Beyond the footpath: grammars of walking and the walking subject in Wordsworth and Shehadeh

This article shows how the act of walking embodies one’s cartographic identity in landscape and decolonizes the walking subject through physical re-mapping of places, corporeal self-definition and resistance to socio-political abstraction. In Wordsworth’s poetry, walking turns into a sublime experience that embodies the poet’s, speaker’s and/or walker’s subjective identity, his organic unity with the natural world and subsequent rejection of materialism. Shehadeh’s writing, likewise, reveals that physical interaction with nature produces authentic tempo-spatial dimensions which refute the political and socio-economic forces that constantly seek to change geographic realities in national landscapes. In fact, Wordsworth’s and Shehadeh’s productions of subjective cartographic identities and protest against material ideologies in cosmopolitan centres are expressed via the employment of certain grammars of walking. While these grammars reflect Wordsworth’s poetic practice of walking as a regenerative activity that underpins essential truths about the value of spontaneous correspondence between the human self and natural order in the humdrum of England’s industrial advent, they demonstrate Shehadeh’s discursive construction of knowledge. Shehadeh’s discourse not only fashions a cosy familiarity between the Palestinian walking subject and his/her lived places but also challenges the Zionist cartographic propaganda or tradition of “knowing the land”.