Border, unruly

Walking composition

Audio version:

I used to love crossing borders. When I was young, they smelled of adventure and exploration, of languages I hadn’t learned and could tune my ear to, of foods like a book to be tasted instead of read. I still remember the first time I managed to say “thank you” correctly in a small town in Turkey; and plunging my wrists one summer day under freezing cold fountain water on a hill outside of Budapest, where the heat felt like it might crush me and our friends woke us daily with tiny glasses of espresso and brandy.

To hand my passport over to a border agent once brought a tiny thrill. To a person brought up in a small Montana town where daily rhythms were determined by the train howling nightly as it passed by the Con Agra grain tower and the church bells I sometimes got to pull after Sunday school, borders were to enter a world unknown, a world made large.

Borders haven’t felt like that in a long time. When my spouse and I prepared to move to Australia from Austria, I was 22 years old. We spent exhausting hours at the Australian embassy in Vienna filling out forms and answering questions and submitting to lung X-rays to check for tuberculosis and compiling massive customs forms in two languages for our scant two boxes of belongings. We flew out on my 23rd birthday, which in Australia time had already passed. My spouse had a job in Sydney, which was why we were moving; my first three months in the country were a slog of employment applications and residency requirements and trying to find out how to get a birth control prescription. Living there had its wonderful moments—most of them spent in the ocean—but they were despite the border and residency struggles, not because of them.

I have just spent the last few days in Canada, where some longtime friends and I cross-country skied and cooked for one another. I have lived in proximity to this border, between America and Canada, for almost the whole of my life. The closest crossing to me is an hour’s drive from my home, and I’ve driven over it so many times it’s as familiar as the footbridge I usually take to walk into town. It wasn’t that long ago—only decades, and what is that in geological time? not even a fingernail’s worth—that other friends and I would get the idea to go to Canada at some stupid hour of the night just to jump into a lake we liked visiting. We didn’t need passports back then, and the border guards were mostly bored.

Going to and coming back from Canada last week involved little stress. We presented our passports or passport cards. I as the driver answered questions about alcohol, drugs, tobacco, and weapons in the negative or semi-negative as not all of us are non-smokers. Our carful of white mothers in their forties was waved through easily.

And yet even to me, there was nothing about this interaction that didn’t put me on edge, nothing about it that didn’t remind me of threat, of what can be denied. If not denied to me personally, to plenty of other people who have just as much right to traverse this man-made barrier just as much as I do.

The entire interaction of crossing the border, beginning with the slowdown to the border gates and the scramble of finding passports, and through the questioning that brings up vivid memories of previous border crossings involving full-on stripped-out car searches and quizzes split between me and college boyfriends about what color our toothbrushes were, makes obvious the crushing power of borders. These are arbitrary yet all-powerful creations of nation-states, creations that have no recognition from water, air, rock, or wildlife, yet maintain the say of life, death, or the birthright of wandering that belongs to every human being even if it’s denied—they have the power to strangle our travel, our relationships, our communities, and our work. They impart the conviction that anyone on one side of a border or another has the power to judge, to condemn, to dispense death.

My friends and I were just going cross-country skiing as part of a tradition to celebrate one person’s birthday. What if we’d been fleeing genocide? What if our entire personhood were suddenly made illegal?

My paternal grandparents were Jewish people in the Russian empire, subject to strict rules about religious and cultural practices, limited work opportunities, male children’s compulsory conscription into the military (as young as the age of 9 depending on the tsar), and, like in much of Europe, forbidden from owning land. Not to mention being confined to living in shtetls within the borders of what was called the Pale of Settlement. My immediate family history is defined by who is allowed to live, work, travel, and wander, where.

To show my passport and be waved through a border says everything about the kinds of freedoms I have, and how easily they could be taken.

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Borders are psychological, emotional, and physical. I don’t publish fiction because I attended a hyper-competitive MFA program where other students and at least one professor persuaded me I had no talent for fiction. I know this is an idiotic way to let my life be determined, but I haven’t had the time to counteract the effects of the snobbery and need to tear people down that were pervasive in those fiction writing workshops. This is a border I mostly created and maintain myself. I will dismantle it when I have time.

Borders are social and cultural. When I enter a mosque or a Russian Orthodox Church, I cover my hair. When certain people come into my home, I take down and hide the sign above the coffee grinder that reads “Keep Your Fucking Shit Together” because I know it would offend them. I don’t walk through other people’s yards even though I don’t believe that private property boundaries should exist.

My views on the importance of free speech are boundaried by the reality of its lack for the half of my family living in Russia, but also by an understanding that words can cause just as much harm as physical violence, a perspective that puts me strongly at odds with an absolutist view of free speech. (I wrote about my town’s experience with neo-Nazi troll storms, including some of the messages I received personally and what effect it had on me, here. I wouldn’t usually urge people to go read something like that, but in this case, if you haven’t, I actually think it’s important.)

I am, for some masochistic reason, a moderator on my local NextDoor, which is peppered with decisions and behind-the-scenes debates often determined by my own borders about what should be allowed, and what should be removed.

My stepbrother and his family weren’t able to come camping with us this last summer because they are Russian and can’t readily leave a country that’s been waging war on a neighboring one. They can disagree with the war all they want, but the border created by geopolitics doesn’t care what they think, or desire, and it’s illegal for them to say anything about it publicly. These are very different kinds of borders with vastly different consequences. Not all of them require a passport; many of them still require a form of passing, or of shaping oneself to accepted expectations.

One of the books that I’ve learned most from over the past few years is Harsha Walia’s Border & Rule. Since reading it, I’ve watched several of her online presentations and webinars, and am often inspired by her expansive view of what borders are, what they do to us, and how dismantling them requires also dismantling the systems of oppression that they enable, as she wrote about in this interview:

“A no border politics is expansive. It includes the freedom to stay and the freedom to move, meaning that no one should be forcibly displaced from their homes and lands, and that people should have the freedom to move with safety and dignity. Those two freedoms may seem contradictory, but actually they are necessary corollaries. The crux of a no border politics is nestled in the broader politics of home. How do we create a world where we all have a home?”

It’s an answer to something brought up repeatedly in Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall’s book The Prehistory of Private Property. The essence of freedom is contained in the answer to one question: Can you leave?

Can you? Can I? Could I just pick up and walk north until I reach the border and then, like the rivers that run down from Canada full of selenium pollution from coal mining, ignore it? The answer is no, obviously, and it might serve us all to ask more frequently why not.

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When I lived in Austria, I had to apply for a meldetzetl, a residency visa for foreigners. To get it, I had to go to a special foreigners’ police station. I had lived in the country for two months and had been taking intensive German lessons for two weeks. I arrived in good time for my appointment, only to find that nobody there spoke English, or in fact any language other than German. At the foreigners’ police station. The officers ridiculed and belittled me in words I barely grasped, and told me to come back with a translator.

I wasn’t a middle-class, middle-aged white woman at the time. I was 22 years old and had used my last speck of savings from waiting tables to pay for a root canal at the dentist. But I was still a white woman in a country that at the time was extremely racist toward anyone not obviously white. I was scared and sad, but had a multi-lingual friend, also a white woman, who worked for the BBC and came back with me to translate and also threaten the police with press exposure if they didn’t follow their own damn rules. I got my residency visa purely because of her.

Within a couple years after the September 11th, 2001, attacks in New York City and elsewhere, my spouse and I were stopped about 70 miles from the Canadian border. My spouse, who only applied for U.S. citizenship a few years ago, is English. Our friends who were going hiking with us were also stopped. The wife was American, while the spouse—one of my husband’s oldest friends—was from Northern Ireland. We were taken to an immigration center, sat down with a whole lot of other people, and told in no uncertain terms that the males of our parties, the non-American spouses, could be deported immediately because they weren’t carrying their identification and green card papers.

The border agents were dead serious and it was scary as hell. Close to that time period, a colleague of my spouse’s avoided her own husband’s deportation by moving back to her country of birth—she was Japanese and her spouse was Italian; the renewal of his U.S. residency visa had been denied and for neither of them, suddenly, was it easy to live and work on land where cranberries grow and turkeys roam wild and where they had employment. The land had no judgment of them, but the political regime most certainly did.

I look back on all of these interactions, and more, like the innumerable run-ins I’ve had with the police in Moscow trying to get a bribe out of me or the stories I’ve heard from a local border patrol agent we used to be friendly with, and see a world laced with borders. Borders that are not, as Harsha Walia wrote, “fixed lines simply demarcating territory. They are productive regimes firmly embedded in global imperialism, and border controls exist far beyond the territorial border itself.”

Coming back from Canada, my friends and I passed several herds of grazing bighorn sheep, and slowed for a flock of pine grosbeaks (I think) reluctant to leave the road. We got through border security easily, drove forward, and then paused to debate if we were allowed to go back and ask the guard about using the bathroom. We were allowed, but sat there for a minute literally asking one another, “Do you think we’re allowed to go back and ask him?” with an undercurrent of uncertainty and fear created on purpose by the psychological architecture of the place.

Borders are physical, social, cultural, and emotional, but what they are most is a form of power. When I hand my passport over, it’s with the knowledge that my freedom to go, to wander this Earth and love it freely, can always be denied.

A world of boundaries and respect, but no borders, could truly be one where traveling smells of freedom, a world that can be read and known through our footsteps, the only true book, one to be experienced rather than read, and whose air shifts like poetry as we traverse every curve of her spine.

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