European cartography and postcolonial cartographies have produced a mutilated - and mutilating - cartography that constructs maps that enclose differences within borders, erasing the circulation of tastes, ideas, fashion and bodies. Using the notions of palimpsests and cumulative palimpsests, an alternative cartography can be devised, one that can show both 'roots and routes', anchoring and wandering, and can map the accumulated layers and levels of signification without foreclosing the present. The Indian Ocean as a diasporic field cannot be confined to a single representation. Its interconnected or conflicting strata call for a leap of imagination - a call artists and novelists have sought to answer. A palimpsest is 'a parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another; a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing'. It is a 'multi-layered record' which both preserves the distinctness of individual texts and exposes the contamination of one by the other, making way for a structure that privileges heterogeneity and diversity. For the Indian Ocean, the archaeological notion of the 'cumulative palimpsest' seems even more apt. It describes monuments in which 'the successive episodes of deposition, or layers of activity, remain superimposed one upon the other without loss of evidence, but are so re-worked and mixed together that it is difficult or impossible to separate them out into their original constituents'.