Travels Along the Barricades

What does it mean to live against a wall?

Human civilization has always been preoccupied with border barriers and fortified lines. In the first century A.C.E, the Roman Emperor Hadrian built a 120 kilometre limestone wall across Roman Britain. In 1754, English antiquarian William Stukely gushed that Hadrian’s Wall was only exceeded in its brick-and-mortar might by the grand patriarch of human walls, the Great Wall of China. Stukely wrote that the “Chinese Wall makes a considerable figure upon the terrestrial globe, and may be discerned at the moon.” One must admire the confidence of an 18th century earth-bound scientist to describe what can be seen from the moon. As it turns out, his claim was both bold and incorrect; the Great Wall of China cannot be seen from the moon. But the myth, like the Wall, endures.

So does the impulse to build walls. In the 1800s, the Danish repurposed an ancient Viking Age wall as a military fortification in their war with the Prussians. In the 1870s, Argentina built a line of trenches and watchtowers called the Zanja de Alsina to protect Buenos Aries province from invasion by the indigenous Mapuche. At the beginning of World War II, France constructed a concrete barrier along the border with Germany to defend against a Nazi attack. The Maginot Line did not impress Hitler’s army who simply marched around it. Later, East Germany built their own wall. The Berlin Wall went up in 1961, dividing east from west for almost thirty years.

The Berlin Wall made Berliners sick. Or at least it drove them mad. In 1973, East German psychiatrist Dietfried Müller-Hegemann observed that the Berlin Wall caused psychosis, schizophrenia, and phobias in the East Germans who lived in its shadow. The closer to the physical wall his patients lived, the more acute their disorders. The doctor called the syndrome Mauerkrankheit, Wall Disease, and predicted depression, despondency and high suicide rates would persist in Berlin for as long as the Wall stood. The only remedy was to bring it down.

The humiliating failure of the Maginot Line and the emotional liberation felt as Berliners chipped their wall into souvenir dust hardly dissuaded the world’s wall builders. South Africa built a 120-kilometre electric fence, dubbed the ‘Snake of Fire’, along its border with Mozambique in 1975 to keep violence from the civil war there from spilling over the frontier. The United States turned Baghdad into a labyrinth of vertical concrete and is building a wall along the Mexican frontier. India built fences along its borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh, and through the disputed region of Kashmir. Fences separate North and South Korea and keep Zimbabweans out of Botswana. In addition to the barrier around the West Bank, Israel just completed another wall along its Egyptian frontier to keep out migrants from sub-Saharan Africa. Greece is doing the same along its border with Turkey.

And the walls do not just rise on national borders. In the middle of the night in August 2006, the Italian city of Padua encircled the immigrant quarter of Via Anelli with a steel wall three metres high. In eastern Slovakia, a concrete wall rose in the village of Ostrovany on the edge of a Roma slum to keep ‘gypsies’ from raiding their neighbors’ vegetable gardens. Economic apartheid replaced racial apartheid in Johannesburg, South Africa where the wealthy, middle-class and poor alike enclose themselves within walled communities.

These physical walls feel like a throwback to antiquity. We’ve been told the walls are supposed to be coming down. We speak of globalization, international markets and global villages. Barriers to trade and travel keep falling, and we can communicate with anyone instantly from nearly anywhere in the world. Borders themselves matter less and less. Our contemporary angels and demons – multinational corporations, climate change, global terror networks, Hollywood movies, bird flu, Katy Perry – are nationless and borderless and care nothing about the lines we draw on our maps. And yet the walls continue to rise. I wondered, then, if the new walls are not anathema to our borderless world but a natural response to it. We need to put something, anything, under our control. So we counter economic and electronic entropy with simple geometries of bricks, barbed wire and steel.

I understood why nations would choose to raise the walls. Everyone can grasp ideas of political territory and national security and threats from outside. The Ming Dynasty feared the Mongols, the French feared the Nazis, and the Israelis fear terrorists from the other side of the Green Line. East Germany wanted to keep their citizens inside while America wants to keep undocumented Mexicans out. But the idea of being personally walled out is an alien one. I come from a country bound only by oceans on three of its edges and the world’s longest fenceless border on the fourth. We call this border ‘undefended,’ and we mean it as a boast. My nationality grants me access anywhere. Nowhere in the world bars my entry. No place claims I am not wanted or not worthy. No one has ever built a wall for me.

What of those who live alongside the new barriers? What does the wall mean for those living in the borderlands between the United States and Mexico? Or India and Bangladesh? The Berlin Wall came down, but do the residents of divided Cyprus and Belfast suffer their own strains of Mauerkrankheit? I wondered what it meant to be walled out, or in, and to live a barricaded life. I wanted to discover what sort of societies create the walls. More than this, though, I wanted to know what societies the walls themselves create.

I suspected I would learn little from reading political pronouncements or staring down at lines on a map. From a distance, the walls are just social and territorial constructs. But for the people who live against them, those for whom the walls were built to include or exclude, the walls stand as cold physical realities. I needed to be where the posts are pounded into the ground and a country stakes its territory in bold concrete. I wanted to understand why the walls exist, what they mean to those who live within them, and how they make us sick.

So, beginning in 2008, I traveled to some of the world’s most unfriendly edges to meet the people who live along the walls. I travelled to the Western Sahara, then to the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. I visited Israel, Palestine and the divided capital of Cyprus. I travelled along India’s fenced frontier with Bangladesh. I visited the Arizona borderlands, and the so-called Peacelines of Belfast. Then I returned to Canada to visit the infamous l’Acadie fence in Montreal.

(Dispatches from my travels can be found on my blog. Posts from my trip to North Africa can be found in the archives from February to May 2008; my time in India from October to December 2008; my travels in Israel, Palestine and Cyprus from February to April 2009; my trip to the US-Mexico border in November and December 2010; my visit to Montreal in May 2011; and to Belfast in June and July 2011.)

During my travels, I heard some incredible stories. In the Sahara Desert, I met a Saharan poet who braved landmines and Moroccan soldiers to cross over a desert wall. I met a young Punjabi man whose family gambled all they to send him over the fence into Europe. A village headman in Meghalaya explained how the coming border fence would evict him from his family home. In Palestine, a young man led a weekly protest against the wall dividing his village’s farmers from their fields. I spoke with a Native American elder about how the U.S. border wall severs her ancestral land, and played a ‘duet’ on the Nogales wall with a musician who uses the barrier as a musical instrument. I met ex-gunmen in Belfast who now fight to bring down the walls that lacerate their city.

Throughout my travels, I learn that the walls fail at keeping out those they aim to keep out, and I meet the brave men and women who’ve defeated the walls. I learned, too, that the barricades function most-effectively as theatre, each projecting a sense of power and security they don’t, in fact, exercise. I discovered that the walls replace the blurred nuances between communities with a cold, medieval clarity. With the Walls, there is only Here and There. Only Us and Them. I learned that the walls everywhere infect those that live in their shadows with unique strains of the Wall Disease. And I felt what it meant to live alongside a wall.

Goose Lane Editions will publish Walls: Travels Along the Barricades in Fall 2012.