What is the theme of Margaret Atwood's At the Tourist Centre in Boston?

I am having a hard time figuring this out. I need to write about the theme of this poem for an essay question.

Poem:

This is my country under glass,
a white relief-
map with red dots for cities,
reduced to the size of a wall
and beside it 10 blownup snapshots
one for each province,
in purple-browns and odd reds,
the green of the trees dulled;
all blues however
of an assertive purity.

Mountains and lakes and more lakes
(through Quebec is a restaurant and Ontario the empty
interior of the parliament buildings),
With nobody climbing the trails and hauling out
the fish and splashing in the water
but arrangements of grinning tourists--
look here, Saskatchewan
is a flat lake, some convenient rocks
where two children pose with a father
and the mother is cooking something
in immaculate slacks by a smokeless fire,
her teeth white as detergent.

Whose dream is this, I would like to know:
is this a manufactured
hallucination, a cynical fiction, a lure
for export only?
I seem to remember people,
at least in the cities, also slush,
machines and assorted garbage. Perhaps
that was my private mirage

which will just evaporate
when I go back. Or the citizens will be gone,
run off to the peculiarly-
green forests
to wait among the brownish mountains
for the platoons of tourists
and plain their odd red massacres.

Unsuspecting
window lady, I ask you:

Do you see nothing
watching you from under the water?

Was the sky ever that blue?

Who really lives there?

Sometimes a work can have more than one theme. One that might work for this poem is probably centered on these lines:

Whose dream is this, I would like to know:
is this a manufactured
hallucination, a cynical fiction, a lure
for export only?


Notice that she's referring to a map of Canada, but it's on a wall in a building in Boston. She sees her country reduced to a map with the colors of things far different from what she has seen. Basically, she is comparing what she has seen and knows to this image that attempts to let others know where various places are. Thus she asks the questions above.

How will you phrase a theme from this?

I don't know...People cover up what is really there?

"cover up" implies a negative motive. Do you think the people who made and posted the map intended it to be negative?

So it's different perceptions then: hers from real life in Canada, and the mapmakers' who are trying to indicate where different things and people are.

How will you phrase that into a theme?
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theme

No

Oh! So, one's own point of view is different from what another interprets it?

Exactly!

You're very welcome!

I have tried that, and I still can't find and am having a hard time figuring it out. Thanks anyway for trying.