Narcotic Cities

Narcotic
Cities

Mélina
Germes,
Luise
Klaus,
and Stefan
Höhne
(Eds.)

Narcotic
Cities
Counter-
Cartographies
of
Drugs
and
Spaces

Table
of Contents
4

8 Acknowledgments
12 Introduction
Mélina Germes, Luise Klaus, and Stefan Höhne
22 Don’t Map Drugs!
Mélina Germes and Luise Klaus
DE-/RECONSTRUCTING
42 Numbering Babylon?
Failed Attempts to Map British Drinking, 1817–1914
James Kneale
54 What’s in a (Police) Drug Map?
A German Example
Bernd Belina
60 Behind a Berlin Needle Map
Mélina Germes
72 The Hotspot.
An Exploration into the Mapping of Contaminated Urban Space
Boris Michel and Frederieke Westerheide
84 Blanks in the Maps.
On the Relationship between Researchers, Participants, and their Maps
Mélina Germes, Roxane Scavo, and Anna Dichtl
POLICIES AND SPACE
96 Coca, Cattle, and the Forest.
The Expansion of Coca Farming and Illicit Cattle Ranching in Colombia
Paulo J. Murillo-Sandoval, John Kilbride, and Beth Tellman
106 Anti-Drug Vigilante Killings in the Philippines.
War on Drugs, Poverty, and Urbanity
Francis Josef Gasgonia and Ragene Andrea Palma
URBAN HISTORY
122 The Stockholm Smoking Bans.
Intoxicating Spaces in Early Modern Europe
Hanna Hodacs and Sarah Falk
134 Taverns, Clubs, and Homes.
Three Archetypes of Women Who Used Drugs in Nineteenthand
Twentieth-Century Lisbon
Cristiana Vale Pires
142 Media and the Dystopian City.
The Heroin “Crisis” in Madrid, 1980–1995
María José León Robles
154 “Map of Junkie Mokum”.
A Humanitarian Narrative of Amsterdam from 1992
Gemma Blok
164 Small-Time Dealing.
Apartment-Based Heroin Dealers in Paris, 1968–2000
Aude Lalande

ONLINE GEOGRAPHIES
174 A Global Digital Market?
About the Geography of “AlphaBay”
Meropi Tzanetakis and Kai Reisser
182 Substantiated Spaces.
The Invisible Geographies of Erowid’s Vaults
Francesca Valsecchi, Fabien Pfaender, and Fire Erowid
194 Using Kratom.
Online and Local Stories of North Americans
Elli Schwarz
AMBIVALENT EMOTIONS
208 Counter-Addiction Stories.
Reflections from a Body Mapping Workshop in London
Fay Dennis
218 The Secret across the Street.
How Addiction Transgresses Lines and Breaks Bonds in a Belgian City
Eli
224 (Post-)Lockdown Mapping.
Drugs, Sociability, and Risks in Bogotá
Maria Alejandra Medina, Vannesa Morris,
and Estefania Villamizar, Échele Cabeza collective
234 Party, Emotions, and Gender.
Mapping Festive Spaces of Consumption in Bordeaux
Roxane Scavo
244 Traces.
Playing Hide-and-Seek with a Night Owl in a Large French City
Roxane Scavo and Mélina Germes
URBAN STRUGGLES
254 Displaced.
The Denial of Public Space and Everyday Resistance in Milan
Sonia Bergamo, María de los Ángeles Briones, and Francesca Mauri
266 Open-Air Fumoirs.
Atypical Socio-geographical Places in Abidjan
Jérôme Evanno and Ahouansou Stanislas Sonagnon Houndji
274 Pyatak Drifters.
The Making of Social and Cultural Places in Ukrainian Cities
Vladimir Stepanov and Alexandra Dmitrieva
286 Weaving Drug Users’ Spaces of Care and Sociality in Vancouver
and Paris
Céline Debaulieu, Melora Koepke, Maddy Andrews, Elli Taylor,
and Lauren Dixon, SoCS Collective
298 An Ideal City for Marginalized Drug Users in Germany?
Luise Klaus and Mélina Germes
310 Contributors
316 Table of Figures
320 Imprint

Introduction
Mélina Germes,
Luise Klaus,
and Stefan Höhne
12

Drugs are fascinating—not only because of their effects on mind and
body, but also because of our ideas and conceptions of them. While they
have been part of human culture and everyday life for millennia, it is only
recently, during the twentieth century, that the term “drug” has acquired
a moral overtone combining fear of harm and addiction with contempt
toward those who yield to it (Koram 2022). Psychoactive substances are
used for a variety of purposes, such as exploring the self, altering
moods, enhancing the senses, but also treating disease, escaping
boredom and despair, enhancing social interaction, stimulating artistic
creativity and performance, or coping with peer pressure (Rosen and
Weil 2004). Yet what defines drugs is not their chemical properties but
the way substances are categorized and labelled, and some uses
condemned. While some products such as alcohol and tobacco are
largely accepted and consumed all over the world, others are framed as
dangerous and vile—from production to trade and consumption. Urban
discourses associate drugs with crime, vice, and sickness, so much so
that we share an urban imaginary consisting of neighborhoods eaten up
by drug use and trafficking and of shiny party miles of ecstasy in the
night-time economy.
By exploring drug maps, we question the relationship between drugs,
spaces, and their representation, thus dealing with both issues: the
representation of drugs and the representation of space—most particularly
cities. While the title Narcotic Cities evokes images of urban
spaces of crime, repressive law enforcement, and violence, our aim is
rather to investigate these discourses and reframe the term narcotic by
establishing and solidifying alternative images and knowledges, thereby
representing a diversity of viewpoints. Narcotic Cities traces the
complex entanglements of drugs, institutions, and experiences with
spaces and places, thus shedding new light on our cities.
HISTORIES OF PROHIBITION AND HARM REDUCTION
The way we deal with psychoactive substances is rooted in specific
histories, beginning with ritual substance use and traditional farming.
These include the history of war, genocide, and colonial regimes,
including slavery and the exploitation of land, rural economies, and
resources. They also include the history of the commodification and
industrialization of what became an extremely profitable merchandise in
the entertainment and well- being industries as well as in the enhancement
of workforce productivity, so that nowadays, powerful industries
and illegal organizations thrive on the exploitation of these commodified
substances.
The history of drug regulation also plays a significant role, by prohibiting,
decriminalizing or legalizing substances, or introducing harm
reduction approaches. Drug prohibition emerged a little over a century
ago, with the International Opium Convention of 1912, enacted by the US
to stop the British export of opium to China (Scheerer 2019). Further
legislative measures quickly followed and were consolidated into the
1961 United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which still
remains the most important legal basis of international drug control. It is
shaped by international power and trade interests, colonial ownership
claims, and denial of Indigenous knowledge (Daniels et al. 2022, 4). This
Single Convention failed to reduce international drug trade and use, and
more substances such as cannabis, LSD, and heroine became popular in
Western societies particularly after World War II (Hobson 2014). The US
government responded in the nineteen-seventies with the War on Drugs
campaign at an international level, fostering repression, as well as
economic exploitation with major impacts on human rights worldwide.
Illegalization lays the foundation for illegal economies, often entangled
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with other criminalized activities, leading to a high concentration of
profits on one side, and harsh working conditions, forced labor, and
violence on the other.
Yet prohibition is aimed less at chemical substances—that can be used,
for example, in prescription medication—and more at social practices of
drug use. Depending on the broader historical and geographic context,
but also on the concrete circumstances and the recipient, the very same
substance can be considered a harmless stimulant, a helpful pharmaceutical,
or a dangerous narcotic. Law enforcement varies greatly
depending on the criminal legislation in each country, but also on the
social tolerance of law enforcement agencies, for whom the context of
use and the attributed class, gender, race, and health of the person
using—or “abusing”—such substances matters. These processes show
that the prohibition and condemnation of each substance is less a
matter of objective harms and more a matter of politics and power
relationships. Drug prohibition and control has massively reinforced the
global “color line” (Koram 2019) by impacting disproportionately on
oppressed races, and serves as a way to govern the poor. It forms the
means by which police access marginalized, racialized, and criminalized
groups, that are stigmatized as deviant. The War on Drugs leads to
millions of deaths, shapes social inequalities, and increases “havoc
among vulnerable populations while extracting profit for the powerful”
(Bourgois 2018).
Despite these long-standing phenomena, the last few decades have
marked a crucial moment in the history of psychoactive substances.
Punitive approaches are increasingly regarded as ineffectual or even
counterproductive. Similarly, the medical understanding of addiction as
a disease and abstinence as a cure, has partially evolved with the HIV
crisis, leading to an understanding of (public) health whereby the
eradication of substance use is no longer the goal—or not the only one:
instead, harm reduction has become a new tool of drug policies. Harm
reduction is based on the acceptance of drug use, whether legal or not,
and aims to minimize sanitary risks by containing the real epidemics that
are AIDS, hepatitis, and many more. Today, activists, organizations, and
researchers try to change the way we see and think about drugs, drug
users, prohibition, and so on. Medical and legal approaches to drugs
frame their use with moral reprobation as deviance from law and
medicine, as a matter of crime and of sickness—and often, they result in
controlling policies. In recent decades, there has been a shift away from
this perspective. Sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and
many others in the realm of social sciences and humanities now
understand drugs as a social, historical, and political construct, as well
as the object of multiple social practices, around which power relationships
unfold. Growing movements such as the International Network of
People who Use Drugs (INPUD) or the International Drug Policy
Consortium (IDPC) advocate for social justice around drugs on a global
scale. There have been calls for an end to crop eradication as well as for
consultation of local farming communities on land uses. Under the
leadership of field activists in some Western European countries for
example, different strategies for prevention and harm reduction are
being increasingly mobilized to address health issues, such as substance
and health information, drug checking, safer use campaigns, and
distribution of sterile materials, in combination with street work by
social and medical personnel. Different initiatives are emerging, working
in favor of decriminalization of cannabis or psychedelics, but also
against prohibition in general. These developments have uneven
geographies: in other countries, activists are fighting the death penalty
for sole drug possession.
All these phenomena indicate an evolution in the way that many
psychoactive substances are perceived, used, and governed. They vividly
demonstrate that the laws, regulations, and imaginaries surrounding
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drugs, for example with regard to their legality and effects, are historically
dynamic, subject to social power relations, and therefore
changeable.
In this context, representing issues around drugs appears a sensitive
task. Mapping drugs is probably never a neutral gesture, but rather a
stance. What kind of discourse do drug maps convey? What are the
conceptual, technical, and ethical issues of representation that arise
while mapping drugs? How can drug mapping contribute to these
debates?
IN SEARCH OF NARCOTIC CITIES AND SPACES
Before we delve into cartography, let’s establish what mapping drugs is
about: a way of tracing geographies, a way of figuring spaces.
While the production and commerce of drugs involve a diversity of
scales and places from rural areas to global trade, cities—understood as
spaces of consumption—tend to be the last link of the value chain. They
are a major scene of retail and use and, as such, are at the forefront of
narcotic spaces. The display of drug practices attracts public attention,
which leads to urban discourses of insecurity. Urban stereotypes such
as “ghettos”, red-light districts, or other “spaces of fear”—and also
stereotypical, often highly gendered and racialized characters such as
“junkies”, migrants, sex workers, or dealers—permeate our cultural
representations of the narcotic city. Drug maps often perpetuate these
stereotypes.
In response to the neoliberal appeal for public order in terms of drugs
and the danger they pose, urban and mostly public spaces are monitored,
inhabitants are controlled and space is governed by both repressive
but also social policies. It is less a question of what drugs do to
cities than of what drug policies do to cities. As institutions, cities, and
metropolises—increasingly in charge of security, health, and social
policies—are major enactors of drug policies and hence able to frame
local landscapes. As centers of economic growth, cities are also places
of colliding inequalities—a growing phenomenon which is mirrored by
the geographies of drug consumption. These range from upper-class,
private places of sociability and almost riskless use to impoverished
neighborhoods where there are high rates of homelessness, little to no
access to privacy, and sanitary and safety risks. Meanwhile, there is
hardly any aspect of society not touched by drugs—even in the form of
communities or spaces that define themselves by abstinence from
psychoactive substances, be it for moral reasons or in the interests of
recovery from addiction. In most countries, we can expect drug use, in
one form or another, to occur almost everywhere, from universities and
parliaments to offices and retirement homes. Indeed, a large majority of
people use a psychoactive substance of some kind, be it for performance
enhancement, recreation, or pain relief.
Yet drug use doesn’t happen just anywhere—rather, where and how it
happens reveals social structures and collective cultures. Zinberg (1984)
shows that three different factors matter: drug, sets, and setting. The
first (drug) refers to the substance and its mode of application, frequency,
and dose. The set is the physical, psychological, and social
makeup of individual users. But it is the setting that significantly affects
how we experience, perceive, and categorize drug use. The notion of
setting encompasses a multi-scalar understanding of space: political,
legal, and economic frameworks; socio-cultural milieu—where, again,
class, gender, race, and ability play a huge role; and also the actual place
and time of consumption. To a great extent, it is the setting that explains
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why the use of one specific substance can be either prescribed,
recommended, tolerated, or prohibited and why the same product, used
in different contexts, is not perceived, conceived, or handled in the same
way.
As such, this book is not an atlas giving answers to the question of
where drugs are found, but much more an attempt at understanding the
relationships between drugs, space, and their representation. Our
understanding of space—as developed in the next chapter—is a constructivist
one. Space is neither a given, nor an empty container, nor a
determinant, nor an essence. Rather space, places, and cities are to be
understood as multifold constructs, built by history, economies, power
relationships, everyday life, emotions, and imaginations (Lefebvre 1991).
There is no objective space, but rather a multitude of ways to describe
and depict the ways social relationships exist within spaces and fold
spatialities in their own way. Cartography is one of the countless
possibilities of doing so, and offers infinite potential for the representation
of space.
Yet the cartography of drugs seems to be particularly problematic. Our
spatial representations revolving around drugs are often structured by
polarizations between Global North and Global South, domestic and
foreign, private and public spaces, rural and urban, or citizens and
deviants. Dominant discourses make space a part of the “drug problem”
and, by spatializing it, make it appear tangible and more real. In their
turn, cartographies make the “drug problem” visible and contribute to
the questionable construction of drugs as a problem. Common cartographies
of trade flows, of dangerous urban areas, or of regions affected by
overdose epidemics often fail to map structural contexts and power
relationships. They tend to make us believe that “the problem” is the
ghetto, the South, or the substance itself. Yet we know that there would
be no ghetto without the capitalist production of urban space and labor
exploitation; no South without uneven development and postcolonial
heritage; and no such spread in opioid overdoses with the existence of
an intact and accessible healthcare system. Critical cartography is very
helpful for the deconstruction of such maps.
Our approach to the issue of representing space and cities is rooted in
critical cartography, understood as, firstly, a praxis of critique of maps
and, secondly, a praxis of mapping other maps. We aim to interrogate
in depth what is at stake in a drug map and also how to engage in
mapping drugs. We also ask how we can learn to discover new cities,
new appropriations of space and new geographies with, or contrary to,
drug maps. Since maps are instruments of power, they can also become
instruments of counter-power, by overwriting dominant discourses
about drugs and highlighting dissident perspectives, displacing the
gaze, and visualizing other objects through other lenses. Concepts and
tools from critical cartography as a discipline and counter-mapping as
a set of practices are invaluable in order to understand what is at stake
when one engages (or declines to engage) in drug cartography.
Conceiving of this book as an experiment, we attach great importance
to clarifying and reflecting on mapping processes. For this reason, we
have developed something called a paramap. The paramap is the story
around, about, and beyond the map that reflects how and by whom it
was produced. It gives an insight into the sources, context of production,
and methodologies of research, and explains graphic or conceptual
choices. Each chapter includes a paramap; in order to distinguish it
from the more thematic text, it is printed in a distinct layout and
recognizable font.
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MAPPING NARCOTIC CITIES
This book gathers together scholars and activists from a variety of
backgrounds, working hand in hand with a team of cartographers,
illustrators, designers, and artists. While scholars brought to bear their
academic culture and the habits and methods of their discipline,
activists shared a knowledge rooted in their political statements,
expertise, and commitments. Map makers brought their imagination,
their gift for seeing beyond mere words, and their numerous skills. Some
contributions scrutinize drug maps from the perspective of critical
cartography. Other contributions were devised and produced by map
makers themselves. Around half of the contributors worked with a map
maker for the first time. The result of an intense creative and scientific
labor, this book presents a series of graphic essays exploring urban
stories as well as histories, policies, communities, digital spaces, and
pleasures associated with drugs. Graphic techniques range from
satellite images and spatial analysis to amateur hand drawings and
artistic weavings, with the idea of experimenting with different graphic
languages. Writing styles range from personal memories, stories, and
reports to essays and scientific papers. Contributors interpreted our
editorial request to compose a paramap in their own ways, showing that
there are incredibly diverse ways to do so. Providing reflexivity and
explanations, the paramaps deal with issues linked to critical cartography
and counter-mapping, granting a look behind the scenes of the
maps, enhancing them as a contingent product, exposing mapping
processes to questions, doubts, and criticisms, and laying bare their
pitfalls. They explain the contributors’ intentions and methodologies as
well as the background to their contributions. This rich mosaic of
drug-related topics, perspectives, and knowledge shares the common
denominator of non-judgment toward drug use, endorsing neither
criminalization, nor medicalization, nor moralism.
Paradoxical though it may seem, the first chapter “Don’t Map Drugs!”
(→ 22) explains why and when it is crucial not to map drugs. It addresses
more systematically the issues around critical cartographies of drugs
and spaces outlined above. Based on our own experiences with mapping
both in field research, in the editing of this book, and on accounts from
critical cartography and counter-mapping, it presents the traps and
pitfalls of mapping drugs, as well as what one should consider when
mapping drugs.
De-/Reconstructing
The first part of the book investigates drug maps and the processes of
their production, undoing, or even redoing. Questioning their construction,
de-, and reconstruction, the chapters also suggest new ways of
reading drug maps. Delving into the European context from the nineteenth
to the twenty-first century, they problematize technicity, politics,
and power. They address the way drug maps are embedded in the
making of urban and regional policies, depicting “wet” and “dry”
neighborhoods in London (“Numbering Babylon?” by James Kneale,
→ 42), revealing the failure of prohibition but also the issue of racism in
Germany (“What’s in a (Police) Drug Map?” by Bernd Belina, → 54), and
highlighting the fetishization of discarded needle maps in Berlin
(“Behind a Berlin Needle Map” by Mélina Germes, → 60). Technical and
ethical issues around drug mapping are addressed through discussions
of how spatial algorithms handle drug crime data (“The Hotspot” by
Boris Michel and Frederieke Westerheide, → 72), and how research
participants create blank spaces during mapping interviews (“Blanks in
the Maps” by Mélina Germes et al., → 84). Altogether, these analyses
rooted in critical cartography outline the way (urban) drug maps tend to
depict cities as dangerous spaces, and are a means of securitization
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that nevertheless involves prejudices, revealing numerous pitfalls and
defects.
Policies and Spaces
That said, cartography and GIS (Geographical Information Systems) can
be enlightening in terms of understanding drug policies and their impact
on spaces—both in urban and rural contexts. Satellite images allow
interpretation of built or cultivated landscapes, and are embedded in
problematizations of the role of legislations and state institutions. Two
contemporary case studies, on the cultivation of coca and environmental
issues in Columbia (“Coca, Cattle, and the Forest” by Paulo J. Murillo-
Sandoval et al., → 96) and on killings of drug users in the Philippines
(“Anti-Drug Vigilante Killings in the Philippines” by Francis Josef
Gasgonia and Ragene Andrea Palma, → 106) offer two contrasting
insights into how the global War on Drugs creates different spatial
patterns, whether in rural or urban spaces.
Urban History
Because the way we engage with drugs today has a long history, the
third section of the book explores practices and representations which
draw on European urban cases studies from the eighteenth to the end of
the twentieth century. The regulation of intoxicants—colonial products
such as tea, coffee, or tobacco—was first introduced back in the
eighteenth century, when smoking bans in public spaces were issued
(“The Stockholm Smoking Bans” by Hanna Hodacs and Sarah Falk,
→ 122). Class and gender make a difference: in places such as taverns,
nightclubs, or at home, the consumption of substances by women
contravened the gendered expectation of a masculinist society in
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Lisbon (“Taverns, Clubs, and
Homes” by Cristiana Vale Pires, → 134). Such dominant discourses were
also led by the media, such as the Madrid newspaper ABC spreading
discourses of fear in a context of gentrification in the 1980—90s
(“Media and the Dystopian City” by María José León Robles, → 142). As
a counterpart, in 1995 the artist Peter Pontiac painted a complex and
intriguing map of Amsterdam (“Map of Junkie Mokum” by Gemma Blok,
→ 154). Meanwhile, at-home dealers in eighties/nineties Paris were
managing earnings and risks by doing precarious deals in the city
(“Small-Time Dealing” by Aude Lalande, → 164). This third section
highlights the social and cultural embedding of drugs through a series
of maps that re-interpret the urban landscape of deviance from the
eighteenth to the twentieth century, focusing on the way specific urban
spaces are associated with the use of legally prohibited or morally
reproved substances.
Online Geographies
In the twenty-first century the rise of the internet, by allowing massive
peer-to-peer communication between remote, anonymous people, has
transformed our geographies and cities, creating infinite possibilities of
connecting people worldwide. So does the darknet, a hidden and secret,
yet huge part of the internet, with platforms used for online drug
end-user supply (“A Global Digital Market?” by Meropi Tzanetakis and
Kai Reisser, → 174). But this trade has mostly concentrated on the
Global North darknet, and the internet mirrors already known geographies
of consumption. Other platforms build spaces of knowledge-
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sharing, like the self-reported psychedelic experiments of amateur
psychonauts collected in the Erowid Vault (“Substantiated Spaces” by
Francesca Valsecchi et al., → 182). These infrastructures provide North
American users with knowledge about—and a marketplace for—kratom,
a herb used to meet their (medical) needs (“Using Kratom” by Elli
Schwarz, → 194). The internet has its own geography, which is closely
interconnected with non-virtual geography and with digital divides, more
often than not linking together those who are already geographically and
relationally close. These maps reflect distance and proximity within or
despite the a-spatial promises of the internet.
Ambivalent Emotions
While policies, histories, and infrastructure contribute to the production
of space, subjectivities are also at play. Furthermore, emotions such as
pleasure and relief are central to the question of why drugs are used and
how. Five urban case studies ranging from Western Europe to Bogotá
map what happens within us and also between us, dealing with risks,
hurting, and healing, but also with harm, both to oneself and others.
Self-representation in the context of addiction (narratives) is highlighted
in the body map artwork of a London workshop participant (“Counter-
Addiction Stories” by Fay Dennis, → 208) and in a childhood memory
taking place in Belgium, between light and shadow (“The Secret across
the Street” by Eli, → 218). Pleasure and the social construction of risks
are addressed in the context of lasting changes following the COVID-19
lockdown in Bogotá (“(Post-)Lockdown Mapping” by Maria Alejandra
Medina et al., → 224), or of gendered approaches in two French cities,
with the cautious itineraries of the partygoer Marie ( “Party, Emotions,
and Gender” by Roxane Scavo, → 234) contrasting with the more
entitled itineraries of Charles (“Traces” by Roxane Scavo and Mélina
Germes, → 244). These maps experiment with representations of body,
self, and subjectivities, and of intimate and social relationships. As such,
they show very clearly how social positions and privilege matter, as
exemplified by issues of gender and age, the status of urban night-time
economy workers, or the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. These
chapters call for participants and interviewees to be allowed to draw
and map their space, their city, how they feel, and what they think.
Urban Struggles
Contemporary cities are inhospitable places, the scene of growing inequalities
where increasing ground rents foster homelessness. Despite
large differences in legislation, law enforcement, and socio- medical
intervention throughout the world, drug users—when they are visible in
public and bear signs of their use—are marginalized, stigmatized, and repressed.
What is seen by outsiders as a frightening “open drug scene” is
a space of sociability, survival, and everyday life from an insider perspective.
Referencing case studies from three continents, this section deals
with urban struggles and attaches great importance to understanding
these perspectives, which are often silenced or misrepresented, and
also to showing what marginalized drug users make possible against all
the odds. Their struggles relate not only to legislation and the issues
of stigmatization and rejection, but also to city planning: urbanism is
a tool of open drug scene displacement, as seen in Milan (“Displaced”
by Sonia Bergamo et al., → 254). In Abidjan, the open drug scene is
structured by informal yet well-established smoking rooms which are
simultaneously protected and raided by the police (“Open-Air Fumoirs”
by Jérôme Evanno and Ahouansou Stanislas Sonagnon Houndji, → 266).
The creation of spaces of sociability is proving to be of the utmost importance,
giving marginalized drug users real agency. In Ukrainian cities,
pyataks were meeting places structuring everyday life (“Pyatak Drifters”
by Vladimir Stepanov and Alexandra Dmitrieva, → 274). In Vancouver
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and Paris, the dynamics of encampment and decampment, emplacement
and displacement are captured through weaving “Weaving Drug
Users’ Spaces of Care and Sociality in Vancouver and Paris” by Céline
Debaulieu et al., → 286). In these circumstances, it is more important
than ever to invent new futures and imagine a hospitable city—and why
not an ideal one?—built on a claim to rights and dreams (“An Ideal City
for Marginalized Drug Users in Germany?” by Luise Klaus and Mélina
Germes, → 298). These last maps illustrate the city once more as a site
of struggle and everyday resistance.
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“Map of Junkie Mokum”.
A Humanitarian
Narrative of Amsterdam
from 1992
Gemma Blok
154

This map of Amsterdam (popularly known as “Mokum”), depicting the daily experience of
intensive drug users living in the Dutch capital, was created in 1992 by cartoonist Peter Pontiac
(under the pseudonym of Petrus Josef Gerardus Pollmann, 1951–2015) (Figure 30). The map was
in fact a poster, meant for readers and contacts of Mainline, a Dutch foundation for the advancement
of harm reduction, founded in 1991. From the start, Pontiac worked for the Mainline
magazine as an illustrator. The poster offers a bird’s eye view for the city as a place for drug
users, overseen by crime, death, and the devil.
Mainline was founded with financial support from the Dutch government, as well as from the city
council and several organizations in Amsterdam. As such, Pontiac was probably paid for making
the poster at least in part with government money, the Dutch taxpayer thus indirectly facilitating
his imaginaries of the plight of the heroin addict. In giving a voice to drugs users, however,
Mainline was still received with mixed feelings. As the Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool wrote
with some irony: “Drug users now also have their own lifestyle magazine. The glossy magazine is
called Mainline and was distributed this week with a rigged cargo bike to the target group in the
center of Amsterdam and the Bijlmermeer (Bosman 1991).”
The new foundation and magazine were also criticized in the Dutch parliament. In 1993, one
Member of Parliament asked the Minister of Health whether it was lawful for this magazine to
publish an issue including a bag of blue poppy seeds, accompanied by an explanation of how to
grow them and a recipe for extracting opium. According to the Minister, this was not lawful:
Mainline had crossed a line here; propagating drug use was not what the magazine was meant to
do. However, the Minister argued, “The broad health information in the journal generally contributes
to harm reduction. The magazine seeks as much connection as possible with the daily
environment of active (hard) drug users” (Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal 1993).1
Peter Pontiac, a cult figure of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, is considered the “godfather” of
Dutch underground comics. He was the first Dutchman to draw autobiographical comics.
Influenced by American cartoonists such as Robert Crumb and Bill Griffith, Pontiac not only drew
stories about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, but experienced this lifestyle first hand. Many of his
comics analyzed weighty themes such as his own heroin addiction (The Amsterdam Connection,
1977; Detoxiphobia, 1993) and his father’s wartime past as a Nazi collaborator and SS journalist
(Kraut, 2000). Pontiac is also known for his illustrations for music magazines, posters, and album
covers. In 2011, he received the Dutch Marten Toonder Prize of €25,000 for his oeuvre, reflecting
broad acknowledgment of the innovative character and the importance of his work.
Although Pontiac became known within the so-called hippie movement in the late sixties, he did
not identify with the term “hippie”. At the time, Pontiac and his friends referred to themselves as
“freaks” or “heads,” as he later said in an interview (Het Parool 1991). Pontiac started using
opium, and later also heroin, around 1970, after an intensive period of LSD use. An art school
drop-out, he was living at the time in a commune where drug use was quite common; after about
twenty-five trips, he was feeling—in his own words—quite bad, very scared, sometimes hallucinating.
Opium, which he bought from the Chinese community in Amsterdam, made him feel OK again,
so good in fact that he started to cry, because he “could finally relax. It was like after many years,
I was finally allowed to take off my tight shoes” (Berkeljon 2015). Also, he was inspired by the
famous debut album of the Velvet Underground, especially by the song “I’m Waiting for the Man”.
“I am a victim of Lou Reed,” Pontiac once jokingly stated (van Brummelen 2015a). He moved on to
using heroin, as well as speed and cocaine, in the seventies and eighties, reinventing himself
during the punk period of 1970–1980.
By the time Pontiac drew the map, he himself was no longer a “junkie,” nor was he living in
Amsterdam. He managed to quit the habit in 1984, when he also became a father and started a
family (van Brummelen 2015b). Shortly after Peter Pontiac stopped taking heroin, the HIV/Aids
epidemic broke out. For a long time he thought he had got out in time, but his years of using
intravenously had caught up with him after all. In 2010, the doctor told him he was suffering from
hepatitis C. Later, this was joined by cirrhosis of the liver. “It’s a pity, but I had it coming” (quoted
in Berkeljon 2015), Pontiac said stoically shortly before he passed away, when he was still
working on his (unfinished) final comic, Styx, about his own death.
1 Question by Member of Parliament E. van Middelkoop (GPV) about Mainline Magazine
(June 2, 1993). With answer by E. Hirsch Ballin, Minister for Wellbeing, Public Health,
and Culture.
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Figure 30
Amsterdam Nation. Map of Junkie Mokum
Urban History “Map of Junkie Mokum”
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A VISUAL HUMANITARIAN NARRATIVE
First of all, the poster Amsterdam Nation can be seen as part of the
drug user movement of the second half of the twentieth century. In
playfully using the term “junkie” in the poster’s subtitle (“Junkie
Mokum”), Pontiac discursively joined a tradition of user activism where
“junk” was a nickname, a badge of honor almost. The work of the
American “beat” writer William Burroughs, with his influential novel
Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (1953), was
instrumental in this process; in the Dutch early opiate scene to which
Pontiac belonged, this book was well known.
Junkie Unions, as they called themselves, emerged in Amsterdam,
Rotterdam, and several other Dutch towns around 1980, rebelling
against the abstinence-oriented treatment climate that dominated the
approach to drug addiction at the time (Blok 2011b). This drug user
movement can be interpreted as an embodied health social movement,
defined by sociologist Phil Brown as a movement of people who criticize
the knowledge and practice around a certain condition—in this case,
opiate addiction—and who thereby use the biological body as a way to
focus on the experience of the individual (Brown et. al. 2004).
In his poster, Pontiac certainly highlighted the bodily experiences of
opiate users. His poster can be perceived as a visual form of the
“humanitarian narrative.” The literary aesthetic strategy of the humanitarian
narrative was invented in the nineteenth century. Its aim was to
generate compassion and move people to take action, using vivid
descriptions of the suffering body. This narrative strategy was closely
linked to the rise of social movements at the time, such as the anti-slavery
movement. The anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example,
contained evocative descriptions of the suffering of slaves who are
beaten and abused. The body, in the words of cultural historian Thomas
Laqueur—who coined the concept of the “humanitarian narrative”—is an
effective imaginative vehicle for arousing solidarity and empathy.
Through the physical dimension, all people are deeply connected to
each other: every person can imagine what it’s like to experience pain,
cold, or hunger.
Pontiac’s visual style was aimed at making viewers aware of the social
and physical hardship caused by opiate dependency. Their habits are
depicted as depressing: they have to resort to taking their drugs in train
toilets. They regularly suffer from cold turkey symptoms, hence the
actual turkey on the shoulder of the skeleton hanging over “Junkie
Mokum.” Behind Central Station at the De Ruijterkade, where many
heavily addicted female drug users worked as prostitutes at the time,
one of them is portrayed with angel wings, the customer being a
faceless wad of guilders. A homeless person also lies asleep there,
looking ragged, unhealthy, and unhappy, with—once again—a green can
of beer in front of him.
Clearly, Pontiac’s poster also seeks to make the point that both opiates
and alcohol can create dependence and misery. Through this strong
emphasis on the connection between drug policies and dependencies
on the one hand, and alcohol policies and dependencies on the other,
the map provokes the viewer to reflect critically on the way society deals
with these two intoxicants: the one illegal, the other legal, but both with
damaging effects on at least some of their users. This critique of the
existing drug laws was also a key element of the broader Dutch drug
user activism of the late twentieth century.
In many ways, therefore, this map of “Junkie Mokum” can be considered
as counter-mapping. First of all, it was clearly a critique of the role of
the state and of the drug laws. In the Netherlands, opiates were illegal
except for medical purposes from 1919 onward; the revised law of 1976
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introduced stronger sentences for dealing in “hard drugs” such as
heroin, although its users were framed as patients. Heroin was very
expensive in the seventies, a gram costing about 300–400 guilders
(roughly equivalent to the same amount in euros today), and even
more in times of market crisis. On the top left of the poster, we see a
criminal counting his money, and there is a bag of money in front of him
marked Nederlandse bank, the Dutch central bank. Beside it is also a
green beer can, a clear reference to the green cans of the famous Dutch
brewery Heineken. The can is located on the map in the neighborhood of
De Pijp, where the actual brewery is based. On the front of it is the word
staat (state). The criminal’s money-counting is depicted as causing a
kind of whirlwind or vortex reaching down to the city, as if he is sucking
the money out of the city, its “junkies”, and urban residents in general,
who are robbed, or have their bikes stolen. The subtext seems to be
that, according to Pontiac, both organized crime and the state make
huge profits from intoxicant use; criminals launder their money through
the legitimate banking system, and taxes on alcohol make the state
rich as well.
The map can also be read as a critique of the connectedness of modern
consumer society with the substance dependence of “junkies.” Near
Central Station stands a farmer with a pig, asking for directions to the
Wallen, the Red Light district; many prostitutes living there were heavy
drug users. Near the hand of the skeleton, Pontiac depicts a drug user
bringing a stolen TV to the Bank van Lening, the pawnshop, suggesting
that a lot of goods stolen by users entered the legal economy this way.
We see the city of Amsterdam profiting from vice tourism, too: on one of
the trains, a passenger exclaims, “Sin city, here I come!” There is a lot of
prostitution going on in the poster, especially in the alley Lange Niezel,
from which a giant penis rises. Meanwhile, the police are mostly
portrayed as a rather lazy institution, focused on the punishment of
user-sellers. In the Warmoestraat, the police station closest to the open
drug scene of the Zeedijk, a policeman has locked a culprit up in a cell
and is leaning back in a relaxed manner.
Furthermore, the map shows a hidden side of Amsterdam: not the
tourist attractions, but the harsh nitty-gritty of the drug user’s life, and
the places and spaces he or she would go to buy drugs or get help,
treatment, shelter, or clean needles. Pontiac explicitly addresses these
two worlds of the tourist on the one hand, and the drug user on the
other—both very present social groups in the city center. Near Dam
Square, a couple of tourists are taking a boat tour, unaware of the drug
deals going on in a nearby alley. The map explicitly shows several early
examples of shelters and drug consumption rooms that were present in
Amsterdam in the seventies, like the Princenhof, the Junkieboot, and
the HUK.
The HUK in the Spuistraat was no longer in existence in 1992; this
early experiment in harm reduction was started with the support of
Amsterdam city council in 1974, as a user room for a group of some sixty
to seventy chronic opiate and speed users, offering them free medical
care, cheap food, clean needles, and a place to stay, use drugs, and
hang out during the day. Support for the HUK was withdrawn by the
city council in the early eighties, however, because the place allegedly
caused nuisance and was dominated by criminal activities (Blok 2008).
This is why Pontiac puts “v/h”, short for voorheen (“former”) in the text
balloon next to the HUK. The Junkieboot near the Oosterdokskade—a
drug consumption boat initiated by a group of urban residents in an
effort to concentrate the drug scene and reduce nuisance in the neighborhood—was
also defunct, following Amsterdam mayor Ed van Thijn’s
project to “clean up” the Zeedijk area. The only drug consumption room
left was the Princenhof.
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The map also shows the methadonbus, which was a mobile methadone
clinic for low-threshold maintenance treatment; this was introduced in
Amsterdam in 1979, as an alternative to the abstinence-oriented
treatment dominant in the seventies. Other points on the map are a
“junkie priest” offering needle exchange; the “Junkiebond MDHG” near
the Oude Waal; and the big red heart of the Salvation Army.
With this bottom-up view of marginalized groups, drug users, and
homeless people, the map argued that the city belonged to these groups
as well, but their world was a hidden world: they were marginalized in
spatial terms as well. It also made the point that the daily life of the drug
user was not one long round of hedonistic, escapist fun, but was in fact
hard work: it was about knowing where to get dope, shelter, food, help,
and support; where to sell your stolen bikes or engage in prostitution to
raise the money to buy drugs.
In its raw depiction of the daily experience of drug users, the map aimed
to look beyond the negative judgments and stereotypical images of
“junkies” that were common in Dutch society at the time, and still are;
addiction is a heavily stigmatized condition, in the Netherlands as
elsewhere (van Boekel 2015). The new phenomenon of non-medical
heroin use peaked in the mid-eighties and was still visibly present in
towns throughout the Netherlands in the early nineties, when Pontiac
created his poster. Reactions to heroin use were mixed, but often
negative. Others were scared or annoyed by drug-related crime and the
“visible nuisance” of “junkies” at railway stations, or on the train. In the
poster, a passenger on one of the trains says: “Er zit ‘r een op het toilet
conducteur” (“One of them is on the toilet, conductor.”) Near a bridge in
the city center, famous at the time for the trade in stolen bikes, Pontiac
shows a dialogue between a “junkie” and a member of the public: “Pst,
fietsie kopen?” (“Hey, wanna buy a bike?”) the user asks; “Ga werken,
sukkel” (“Get a job, loser!”) is the reply.
In other aspects, however, Pontiac’s map was not simply a counter-map.
His poster was part of the harm reduction paradigm that was in fact
rapidly becoming the dominant one in Dutch addiction treatment at the
time. Methadone maintenance treatment had been on the rise since the
late seventies, in response to the concentrated open drug scenes in
Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and other cities. In Amsterdam, the number of
people receiving methadone maintenance treatment rose from 1466 in
1981 to 3887 in 1984 (Blok 2011a). The local municipal health service
coordinated a methadone program comprising mobile methadone clinics
and district posts (Blok 2014). From the mid-eighties onward, needle
exchange was available as well, through several care organizations and
the municipal health services. The framing of addiction as a chronic
disease was taking hold. Pontiac seems to agree with this view. The map
seeks to counter any romantic image of drug use. The devil is grinning,
the junkie is a skeleton with a turkey on his shoulder, and the dominant
mood is one of suffering and anxiety. We should note that, by the time he
made this map, Pontiac was no longer addicted himself, and looked back
critically on his drug-using life. In an interview, he said:
I thought it was really cool to be a junkie, a needle sticking out of
my front pocket; the ritual of scoring drugs, the tension of walking
up to the dealer on the street. In retrospect, you look back and
realize that it was in fact a rather sad affair (Minneboo 2011).
The map also shows how post colonial migration shaped the Amsterdam
drug scene, and is inclusive in that it portrays the Dutch-Surinamese
group of heroin users, although they are humanized less explicitly than
white users. In the seventies, many residents of Surinam migrated to the
Netherlands, as the colony gained independence in 1975 and its
inhabitants could choose between a Dutch or Surinamese passport. A
small number of the migrants from Surinam entered the street trade in
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heroin and/or became addicted themselves. Within the heroin-using
community, the Dutch-Surinamese user-sellers formed a relatively large
group, accounting for about ten percent. They dominated the public
trade in heroin at the head of the Zeedijk, from heroin bars like Emil’s
Place. On the map, we can see a grinning black user-seller, dressed in
SuperFly gangster style. Another black man is running away from the
police, dressed in the green, red, and yellow colors of the Surinam flag.
The suffering of Dutch-Surinamese users is less present in the poster: a
substantial number of them were homeless, for instance, because of the
toxic combination of structural discrimination in the job market, lack of
affordable housing, police persecution of street dealers, and heroin
dependence.
The map does show the SOSA building, where a Surinamese care organization
was founded, and where drug dealing also went on. In fact, the
SOSA was shut down in 1978 for this reason, leaving a group of homeless
Dutch-Surinamese heroin users, who had been living in the SOSA
building, out on the streets. In the winter of 1979, the Doelengebouw, a
large empty theatre building on the Kloveniersburgwal, was squatted by
this group, with the help of a white Dutch Protestant minister. This was
in fact a crucial phase in the history of heroin in Amsterdam, because
when the city council evicted the Dutch-Surinamese users from the
Doelengebouw the following spring, they introduced the first methadone
bus (mobile methadone clinic) as a new treatment facility, originally
meant especially for this particular group.
However, this building, the events leading up to it being squatted, and
the fact that a large group of Dutch-Surinamese heroin users was left
homeless, are missing from the map. Given the long history of stereotypical
portrayals of “evil” black dealers in Western popular culture
(Coomber 2006), the map could have countered this dominant, stigmatizing
visual narrative more explicitly. In this sense, Pontiac’s map,
although it was extremely innovative, and highly inclusive and destigmatizing
in its aims, also reflects the perspective of the white heroin user in
Amsterdam in the seventies and eighties.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the heirs of Petrus Josef Gerardus Pollmann for
their kind permission to reprint Amsterdam Nation in this publication.
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Bibliography
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Peter Pontiac (1951–2015).” de Volkskrant, January 22, 2015.
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SHAD22020243
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in Nederland. Amsterdam: Nieuwezijds.
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Fight against the Ideal of a Drug-Free Society.” In: The Transmission
of Health Practices (c.1500–2000) edited by Martin Dinges and
Robert Jütte: 69–88. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.
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Mobile Methadone Clinic (‘Methadone Bus’) in Amsterdam.” (1979)
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van Boekel, Leonieke C. 2015. Stigmatization of People with Substance
Use Disorders. Tilburg: Tilburg University.
Bosman, Frans. 1991. “Vakblad Mainline vindt bij druggebruikers gretig
aftrek.” Het Parool, November 2, 1991.
Brown, Phil, Stephen Zavestoski, Sabrina McCormick, Brian Mayer,
Rachel Morello-Frosch, and Rebecca Gasior Altman. 2004. “Embodied
Health Movements: New Approaches to Social Movements in Health.”
Sociology of Health and Illness 26, no. 1: 50–80. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-
9566.2004.00378.x
van Brummelen, Peter. 2015a. “Amsterdamse Striptekenaar Peter
Pontiac Overleden.” Het Parool, January 21, 2015.
van Brummelen, Peter. 2015b. “Striptekenaar Peter Pontiac (1951–2015)
Verloor met 2-0 van de Dood.” Het Parool, January 21, 2015.
Coomber, Ross. 2006. Pusher Myths. Re-situating the Drug Dealer,
London: Free Association Books.
Het Parool. 1991. “Peter Pontiac praat.” Het Parool, June 29, 1991.
Minneboo, Michael. 2011. “Interview Peter Pontiac: Horro Vacui.”
September 10, 2011. http://www.michaelminneboo.nl/2011/09/
interview-peter-pontiac-horror-vacui/
Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal. 1993. Aanhangsel van de
Handelingen. Vragen gesteld door de leden der Kamer, met de daarop
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sgd/19921993/0000011983/1/pdf/SGD_19921993_0001611.pdf
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The Secret across
the Street.
How Addiction
Transgresses Lines
and Breaks Bonds
in a Belgian City
Eli
218

My name is Eli. It’s 1982 and I am eight years old. I live in a Belgian city
surrounded by the country, forests, cows, and small villages with houses
made of stone. Since we moved into a flat in the small city center, I have
been allowed to walk to school on my own. My mom and dad care for me
all the time. They go to the office to work every day with their briefcases
and they do a lot of things. They are so kind, even if I have to eat green
vegetables. Our home is on the second floor, above the garage, and
there is a backyard where I can play ball and I have a lot of small cars
and a city map to play on.
On that day, my mom was due back very late after her yoga class—so late
that I would be asleep by then. So only my father would be there to look
after me at bedtime.
I was lying in my bed in the dark, about to go to sleep, when he knocked
and opened the door slightly.
— Are you asleep?
— Not yet.
— Is everything alright?
— Yes.
— I’m just going to the pub over the road for a few minutes. I have something
to deal with. I’ll be there in time before mom comes back, my dad
says.
— It’s nothing, just a few minutes. We’ll keep it a secret, OK? Don’t tell
mom. It’s our dad-daughter secret. I’ll be back right away. Good night,
sweet dreams!
I am lying in my bed in the dark and hear the door being closed and
footsteps going down the stairs.
Something is wrong. I don’t know what exactly. But something, I’m sure.
Because if it has to be a secret, then something is wrong. Dad and I do
have secrets, like when he’s buying me a lemonade at the Saturday
market. That’s what a fun secret is like. A play secret. Not a real one, not
a dangerous one.
Tonight, this is no fun. I’m home alone at night. I have no idea what kind
of business my dad has in the pub next door. Something is wrong. I
should sleep. Instead I wait. Why do my parents need to have secrets
from each other? What are they doing that is sooo bad, so wrong that
they need to keep it secret from each other? I’m alone and I worry.
There is something wrong happening here, and I cannot let this happen,
because it’s wrong. I have to make it right before mom comes home.
Because how can dad be sure to be back in time before she comes? How
is he going to know? I cannot let this happen so I have to do something.
I switch on the small light and get up and pick up my dressing gown. I
have to. I tie it very tight around me. I take my own keys to the flat. I have
no choice, I have to do something. I go out of my room, I wait, trembling
in the doorway, then go out of the flat, down the stairs and out of the
building, the empty flat behind me.
Outside, the street is dark. There is the street lighting, the light from the
cars and the lights from the pub across the road. The pavement is a bit
wet and shines. What do I do now? I have to go across the street, the
one I cross back and forth the whole day long, running errands for my
parents or whatever.
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The Secret across the Street
219

Figure 43
Mapping a secret
But it’s night and nobody knows I’m here and I have never been here
alone at night and nobody must know that I’m here because it’s a secret.
I’m scared that somebody will see me.
I cross the street and stand outside the pub door. There is so much light
inside. Lots of noise too. But I can’t see anything, I can’t see dad. I’m
scared.
I open the door of the pub, it’s heavy, it’s warm inside, and everyone
stares at me. The old landlady. The men at the bar. My father is sitting
here talking. I go straight up to him, grab his sleeve, and try to pull him
out and say that he has to come home now, right now.
He laughs. “Don’t worry. I’ll be home in a few minutes. I told you. Go back
to bed, go back home.”
I’m ashamed of myself, in my dressing gown and slippers in a pub full of
old men in the middle of the night. But the shame doesn’t matter at all to
me.
Dad stays there. I turn and go back, out of the pub, across the street, up
the stairs, into the flat and into my room. I’m scared.
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220

A few minutes later I hear footsteps on the stairs; the door opens, it’s my
dad. I can finally let myself fall asleep.
Sometime after that, sometime after I found so many empty bottles and
cans hidden in the garage, I go to mom. Dad is not there. She is busy
with work. I tell her what I can, about dad and the bottles, my worries, no
details. I cannot keep such a strange secret to myself. If there is
something wrong then she ought to know. I have to tell her. She is
always the one who explains things to me, who understands and tells,
like when dad was feeling bad after grandma died years ago. She knows
very well what’s right and wrong and she will know what to do. I don’t
talk about the pub though, because I did something wrong that day.
She looks up and says: “That’s nothing, dear. All adults drink now and
then. They get tipsy, but they are fine. You might have heard that some
people drink too much. Not your father. He drinks with meals, that’s
normal. That’s nothing. Don’t you worry. Don’t be scared.”
Many years later my dad is officially diagnosed as an alcoholic. Mom tells
me she’s so sorry she didn’t believe me back then. Then, alcohol
becomes the fourth member of our family and tears us apart with its
passive aggressive ways and our combined powerlessness.
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221

ABOUT THE DRAWING
We have all been children once. We have doubtless had very diverse childhoods. But it is more
often as adults that we have the concrete possibility and the ability to talk about our childhood
and to reflect upon it. To talk about the time when we were not entirely the same person as we
are now. Another self.
I drew this map and wrote this text as an adult, reflecting on a fundamental memory from my
childhood, in a tiny rural town in Belgium.
Children have a very particular perception of the world around them, because of their tiny bodies,
because of their need for care, attachment, and affection, because of their different kind of
spatial experience, because of the huge potential they have for imagination, and for making up
and telling stories.
This map portrays one very particular moment in my existence as a child. It’s about a few short
scenes which changed the way I perceived and interpreted the places I lived in and the people I
lived with.
In the foreground, there is the darkness of the night-time. In the background, there is alcoholism.
Further back, what alcoholism did to us. Usually it’s not visible, so I painted it in red: shoes,
buttons, key, steps, closed mouths, and closed ears.
First, we see the child’s own bedroom, its protective and quiet darkness.
I map a secret. I map a child being told to keep the secret of one parent from the other. The
secret breaks the peaceful entanglement of the family, replacing it with gaps. A gap between the
parents, who live in the same place but in different worlds. A gap between the tiny child and the
huge father asking them to keep a secret. A gap between the child and the mother who must not
be told.
I map the lines that the child has to transgress in order to bring back some order to their broken
world because of their father’s transgression. Staying up when it’s time to sleep, going out of the
flat when it’s not appropriate to do so, going out of the building in the middle of a child’s night.
So many lines.
Second, we see the street, a familiar yet at night unknown territory, eerily dark yet illuminated by
the waking activities of adults. The pub is the most illuminated and illuminating space, yet it is
threatening to the child’s eyes. It’s foreign, it’s not the place for them to be. They have crossed
many thresholds and many lines to get there, and they will have to cross even more.
I map loving ones wanting to save loved ones from doing wrong. What I map is beyond any limit,
it’s beyond the thinkable world of this child.
Third, there is the very bright room of the pub, full of lights, reflections of light on glasses,
laughter, noise, and many indistinguishable adults—only the father in the middle of them, who
hears without listening.
I map the gap between children’s and adults’ experiences of the world.
Then there is the journey all the way back to the child’s room. This way back is not a way back to
peace and an undoing of transgression. Once the line of transgression is crossed, it cannot be
crossed a second time. It only has the appearance of normality, but what is transgressed cannot
be undone.
Then, when the child’s mom is told, another transgression happens, with the aim of undoing all
previous transgressions: breaking the secret that broke the order of the world. Breaking the
father’s secret without telling the child’s own secret. The child can’t tell their mother they went
out into the street at night alone. That’s impossible.
But then another transgression occurs: the mother doesn’t believe the child. Thus, we map the
bond that is damaged when a parent does not believe their child.
Ambiva lent Emotions The Secret across the Street
222

I don’t map alcohol. It’s everywhere anyway. I don’t map addiction. It’s not mine to map. I don’t
map prohibition. Alcohol is legal. I map transgressions of sacred limits through and around
alcohol dependency, and the entanglement of these transgressions in the nuclear family context.
I map the way addiction to substances interferes with relationships with loved ones. I map
addiction from a child’s perspective, a child who is not only witness to, but entangled in, the
addiction.
Ambiva lent Emotions
The Secret across the Street
223

© 2023 by ovis Verlag GmbH
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Copy editing:
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Proofreading:
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Design and setting:
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Lithography:
Bild1Druck, Berlin
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