Borders and Walls
- José Manuel
- Oct 18, 2019
- 4 min read
It is remarkably easy to create a border.
Sometimes, all it takes is a line.
We draw borders consciously and unconsciously. We divide rooms, neighborhoods, cities, nations, and even people. We learn to recognize where something ends and something else begins. Over time, these divisions become so familiar that we rarely question who created them, why they were created, or what happens to the people who live between them.
Perhaps we have also learned to build borders as a form of protection. A wall promises safety. It offers the comforting idea that danger can be located somewhere else—on the other side.
Yet the desire to shelter ourselves can produce a paradoxical condition. The structures designed to protect us can also isolate us. The line that keeps something out simultaneously determines who must remain inside.
My reflection in Borders and Walls emerged from reading Haneen Ghabra and Bernadette Marie Calafell's “Intersectional Reflexivity and Decolonial Rhetorics: From Palestine to Aztlán.” Their discussion of borders, walls, and colonial structures creates a dialogue between Palestine and the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Rather than understanding walls simply as physical structures, their work invites us to examine the systems of power, identity, and exclusion that make these structures possible.
A wall is never only concrete.
Before the wall is built, a border must first be imagined.
Someone must decide that there is a here and a there.
An us and a them.
A body that belongs and another body that must be contained, monitored, or removed.
The Monsters We Create
One element of Ghabra and Calafell's discussion particularly caught my attention: their reference to a course on Monsters in Popular Culture. In that classroom, horror films became texts through which students could examine representations of racism and sexism.
The idea of the monster is powerful because monsters rarely emerge without context. Cultures create them. We give them bodies, names, languages, and places of origin.
More importantly, we decide what they threaten.
This reflection immediately reminded me of Norman McLaren's short film Neighbours.
Released in 1952, the film begins with an almost absurd simplicity. Two men live peacefully beside one another. Their houses are nearly identical. Their movements mirror each other.
There is no visible conflict between them.
Then a flower appears.
Something beautiful becomes something to possess.
The men begin to argue over who owns it. A line is drawn. A fence is constructed. The border becomes increasingly important until the neighbors can no longer see each other as neighbors.
They become enemies.
McLaren's use of pixilation and live-action animation transforms the human body into something strange and unstable. The men's gestures become exaggerated. Their faces distort. Their movements become violent.
They become monsters.
But the film never introduces an external monster.
The monster emerges from the border itself.
A Flower, a Line, a Wall
What continues to disturb me about Neighbours is the simplicity of the conflict.
A flower.
That is all.
There is no ancient prophecy. No invading army. No supernatural force.
There is only desire.
The desire to possess.
The desire to define.
The desire to say: this is mine.
Perhaps borders often begin with similarly simple gestures. A line is drawn to organize territory. A fence is constructed for protection. A wall is justified through the language of security.
But lines produce consequences.
Ghabra and Calafell's movement from Palestine to Aztlán asks us to consider how walls affect the people whose everyday lives are reorganized by them. From this perspective, borders are not abstract geopolitical concepts. They are lived structures.
They interrupt movement.
They separate families.
They reshape communities.
They regulate bodies.
They determine who may cross and who must remain.
For those observing from a distance, a wall may appear to be a solution. For those living beside it, the wall becomes part of the landscape of everyday life.
Learning to Build Borders
Borders are also inherited.
Generation after generation, we learn how to recognize difference. We inherit maps, categories, histories, fears, and narratives about others.
We are taught where the lines are.
Eventually, we may stop seeing the lines as human constructions.
They begin to appear natural.
Permanent.
Necessary.
This is perhaps one of the most unsettling lessons of Neighbours. The fence built by McLaren's characters does not exist at the beginning of the film. We watch it appear.
We watch the men construct it.
We watch them defend it.
And we watch them destroy each other because of it.
The border does not arrive from somewhere else.
They build it themselves.
Borders and Walls
My reflection is not an argument that every border is identical or that the histories of Palestine and the U.S.–Mexico borderlands can be collapsed into a single experience. Their political, historical, and cultural conditions demand careful attention to difference.
What connects these reflections is a question about the rhetoric of walls.
What do walls promise?
Who feels protected by them?
Who becomes visible as a threat?
And what happens when protection requires us to imagine another human being as a monster?
Norman McLaren needed only two neighbors and a flower to expose something deeply uncomfortable about human behavior.
Perhaps our most fearsome monsters do not live beyond the wall.
Perhaps they appear at the moment we decide to build it.
References:
Neighbours. Directed and produced by Norman McLaren. National Film Board of Canada, 1952.
Ghabra, Haneen, and Bernadette Marie Calafell. “Intersectional Reflexivity and Decolonial Rhetorics: From Palestine to Aztlán.” 2019.
Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise. Edited by Romeo García and Damián Baca. National Council of Teachers of English, 2019.
Academy Awards. Neighbours received the Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject).
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