Rethinking Borders

Is a border a line on a map or a wall easily breeched? Or is it something else? Is it a journey?

Photo by Greg Bulla on Unsplash

In The Songlines, the amateur anthropologist Bruce Chatwin describes how the indigenous peoples of Australia use elaborate songs to find their way through what might seem a featureless landscape, and, at the same time, mark their territory, connect with their ancestors, and become one with the land.

This is a border that is not linear. It doesn’t enclose territory; it creates a meaningful path through it. And it is a way of respecting, not just the land, but also other clans. If they stray from their songline, they are trespassing.

This is not a European border. Through song, the indigenous peoples create a connection to the land. They even believe that singing a songline brings the land into existence. Chatwin writes:

It was one thing to persuade a surveyor that a heap of boulders were the eggs of the Rainbow Snake, or a lump of reddish sandstone was the liver of a speared kangaroo. It was something else to convince him that a featureless stretch of gravel was the musical equivalent of Beethoven’s Opus 111.

As Hitler rose to power in the 1930s, he often spoke of the Germanic people emerging from the soil of the Rhineland. Blood and Soil. He tried to create a connection between the German people and the soil, to fix them in a particular place, to say they belonged within the borders of Germany and others did not. Why? Was it because, unlike the indigenous peoples of Australia, the average German had long lost any lived connection to the land? Or was something else going on?

As Hannah Arendt pointed out in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the totalitarian governments of the mid-twentieth century emerged from nineteenth century colonialism. Once Hitler had established a myth to justify the borders of Germany, he began to expand these borders by invading Poland, then Denmark, then Norway, . . .

There is a difference between living in harmony with the land of our ancestors and consuming land. There is a difference between being able to move across the land and being fixed to a restricted space.

From colonialism and twentieth century totalitarianism, we should learn that those who speak most about borders end up violating them. We should learn that fixing a people within borders and limiting movement—so fundamental to being human—is about domination. In the end, authoritarian powers violate the border around a family (think about the separation of families at the border) and the border of the human body (think of the overturning of Roe v. Wade).

Authoritarian leaders seek to make us all homeless because the homeless—the stateless—have no rights. Arendt writes:

The first lost which the rightless suffered was the loss of their homes, and this meant the loss of the entire social texture into which they were born and in which they established for themselves a distinct place in the world. This calamity is far from unprecedented; in the long memory of history, forced migrations of individuals or whole groups of people for political or economic reasons look like everyday occurrences. What is unprecedented is not the loss of a home but the impossibility of finding a new one.

We might think borders protect our home. They also prevent others from finding a home.

The politicians who raise fears about immigration tend to talk about only one kind of border and one specific border. The border between Mexico and the United States. This border is a line on maps, it is the Rio Grande River, it is a wall, and it is a border crossing. They don’t talk about borders within the United States.

The borders within borders are about enclosing excess people. They also enclose the privileged who fear contamination.

A ghetto has a border, and so does a gated community.

The border around a ghetto is a red line on a map that restricts investments and equitable home loans. It is economic. The border around a gated community is clearly marked with a fence and guard house. It is no less economic.

We fear wandering people.

Vagrant laws originated during Reconstruction. After slaves were freed, Southern planters needed labor. Vagrant laws forced Black men and women to work as tenant farmers. They had to buy seed and food from the land owner’s store. They never found a way out of debt. This was the new slavery that restricted movement, fixed people in place, within the borders of a small farm. Tenant farming disappeared as farms became more mechanized. We found other ways to enclose excess people, like prisons.

Borders are what Mary Louise Pratt calls a contact zone, a historical crisis where two cultures collide. We could view this as an area saturated with cultural exchange, or we could view it as the focal point where a dominant culture, which wants to remain “pure,” uses force to crush another culture.

As we learn more about early history and even prehistory, it is becoming increasingly clear that humans have always travelled far distances. Trade and cultural exchange have always been a part of this culture. I understand the importance of preserving and respecting traditions. I do not, however, think that it makes much sense to speak of a “pure” culture. And it is dangerous to speak about preserving the purity of a culture, especially when the purity is attached to race, gender, or religion. Preserving purity often transforms into eliminating difference. This leads to violence, sometimes to genocide. All of this happens at borders.

In a digital age, borders are becoming increasingly artificial and porous. Privacy is built around the border of the human body. We used to create borders around people who looked different. Now, we create borders by manufacturing fear, rage, and resentment.

The new contact zone is the phone that sits in the palm of our hands. As we spend more and more of our time on social media, our privacy is eroding, not just because these platforms collect information about our inner lives, but also because they manufacture a reality that changes the structure of our minds.

Borders and contact zones are often sites of violence. Borders are often marked by corpses. In Brutalism, Achille Mbembe, an African philosopher, echos the words of Hannah Arendt:

Nowadays, merely by paying attention, you can see the trails of corpses that are often painful to look at—from time to time, corpses of children, women, or young people who have drowned attempting interminable crossings, or human carcasses that desert sands have buried. This is how the landscapes of our times are made. Of these hundreds of thousands of people who leave, who go away, who succumb to the flight syndrome so typical of our times, fewer and fewer arrive at their destinations. Leaving is no longer the real issue. The issue now concerns arriving and the likelihood of never reaching one’s destination. (Italics added.)

In the quote above, Arendt wrote: “What is unprecedented is not the loss of a home but the impossibility of finding a new one.” We are living in an era of endless journeys, not a clear path through the landscape of our ancestors, a land animated by songline, but an aimless wandering. Homelessness.

As we discuss immigration, we should also discuss the difficulties of journeys that cross borders. This does not mean that we must land on one side of a complex issue or the other. It simply means journeys should be part of our dialogue. This will help us to approach the issue with more empathy.

But we also need to find new ways of thinking about borders. Maybe borders are important only when we cross them. If so, we need to think about how we cross borders. As Mbembe writes in Brutalism, colonialist crossed borders, extracted objects from the land, including sacred objects, and brought them to their home, like plunder. They placed the object within glass cases in museums. They said, “This is the proper perspective to view these objects.”

Mbembe’s analysis of this process is stunning, and I cannot do it justice, especially in a short essay. But, he basically says that taking an object from Africa and placing it in a European museum extracts the life from it. The objects have lost their connection to the emerging lives of the artist and artisans who created them and the people for whom they were created. Whether that connection between artist and people formed a ritual, as in a mask, or the connection between artisan and user formed the fabric of daily life, as in a bowl or a spoon, the connection between subject and object was a life being lived. This is correct way, Mbembe says, to experience—rather than view—African art.

I am making this digression into colonialism and African art to make a distinction between the living and the dead. I love museums, but I have come to think of visiting a museum as a guilty pleasure. I think most of them are in a death spiral, and this may be a good thing. They were actually doomed to fail from their origin. They are about divided rooms and glass cases. They are about borders between here (the museum and the city and the people who want to see something exotic) and there (the artist, the rituals, and the community where the object helped form a culture).

Most of us Westerners have lost any meaningful connection to our environment and the objects in it. This is how Mbembe describes the connection between Africans and the objects in their world:

To become other, to cross the limits, to be able to be reborn, another time, in other places, and in a multitude of other figures—an infinity of others summoned by principle to generate other flows of life.

This doesn’t sound like a trip to a museum. It is about crossing the ultimate border between self and the world and being transformed by the crossing. It is about life.

I don’t want to live inside a walled border. I don’t care how much territory it encloses. It is still a form of death.

If we can think of borders and empathy instead of borders and fear, maybe we will be more willing to cross them and to welcome those who cross them. This doesn’t mean having an open border. It does mean embracing movement and change as the fundamental freedom of being human.

If we can develop empathy for others, if we can learn to live without fear, if we can move past the need to see ourselves as pure and others as impure, we might begin to think about the texture—the touch and the vibration and the sensation—of borders. We might begin to understand the difference between a songline and a wall.