The borderline

A borderline, the dictionary tells us, is a ‘line marking a boundary’; but also – adjectivally – the phrase ‘on the borderline’ means ‘verging on an extreme condition; only just acceptable’. A borderline marks a mythical crossing-point; often the transition from what is known, safe & familiar into the unknown & dangerous. I say ‘mythical’ because there are no borders in actuality; they delineate imaginative failures; they are symbols of Hobbesian fearfulness conjured into existence by dried-up old men - full of desperation, clinging to an ebbing life-force. This provides little solace for those trapped on either side of them, however.

Shih Huang-ti, the all-conquering Prince of Ch’in from whom China takes its name, famously built a 4000 mile wall to protect civilised townspeople from the wild horsemen of the steppes; but he also burned books in an attempt to erase any but his own interpretation of history, to remove the challenge posed by knowledge. His Great Wall - which we are told can be seen from orbit - may seem as solid a physical construction as any there is, but Shih’s attempt to build this other less tangible boundary separating the minds of his people from their past is surely even more powerful in spite of - or perhaps because of - its intangibility. The wall of Hadrian marks another prominent attempt to convert a failure of imagination into physical reality, standing this time against the incursions of marauding Picts, but symbolising a similarly futile attempt to protect an always fragile cultural & economic stasis.

Wall-building & border-defining represent lessons of history we have palpably failed to learn. The West Bank barrier, supposedly protecting Israeli civilians from Palestinian suicide bombers, is a particularly divisive & misconceived contemporary example. So too the so-called ‘Great Wall of Mexico’; the latest ludicrous folly emblematic of US Homeland Security’s (mark the name) attempts to fence off US citizens from their poverty-stricken neighbours to the south. (Over 5000 desperate people have died crossing this border in the last thirteen years.)

I grew up in Gibraltar; at that time General Franco had placed a barrier across the tiny finger of land by which Tarik’s mountain clings to mainland Spain. It represented a characteristically petulant attempt to employ Fabianist siege tactics to capture this anomalous lump of colonial limestone that history had left as an offence against modern global politics; a transparent attempt to bully Los Llanitos into compliance. With even greater peevishness, Western Europe’s last remaining tin-pot tyrant placed his own barrier several hundred yards from the actual fence (currently something similar is happening at the Mexican wall), so that divided families were forced to come to opposite sides of this ‘no-man’s land’ at pre-arranged times to yell pitifully to one other across the wasteland, their voices bouncing plaintively around the sheer rock-face at their backs.

I saw the town on the other side at first hand just once, having taken the Mons Calpe ferry (Mons Calpe, the Ancient Greek name for Gibraltar, is one of the ‘Pillars of Hercules’ which once marked the limits of the known world) to Tangiers & boarded the Spanish ferry for Algeciras there. We then drove around the coast to the other side of the frontier; a journey which, but for the fence & the armed guards, would have taken all of ten minutes on foot. The town on the other side is called, formally, La Linea de la Concepcion; or, more simply, La Linea: ‘The Line’. Even at the age of nine the absurdity of this line-drawing, the feeble gesture of a bitter old man defending a failed ideology that forced people to travel for several days to be within touching distance of home, was not lost on me.

Franco is dead, but there remain borderlines to be crossed at every opportunity; even when we do so with the apparent impotence of an old woman yelling “Feliz Navidad!” to her grandson across 500 yards of tarmac.