Kitabı oku: «border and bordering», sayfa 4

The Lines on the Map

Liminal spaces can act as moments of interaction between the people and cultures of the world while at the same time performing an act of transition within the self. As the traveler leaves his or her place of origin they step into the role of others through both an internal and external process. Such moments are imagined and documented in literature, but before pursuing this further we must look at the term ‘border’.

Within this framework, borders may be understood as:

…arbitrary dividing lines that are simultaneously social, cultural and psychic, territories to be patrolled against those whom they construct as outsiders, aliens, the Others; forms of demarcation where the very act of prohibition inscribes transgressions; zones where fear of the Other is the fear of the self; places where claims to ownership—claims to ‘mine’, ‘yours’ and ‘theirs’—are staked out, contested, defended and fought over. (Brah 2003 p. 198)

Avtar Brah’s definition of borders exemplifies the complex nature of the term. He describes them as being both physical and psychological barriers combining social and geographical dimensions as we have seen above. In this understanding of the term, borders can exist beyond the lines on a map to become aspects of societal beliefs. In constructing a sense of self through such shared beliefs it is possible to construct an ‘us’ thus enabling the construction of an ‘other’. In the texts discussed below, ideas of borders are related to both the physical and the psychological while beginning to consider the idea of the ‘other’ as someone who exists on the opposite side of a border.

Many characterised interactions between the state and outsiders are a contrast between civilisation and barbarity, but we know this version because states write their histories from their perspective, while many mobile people did not record their experiences. (Jones 2015, p. 91)

Literature, especially that which deals with migration, potentially redresses this imbalance, and calls into question how civilised the bordered state truly is when the violence enacted upon the mobile migrant body is brought to light and removed from the invisible liminal area. Due to the nature of mapping, borders become normalised in the public consciousness as do the hierarchies associated with those who can and cannot cross them. This suggests that they are as much a work of the imagination as they are a geographical reality, a concept described by James Procter as “imaginative geography” (Procter 2003 p. 1).

Brah also highlights the relationship between borders and narrative: “Each border embodies a unique narrative, even while it resonates with common themes with other borders” (Brah 2003, p. 198). This narrative is not the sole preserve of the state, there are other voices present. In fact the border itself is in some way defined, can only exist, in relation to the other. As Trinh T. Minh-ha puts it, borders are:

Constantly guarded, reinforced, destroyed, set up, and reclaimed, boundaries not only express the desire to free/to subject one practice, one culture, one national community from/to another, but also expose the extent to which cultures are products of the continuing struggle between official and unofficial narratives: those largely circulated in favour of the State and its policies of inclusion, incorporation and validation, as well as of exclusion, appropriation and dispossession. (Minh-ha 1996, p. 1)

Migration literature is arguably a form of unofficial border narrative. Yet even set in opposition to an official state narrative or map, it unavoidably reinforces the border through the very method it utilises to destroy it. Crossing the border, especially clandestinely, similarly recognises its power while also negating it.

Migration Literature

Within literary criticism there has been a shift from the literature of exile to migrant literature which is said to offer a “transnational, cosmopolitan, multilingual and hybrid map of the world that redraws boundaries” (Mardorossian 2002, p. 17). Yet this term still defines the author rather than the literature, maintaining the borders which so much of this literature seeks to cross. In Migration and Literature: Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, and Jan Kjærstad, Søren Frank instead suggests that the term used should be ‘migration literature’ as it “ not only calls for a redrawing of the map of literary history but also challenges the way literary studies is often organized in nationally separated contexts” (Frank 2008, p. 10). It is this term I will use when discussing the novels and related texts in this chapter, viewed within the wider realms of contemporary and postcolonial literatures.

Literature as a Cultural Map of Migration

While there is precedent for using literature as a cultural artefact for better understanding migration in several disciplines, it has yet to be seen or utilised as a map of contemporary migration. The editors of Writing Across Worlds: Literature and Migration offer us an argument for using literature as a way of gaining insights into the experience of migration:

Literary accounts focus in a very direct and penetrating way on issues such as place perception, landscape symbolism, senses of displacement and transformation, communities lost and created anew, exploitation, nostalgia, attitudes towards return, family relationships, self-denial and self-discovery and many more. (King, Connell and White (eds.) 1995, p. x)

Amanda Lagji has moved this argument forward by writing on the inter-relationship between literature and mobility studies as literature is “embedded in and reflective of cultural imaginaries” and “helps us to see how we make meaning out of, and subscribe meaning to mobilities, foregrounding the interpretive work of making sense of movement and stillness” (Lagji 2018, p. 7). If we look specifically at mobility in terms of migration, contemporary fiction, and more specifically migration literature, can thus be argued as ‘making meaning out of’ both the journeys described in such works and the moments of stillness during which waiting (for a chance to cross a border, for news from a smuggler, for money to arrive, for an asylum claim etc.) is also a form of moving forward. This discussion feeds into the idea of contemporary fiction as a cultural map of migration. As the borders are crossed, so the map is drawn, but the authors of, and the visible bodies within, this map is not only the state actors who have imposed the border upon the landscape, but the border crossers and border writers themselves.

Landscapes, Vulnerable Bodies and Imagined Others

In The Gurugu Pledge a group of black Africans who have travelled from all over the continent wait on Mount Gurugu in Northern Morocco for their chance to cross the border into Melilla, Spain. They play football and tell stories to pass the time. When two women in the group become ill after a sexual assault and one of them experiences a miscarriage, the group tries to climb the fence on mass, leaving the women, who are too weak to climb, tied to the top to be found and taken care of. It is likely that they die there. The character with the last word, for the narration switches in and out of third person and inhabits different characters along the way, decides not to cross and remains on the mountain but facing south, towards the Zambezi river and away from Europe. At this moment, a common understanding of the journey is inverted. The route charted on maps of modern migration takes us from the south to the north, yet the final geographical gaze of the novel faces pointedly in the opposite direction.

In Signs Preceding the End of the World, Makina travels from Mexico to the USA in search of her brother and to deliver a package for one the men who help her cross. Surviving a clash at the border during which she is shot, she makes her way to the city where her brother should be, but she cannot find him. In the end she discovers that he has changed his identity, taking on that of a young American man who signed up to the army without his parents’ permission, and thus she realises her brother will not come home. Makina, having always believed she would return, also ends up getting American papers.

The novels deal specifically with liminal areas, the Spanish/Moroccan border and US/Mexico border respectively and their characters’ identities are shaped in relation to the landscape they inhabit, the cultures they bring with them, and the cultures they meet in the countries they journey to. The landscape then must also be shaped by them in some way. Both novels also include the epic themes of journey, death and the underworld and discussions on migration, immigration, nativism, profiling, transnationalism, transculturalism, language hybridity, the apocalypse/end of the world, thus lending themselves to an investigation such as this.

In both works there is a tension between the body and the border. The vulnerability exposed by the breakdown of previous collective identities and the creation of a new identity, that of the migrant. In The Gurugu Pledge we see this clearly when one of the protagonists states: “They told me I no longer have a country, that’s what they said at the border: you’ve no country any more, now you’re just black.” (Laurel 2017, p. 75). This happens as he crosses into Morocco. The transition between one state and another is thus both physical, as in the crossing of a boundary between two territories, and internal, changing the very nature of his identity. Makina’s search for her lost brother in Signs Preceding the End of the World can also be viewed as a search for a stable identity within a new culture. Whereas the characters portrayed as living on Mount Gurugu in Morocco, located near the Spanish territory of Melilla, speak of their stories and journeys as a way of both commemorating and shedding their pasts, a process which feels necessary for them to survive this passage into a new culture that awaits them on the other side of the fence.

In his exploration of diasporic identity Brah also expresses this link been migrant identity and the repetition of narrative:

This means that these multiple journeys may configure into one journey via a confluence of narratives as it is lived and re-lived, produced, reproduced and transformed through individual as well as collective memory and re-memory. It is within this confluence of narrativity that ‘diasporic community’ is differently imagined under different historical circumstances. By this I mean that the identity of a diasporic imagined community is far from fixed or pre-given. It is constituted within the crucible of the materiality of everyday life; in the everyday stories we tell ourselves individually and collectively. (Brah 2003, p. 183).

Although this echoes the repetition of stories within the camp on Mount Gurugu, I would argue that a diasporic perspective does not cover the transient nature of the migrant camps we now have at the borders of Europe and within Europe itself, that this situation more generally, and specifically within The Gurugu Pledge, somehow creates a further displacement, as there is nowhere to settle, yet history has also been lost. This is also represented by the ‘invisible’ nature of these spaces within traditional maps, and the invisibility thus transferred to the occupants.

One character in The Gurugu Pledge states: “none of us are from anywhere” (Laurel 2017, p. 121), during the process of storytelling, and another, “…I will not mention anyone or anywhere by name” (Laurel 2017, p. 15). As Carol Phillips notes, a migrant’s relationship to home can become complicated, both as a form of protection (to be identified by their true origins may endanger the traveler), and emotionally as there is often no possibility to return to the place in which you once ‘belonged’: “Our identities are fluid. Belonging is a contested state. Home is a place riddled with vexing questions” (Phillips 2001 p. 6). A map of this nature thus naturally draws lines between countries and interspaces which may seem geographically distant and culturally disparate.

Signs Preceding the End of the World goes as far as to use geographical markers as chapter breaks—The Earth, The Water Crossing, The Place Where The Hills Meet, The Obsidian Mound, The Place Where The Wind Cuts Like A Knife, The Place Where Flags Wave, The Place Where People’s Hearts Are Eaten, The Snake That Lies in Wait, The Obsidian Place With No Windows Or Holes For The Smoke. These headings are laid out to depict Makina’s journey, creating a map personal to her, ‘drawn’ in her own words and reflective of her culture, while also suggestive of the ancient pathway to the underworld as understood in ancient Aztec mythology and consequently referencing Spanish colonial history in Mexico. The Gurugu Pledge instead uses stories with geographical descriptions to map people’s journeys and experiences across the continent—even though this is most often done without place names.

In fact, both works can be described as ‘geographically non-explicit’, and name very few specific sites as they would be recognised on a traditional map. The language used is also often ‘displaced’, a dynamic carried through the translation, another form of ‘displacement’. As Roger Bromley notes in the concluding chapter of Cross Addressing: Resistance Literature and Cultural Borders, texts written in the language of the colonizer often act to violate this language, “Transformation and textual negotiation are key features of the uses of language in border writing: this is also true of its narrative practice” (Hawley (ed.) 1996, p. 276). In Signs Preceding the End of the World for example “jarchar”, meaning to leave, which has an Arabic route and had to transition from Spanish and then to English, became “to verse”, thus the novel creates a new language of movement, required for a new understating of border crossing, and a new map of contemporary migration.

Indeed languages and translations can act as journeys or border crossings in their own right, imposing their own territorial constraints.

In a world full of travellers, borders control and regulate how we move around and who can or who cannot move from one space to another. It is precisely these movements of people (and ideas, capital and things) that contribute to the constant evolution of cultures. Translation is one way in which ideas can move across borders; intercultural communication implies that borders have already been crossed in some way. The existence of borders indicates that there is movement across them, which someone considers needs to be controlled. (Evans and Ringrow 2017, p. 3)

Makina herself is a site of this ‘language journey’: “You are the door, not the one who walks through it” (Herrera 2015, p. 18) says one character to Makina because she runs the switchboard in her village and speaks three languages. She is a site of transition. She embodies the US/Mexico border through translating between local languages and English before she even physically approaches the line of demarcation.

In The Gurugu Pledge languages are also mixed up, broken down and played with. The author takes words from French, Spanish and Latin thus spanning more than one colonial past while at the same time expressing a neo-colonial present. Much of the novel's structure is based around a poem in Latin. Written by the father of Peter, known previously in his village as Ngambo (most characters have multiple names), the poem is in the Conceptismo style (from the 17th century Spanish tradition), written in French and with a gloss (a notation on the poem) in English in an unnamed African country which used English as its primary language, “or imposed language, imposed by rich whites…”(Laurel 2017, p. 12), as one character states, re-imposing the history of these borders and the current map of Africa. Later in the work, another character states that people use, “Eat or manger, according to whichever history the whites chose for you” (Laurel 2017, p. 64).

The Story of Peter’s father’s poem is told in 3 parts and is about Charon, his boat and the payment made, a retelling of the ancient story from Greek mythology. Charon is the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the newly deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron which divided the world of the living and the dead. The poem represents the journey to come for these young people, the price they will pay and the danger it involves. These fractured journeys and selves are reflected in the very structure of these novels. As I said previously, in The Gurugu Pledge, narration swaps in and out of third person, with the ‘voice’ of the story frequently changing. The author states this is because all of their voices needed to be heard, creating, I would posit, a more accurate map of this area in Morocco.

The Final Border

In both works the final physical border crossing is in fact a culmination of all the borders that have come before, though we meet the characters at the gates of Europe or America, their very beings hold the journeys taken, borders crossed and maps traversed up until that point. And in Signs Preceding the End of the World, even when Makina is in the USA, echoes of the border continue and she continues to cross them. This is often embodied in language. The people Makina meets in the US are both “homegrown” and “anglo”—“Their gestures and tastes reveal both ancient memory and the wonderment of a new people” (Herrera 2015, p. 63). They speak an “intermediary” tongue described as a “hinge pivoting between two like but distant souls, and then two more, and then two more, never exactly the same ones; something that serves as a link.” (Herrera 2015, p. 63) and “their tongue is a nebulous territory between what is dying out and what is not yet born” (Herrera 2015, p. 63), thus creating “the world happening anew…” (Herrera 2015, p. 66).

And what of the border itself, the site of physical transition. As soon as she crosses the sky it already looks different to Makina, “more distant or less blue.” (Herrera 2015, p. 40), is has gained something, distance, and lost something, colour and familiarity, just as Makina will. She arranges for her crossing back while she is still at home because of a friend who returned and:

…everything was similar but not the same: his mother was no longer his mother, his brothers and sisters were no longer his brother and sisters, they were people with difficult names and improbable mannerisms, as if they’d been copied off an original that no longer existed; even the air, he said, warmed his chest in a different way. (Herrera 2015, p. 20)

The border changes the make-up of things, the transition from one to the other is visible even in sentence structure. When Makina meets her brother he has assumed an American identity and will not come home. He has become, through the process of border crossing, another person. She is not his sister. His mother is not his mother. The boy she knew is gone.

The fragility of the body, its ability to be appropriated, damaged or destroyed also takes more concrete form. In Signs Preceding the End of the World they find a corpse at the border. From afar it looks like a pregnant woman, but it is in fact a bloated body. And in The Gurugu Pledge hospitals don’t treat “blacks without papers” (Laurel 2017, p. 77) reasserting the idea that vulnerability is actually an imposed state rather than a natural one. Towards the end of the novel, a journalist who visits those living on Mount Gurugu shows a video of dead Africans on a beach, and states that they have not drowned, but been shot, presumably by state actors (Laurel 2017, p. 178), thus reinforcing Jones’ description of the border as creating the violence which takes place there. Border crossing in both novels is a form of death “I’m dead, Makina said to herself…” on the first page, and later in the text someone asks her, “Off to the other side?” (Herrera, 2015, p. 14), directly linking the transition between Mexico and the USA to that between life and death.

In discussing the relationship between the migrant and the society to which they move, Iain Chambers suggests an appropriation of the metropolitan by the figure of the migrant. In this way he links migrant experience and the cityscape:

There is an emergence at the centre of the previously peripheral and marginal. For the modern metropolitan figure is the migrant: she and he are the active formulators of metropolitan aesthetics and lifestyles, reinventing the language and appropriating the streets of the master. (Chambers 1994, p. 23)

Makina’s character also speaks to this relationship, though in stronger words. Having been caught without papers by a police officer she has to write poetry on behalf of another arrestee:

We are to blame for this destruction, we who don’t speak your tongue and don’t know how to keep quiet either. We who didn’t come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take your jobs, who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hours. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you’d never known, who deliver your dope, who deserve to be chained by neck and feet. We who are happy to die for you, what else could we do? We, the ones who are waiting for who knows what. We the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians. (Herrera 2015, p.99)

Here the presence of Mexicans in the Big Chilango (the name given to the American city described in the novel) is violently drawn, but they have presence nonetheless, and the officer who has tried to arrest Makina walks away in confusion having read her response. In The Gurugu Pledge however, that characters are instead described as having failing eyesight from staring at the city (Laurel 2017, p. 60). They are forever trapped outside and growing old with the wait. Even though the city is physically close, for most the dream of the city will never be achieved. Such distance cannot be viewed upon a traditional map. As Sheller states (2018, p. 20), mobility exists in relation to “class, race, sexuality, gender and ability, exclusions from public space, from national citizenship, from access to resources, and from the means of mobility at all scales.” Within this work we find not only proof of this statement, but as readers we experience the human impact of such relations.

In the final phase of Signs Preceding the end of the World, Makina walks through a labyrinth of city streets with her guide, Chucho, until they reach a small door, through which she enters alone. She walks down the steps to a place of complete silence, devoid of people. Here, in the underworld, she is given her new documents. She has left her previous self behind, the girl who left Mexico has disappeared, but a new person has been born in her stead. When she reaches the moment of transition, she realises that she is prepared:

…the Big Chilango, all those colors, and she saw that what was happening was not a cataclysm; she understood with all of her body and all of her memory, she truly understood, and when everything in the world fell silent finally she said to herself I’m ready. (Herrera 2015, p. 107)