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Metaphor
Explanation and Analysis—Land within Land:
Chapter 11 introduces the reader to the complicated social environment of Glenard Oak, the high school that Irie, Joshua, and Millat attend. The narrator describes in a metaphor how the school's social groups are organized in various geographical ways:
[...] kids are like pissing cats or burrowing moles, marking off land within land, each section with its own rules, beliefs, laws of engagement. Despite every attempt to suppress it, the school contained and sustained patches, hangouts, disputed territories, satellite states, states of emergency, ghettos, enclaves, islands. There were no maps, but common sense told you, for example, not to fuck with the area between the garbage cans and the craft department.
Each disparate social group "mark[s] off land within land," claiming their own space, like warring nations fighting over territory. There follows a list of the sorts of geographical arrangements that represent the school's dynamics. All these geographical metaphors describe ways in which certain groups assert themselves or ostracize others. These metaphors are taken from colonialism (territories, satellite states, enclaves, islands) or else segregative urbanism (states of emergency, hangouts, ghettoes). The school, therefore, is organized in a similar way to the colonial world that the novel critiques. "There were no maps" to record these arrangements, but the narrator implies that this geography is known to all.
Note that the narrator's depiction here is primarily metaphorical rather than literal. In all of the descriptions of life at Glenard Oak, students from various social groups are packed together into the school's small courtyard, intermingling with one another. This results in Irie, Millat, and Joshua, who wouldn't usually spend time as a group, being dragged in front of the principal together for marijuana possession. The school's social dynamics make it seem like there are vast, warlike nations at play, but in reality, their conflict often comes from being packed into a small space.
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