Marathe and Kate Gompert at Ryle's (p. 777)
‘As you say. And much beautiful territory, which the stronger nations at the time of losing my legs committed paper atrocities to my nation’s land.’
Context
Marathe, undercover in a Boston bar on a "Swiss" cover story, talking to a concussed Kate Gompert — she's just corrected him ("The Swiss have gold mines"), and his recovery slips real Québec grief through the fake biography. "Paper atrocities" compresses the whole Reconfiguration into three words: the violence was done on maps, with cartographers' instruments, but it was committed "to my nation's land" — the territory bleeds for what's done to the paper. (His broken syntax is authorial, Marathe's Québecois English throughout.)