What does it mean to live against a wall?

In 2002, Israel began building a barrier around the West Bank. The United States is erecting walls along the Mexican frontier and has turned Baghdad into a labyrinth of vertical concrete. In the last decade, India built barriers along its borders with Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma. In fact, India’s only unfenced border is in the Himalayas where the mountains make human-built barriers both impossible and unnecessary.

The world’s walls are supposed to be coming down. We speak of globalization, international markets and global villages. Barriers to trade keep falling, and it is now possible to communicate instantly from nearly anywhere in the world. But just as these virtual walls come down, real walls rise. Economics and electronics may link us, but we are increasingly divided by bricks, barbed wire and steel.

The impulse to wall is, of course, an ancient one.  The Chinese built the Great Wall. The Romans divided Britannia with the Hadrian and Antonine Walls. The Berlin Wall split Germany in two. More recently, and still in use, are the Peace Lines in Belfast, the so-called ‘Wall of Shame’ in the Western Sahara, and the demilitarized zone between the Koreas. Human civilization has always been preoccupied with fortifying its boundaries; keeping people out and holding others in.

But what about those who dwell in the shadow of these barriers? In this book, I will travel to communities in the world that are edged by walls, fences and other ‘hard’ barriers in an attempt to find out what life is like on the barricades. Wherever possible, I will visit both sides of each barrier. I will relate the history and politics of each of these walls, but I am most interested in individuals and their stories.

I’ve already 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, and mothers and sons who endured decades-long separations due to war and exile. I met a young Indian man in Ceuta who told me how he left his school in Delhi, urged his family to sell their home, and gambled it all for a life in Europe.  A village headman in Meghalaya explained how the coming border fence would evict him from his family home. In Palestine, a young man leads a weekly protest against the wall dividing his village’s farmers from their fields. Eventually, he finds himself in an Israeli prison.

(Dispatches from my ‘wall-trips’ 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.)

These ‘walled’ people are among the world’s exiled, excluded and, often, forgotten. Walls rise around places that don’t exist. In the Sahara, for example, the berm tracks through a nation, the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, that isn’t real. Fences surround Ceuta and Melilla, cities which are neither in Europe nor Africa, not Spain or Morocco, but some unlikely and unknowable collision between them. Palestinians surely exist, but Palestine itself is less a place than it is a starved idea defined and denied by someone else’s wall. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is another barricaded ‘nation’ recognized by no one. It is as if the places are only made real by the barricades that enclose them. My book will tell the stories of those living in these walled ‘nowheres;’ the people who make their homes in the places that cannot be.

In addition to their personal stories, the book will reveal insights into the notion of ‘walling’ itself. The walls I visit all represent a defeat of imagination. The walls are not solutions to conflict as much as they are manifestations of the failure to find solution. And the barriers themselves are most often failures. The  only wall I visited that succeeds in doing what it claims to do is the berm in the Western Sahara. Ironically, it is the most primitive of the walls, hardly more than a ridge of heaped sand. The other walls falter. They are mere theatre, projecting power and strength they don’t exercise. They are all bluster and smoke.

The walls’ actual accomplishments are either unintended or denied. In the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, the fences were built to keep out illegal migrants. They fail at this. Instead they create a physical embodiment of age-old prejudices between Christian Spaniards and Muslim Arabs. The fences along the Indo-Bangladesh border were built to secure a frontier that, for decades, has been invisible and meaningless. The new fencing has imposes a sense of national identity on villagers who never used to bother with such things, while the smugglers and militants still pass through. The barricades on Cyprus paint an illusion of danger that no longer exists and aims to keep warm a conflict that has gone cold. Israel’s own secret service debunks claims that the West Bank wall protects Israelis from terrorists. The Wall, however, redraws Israel’s borders and tinkers with its demographics. Despite the stated intention of these barriers, there always something else going on. My aim to is to find out what is that ‘something else’.

In a sense, this is a book about absurdity. It will explore the fool’s notion that complicated problems can be solved through the use of blunt, medieval structures. The book will also show how the barriers actually create the places that they hem in. Most of all, the book will answer the question: what does it mean to live against a wall?

Goose Lane Editions will publish In the Shadow of the Wall in 2012.