worldle, was developed by a Frenchman who took revenge on the English: if they want to play it, they have to pronounce it. If saying it is torturous, playing it is exasperating. The reason: it can reveal an assumption of knowing where countries of the world are found and what they look like. That may not seem such a challenge, but as only the outline of the landmass of the country is shown, things are that much more complicated. France or Italy may not pose a problem, but when Norway makes an appearance, you will be befuddled. Norway, you say, that’s easy. But Norway unplugged from its watery bodies and Scandinavian buddies is a very different proposition. A shard of black bits alongside an unhealthy spine is Norway stripped of its cold waters. If you guess Chile, wrong: Chile is so thin it doesn’t even have a spine.
Schooled in the era when one carried an atlas in a satchel and traced countries in Geography, swotted them in History and wrote tests with one-word answers, I had the idea that I knew my way around the globe, more or less. Worldle showed me that less was the truth. Apart from the few firm favourites, I was clueless about nearly every shape that came with the new day. Nothing about a country’s size mattered: on the screen Russia and Nauru are allotted equal space. And it was not only the fact that I knew so few that was disconcerting: it was my preconceptions. In my mind Europe existed as a group of nicely-shaped, homogenous shapes, easy jigsaw style. But when I identify what looks like a splotch of ink dropped from a giddy height as Laos and find out that I am 8,721 kilometres south-east of the correct answer, Switzerland, I am flabbergasted. Does Switzerland look so messy! If discovering that my actual knowledge of how countries look was very sketchy, my sense of distances across the globe was non-existent. Too proud to stoop to an atlas, I guess a country which I reckon must be approximately right – sorry, seven thousand to the north-east.
Worldle laid bare my ignorance of what lies east of the Mediterranean. An upbringing attuned to the West and the toe of Africa had made my understanding of the world provincial. Were terms such as Near East, Middle East and Far East purposely designed to keep the Orient at arm’s length? Australasia and Japan apart, whatever else lay within and around the waters of the great Pacific I perceived as a scattering of unstable sorts, subject to earthquakes, volcanoes and typhoons.
If that part of the globe is physically volatile, the political instability of the Balkans makes identifying which shape belongs to which temporary country even more difficult. They keep playing games with their borders, inventing new names or melding them. Without the decency to keep a reliable border, it’s no wonder they started the Great War. Russia is another problem: when the great mass of the USSR came apart at the end of 1991, a proliferation of “-stans” entered the list of nations: Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan… and those of the ones which I can at least pronounce, try Kyrgyzstan for a start.
You might think my grasp of Africa would be better; it is not. Should I blame apartheid for having so thin a knowledge of what lies beyond Zimbabwe? I can visualise the array of nations which share that western bight of Africa, but where Guinea (not to mention Guinea-Bissau) fits in and whether Togo comes alongside Nigeria is beyond me. My memory of them is of having pretty colours in my school atlas. Africa does, however, offer a kind of short-cut: straight-line borders. Forty-four percent of all borders within Africa are in the form of the straight lines the colonialists put in place. But is Mali’s right-angle on its west or east side? Does Gabon really resemble a trapezoid? Perhaps Muammar Gaddafi had a good idea about Africa, a United States of Africa; with a single identity like the USA it would be so much easier.
On this globe we know as Earth the existence of countries is taken for granted. That there will always be countries seems natural: we grow up in one, hear about them every day, see them on maps and long to travel to them. It’s as if they have always been around, but once there were no border lines, no boundaries fixed and guarded. Earth was an unknown, a territory to be explored, withstood and understood. Within their natural habitat, people found ways to survive, form communities, build settlements, establish ownerships. Over time these peoples grew into nations which had borders, colours on maps, flags and capitals. As time goes on, the shapes and identities of the countries will not remain as I know, or think I know them, and Worldle will remain a continual puzzle.
* To understand the process which has led to this essay, go to: worldle.teut.fr – good luck.
* image: courtesy of unsplash
Entertaining read and memory buttons pressed. Thank