The notion of ‘territory’ is derived from a complex of terms: from terra (of earth, and thus a domain) and territōrium, referring to a place from which people are warned off, but it also links to terrére, meaning to frighten. And the notion of region derives from the Latin regere (to rule) with its connotations of military power. Territory is a land occupied and maintained through terror; a region is space ruled through force. The secret to territoriality is thus violence: the force necessary for the production of space and the terror crucial to the creation of boundaries. (Neoclaus 2003, p. 412)
This clearly links back to Shapiro’s argument: the state’s mapped territory must be defended, it is a place from which some people will be ‘warned off’. This definition suggests that the creation of a territory necessitates the maintenance of said territory through violent means and such violence is ultimately enacted on the bodies of both those who are perceived as threatening, but also those who are employed to protect the state. A juxtaposition which can only exist in relation to the border, leading Jones (2015, p. 5) to assert that: “The hardening of the border through new security practices is the source of the violence, not a response to it.”
The Lines on the Map
Liminal spaces can act as moments of interaction between the people and cultures of the world while at the same time performing an act of transition within the self. As the traveler leaves his or her place of origin they step into the role of others through both an internal and external process. Such moments are imagined and documented in literature, but before pursuing this further we must look at the term ‘border’.
Within this framework, borders may be understood as:
…arbitrary dividing lines that are simultaneously social, cultural and psychic, territories to be patrolled against those whom they construct as outsiders, aliens, the Others; forms of demarcation where the very act of prohibition inscribes transgressions; zones where fear of the Other is the fear of the self; places where claims to ownership—claims to ‘mine’, ‘yours’ and ‘theirs’—are staked out, contested, defended and fought over. (Brah 2003 p. 198)
Avtar Brah’s definition of borders exemplifies the complex nature of the term. He describes them as being both physical and psychological barriers combining social and geographical dimensions as we have seen above. In this understanding of the term, borders can exist beyond the lines on a map to become aspects of societal beliefs. In constructing a sense of self through such shared beliefs it is possible to construct an ‘us’ thus enabling the construction of an ‘other’. In the texts discussed below, ideas of borders are related to both the physical and the psychological while beginning to consider the idea of the ‘other’ as someone who exists on the opposite side of a border.
Many characterised interactions between the state and outsiders are a contrast between civilisation and barbarity, but we know this version because states write their histories from their perspective, while many mobile people did not record their experiences. (Jones 2015, p. 91)
Literature, especially that which deals with migration, potentially redresses this imbalance, and calls into question how civilised the bordered state truly is when the violence enacted upon the mobile migrant body is brought to light and removed from the invisible liminal area. Due to the nature of mapping, borders become normalised in the public consciousness as do the hierarchies associated with those who can and cannot cross them. This suggests that they are as much a work of the imagination as they are a geographical reality, a concept described by James Procter as “imaginative geography” (Procter 2003 p. 1).
Brah also highlights the relationship between borders and narrative: “Each border embodies a unique narrative, even while it resonates with common themes with other borders” (Brah 2003, p. 198). This narrative is not the sole preserve of the state, there are other voices present. In fact the border itself is in some way defined, can only exist, in relation to the other. As Trinh T. Minh-ha puts it, borders are:
Constantly guarded, reinforced, destroyed, set up, and reclaimed, boundaries not only express the desire to free/to subject one practice, one culture, one national community from/to another, but also expose the extent to which cultures are products of the continuing struggle between official and unofficial narratives: those largely circulated in favour of the State and its policies of inclusion, incorporation and validation, as well as of exclusion, appropriation and dispossession. (Minh-ha 1996, p. 1)
Migration literature is arguably a form of unofficial border narrative. Yet even set in opposition to an official state narrative or map, it unavoidably reinforces the border through the very method it utilises to destroy it. Crossing the border, especially clandestinely, similarly recognises its power while also negating it.
Migration Literature
Within literary criticism there has been a shift from the literature of exile to migrant literature which is said to offer a “transnational, cosmopolitan, multilingual and hybrid map of the world that redraws boundaries” (Mardorossian 2002, p. 17). Yet this term still defines the author rather than the literature, maintaining the borders which so much of this literature seeks to cross. In Migration and Literature: Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, and Jan Kjærstad, Søren Frank instead suggests that the term used should be ‘migration literature’ as it “ not only calls for a redrawing of the map of literary history but also challenges the way literary studies is often organized in nationally separated contexts” (Frank 2008, p. 10). It is this term I will use when discussing the novels and related texts in this chapter, viewed within the wider realms of contemporary and postcolonial literatures.
Literature as a Cultural Map of Migration
While there is precedent for using literature as a cultural artefact for better understanding migration in several disciplines, it has yet to be seen or utilised as a map of contemporary migration. The editors of Writing Across Worlds: Literature and Migration offer us an argument for using literature as a way of gaining insights into the experience of migration:
Literary accounts focus in a very direct and penetrating way on issues such as place perception, landscape symbolism, senses of displacement and transformation, communities lost and created anew, exploitation, nostalgia, attitudes towards return, family relationships, self-denial and self-discovery and many more. (King, Connell and White (eds.) 1995, p. x)
Amanda Lagji has moved this argument forward by writing on the inter-relationship between literature and mobility studies as literature is “embedded in and reflective of cultural imaginaries” and “helps us to see how we make meaning out of, and subscribe meaning to mobilities, foregrounding the interpretive work of making sense of movement and stillness” (Lagji 2018, p. 7). If we look specifically at mobility in terms of migration, contemporary fiction, and more specifically migration literature, can thus be argued as ‘making meaning out of’ both the journeys described in such works and the moments of stillness during which waiting (for a chance to cross a border, for news from a smuggler, for money to arrive, for an asylum claim etc.) is also a form of moving forward. This discussion feeds into the idea of contemporary fiction as a cultural map of migration. As the borders are crossed, so the map is drawn, but the authors of, and the visible bodies within, this map is not only the state actors who have imposed the border upon the landscape, but the border crossers and border writers themselves.
Landscapes, Vulnerable Bodies and Imagined Others
In The Gurugu Pledge a group of black Africans who have travelled from all over the continent wait on Mount Gurugu in Northern Morocco for their chance to cross the border into Melilla, Spain. They play football and tell stories to pass the time. When two women in the group become ill after a sexual assault and one of them experiences a miscarriage, the group tries to climb the fence on mass, leaving the women, who are too weak to climb, tied to the top to be found and taken care of. It is likely that they die there. The character with the last word, for the narration switches in and out of third person and inhabits different characters along the way, decides not to cross and remains on the mountain but facing south,