WORDS FOLLOW ME: At the border

I don’t particularly like borders. For historical reasons of trade, war and religion, an arbitrary marker is set down: this country ends here, that one begins over there. The air isn’t informed of this, nor are the plants, the soil, the rivers.

And there’s nothing like crossing an international border to heighten one’s awareness of human fragility. You are expected to approach the customs officers with the attitude of a supplicant. Your passport belonged to you a mere moment ago, but now you belong to it, and what it contains is what guarantees your personhood.

What is printed in the passport is the crucial difference between being granted passage into the other country or being handcuffed, transformed in a sudden moment of unpleasantness from human being to diplomatic hassle.

I was at the US-Canada border late last Thursday afternoon. After the usual questions about the purpose of my visit, and whether I had ten–thousand dollars or more on my person (how I wish I did), the questioning took an unexpected turn. “What is your line of work?” “I’m a writer.” “What kind of writing?” “Fiction.”

My interlocutor, a Canadian border guard, was silent for a moment, trying to categorize this peculiar species. A fiction writer: what kind of creature might that be? At length, he said, “Have you written anything I should, uh, know about? Anything, uh, that should worry us?” Now it was my turn to be dramatically silent. Then, with a boldness inappropriate to our imbalance of power (he had a gun and a uniform, I did not) I responded, “Are we prosecuting for thought crimes now?”

A long and distinctly uncomfortable silence followed. Not knowing what to do with me, visibly annoyed, he waved me through to the other side.

“L’esprit de l’escalier” literally means “the wit of the staircase” and its usual sense is of a comeback that’s too late; the situation passes, and only then do you think of something intelligent to say. As I got back into the bus on the Canadian side of the border, l’esprit de l’escalier descended on me, and I thought perhaps I ought to have said to the guard: “All my writing is an effort to erase borders. So, if you, as an agent of the state, are not at least a little worried by my writing, I’m failing.”

Had I said all that, how would it have played out? Badly, I suppose. Men with guns do not take kindly to having their authority challenged. They are allergic, in the extreme, to unacknowledged legislators and improvised shakara.

But I’ve had borders much in mind recently. I have been incubating dangerous thoughts about them. The book I wrote about in this column last week, Eduardo Galeano’s “Mirrors” is, among other things, an effort to understand why lines of divisions, in particular the political and geographical ones, are drawn as they are. That book continues to reverberate in my head.

So, when our Greyhound bus grumbled past the last dregs of upstate New York and trickled our passport-accompanying selves across to the province of Quebec, I thought of the ending to one of Galeano’s stories:

“Maybe we refuse to acknowledge our common origins because racism causes amnesia, or because we find it unbelievable that in those days long past the entire world was our kingdom, an immense map without borders, and our legs were the only passport required.”

I was lucky enough to see Galeano speak in New York City last week. One of the first things he read was about the bronze image of an Ooni on the cover of the book. It is a story I’ve carried inside me for many years like an old hurt, and I was glad to see it presented to the public:

“In 1910, Leo Frobenius found ancient sculptures on the Slave Coast that made his eyes bulge. Their beauty was such that the German explorer believed they were Greek, brought from Athens, or perhaps from the lost Atlantis. His colleagues agreed: Africa, daughter of scorn, mother of slaves, could not have produced such marvels.”

The audience in the auditorium, mostly white, sighed appreciatively.

Then someone asked a question: “If you could recommend one book, other than your own, for President Obama to read, what book would it be?” Galeano thought about the question, then smiled. “I think to read just one book is the most dangerous thing of all. I can’t recommend one book. It is necessary to read many.”

For his sake, my journey north and back was concerned, more than usual, with the structural unfairness around us. As I approached the border on my way back from Canada into the United States, I remembered a journey I took about seven years ago. That journey was also on a bus, but it was the crossing of a different border. This was at the entrance of the Channel Tunnel, that modern engineering marvel that connects England to France. A beautiful dark-haired young woman had been in the seat across from mine for a few hours already (we’d both got on in Brussels, heading to London), but only in the last half-hour before the French entrance to the tunnel had we begun to speak.

She asked me, in French, if I spoke French. I responded in French that I didn’t. And when I asked her in English if she spoke in English, she told me in English that she didn’t. We laughed, and began to speak to each other in a mix of French and English. Her eyes were as dark as her hair, both set off beautifully by her caramel-coloured skin. She was young, maybe in her mid-twenties; not obviously rich, but attractive because she was so self-possessed, and so warm.

I told her I lived in New York. She told me she lived in Paris. Our conversation was textured with silences, as conversations with strangers sometimes are.

At the British Customs and Excise checkpoint in Coquelles, we disembarked. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed her passport: Ecuadorian. We proceeded through the lines, and all the people on our bus were processed.

It wasn’t until we were pulling away from the checkpoint that I realised, with a sudden pang, that she’d never made it back onto the bus. The Ecuadorian passport had failed her. She was now detained, found unfit to enter the UK, probably found unfit to remain in Europe as well. According to the paperwork, but only according to them, she was a threat. Had she even told me her name? I don’t now recall. But she was on my mind as I approached, this weekend, the United States Customs and Border Protection ~Officer.

The arrogance of his bearing was familiar: these are the keepers of the gap between those who can come in, and those who must stay out. These are the assistants to amnesia. He conducted the usual interrogation, with the usual tone of voice that warned me that he had power on his side. In his dark blue uniform, he was like a minor god. Then, as I was leaving, the same question about my line of work (a question no one else around me was asked).

“A writer, eh? So, are you famous yet?” “No,” I said. Then I added, to myself, perhaps a little petulantly: “And you won’t really like me when I am.”

But the petulance, perhaps was necessary: in a few hours, I would be back in New York City where, over the weekend, a white police officer had accidentally shot to death a fellow police officer, whose crime was nothing more than being black. It was a stark reminder, as though one were needed, that visible borders are not the only ones defended by the gun.