In Signs Preceding the End of the World, Makina travels from Mexico to the USA in search of her brother and to deliver a package for one the men who help her cross. Surviving a clash at the border during which she is shot, she makes her way to the city where her brother should be, but she cannot find him. In the end she discovers that he has changed his identity, taking on that of a young American man who signed up to the army without his parents’ permission, and thus she realises her brother will not come home. Makina, having always believed she would return, also ends up getting American papers.
The novels deal specifically with liminal areas, the Spanish/Moroccan border and US/Mexico border respectively and their characters’ identities are shaped in relation to the landscape they inhabit, the cultures they bring with them, and the cultures they meet in the countries they journey to. The landscape then must also be shaped by them in some way. Both novels also include the epic themes of journey, death and the underworld and discussions on migration, immigration, nativism, profiling, transnationalism, transculturalism, language hybridity, the apocalypse/end of the world, thus lending themselves to an investigation such as this.
In both works there is a tension between the body and the border. The vulnerability exposed by the breakdown of previous collective identities and the creation of a new identity, that of the migrant. In The Gurugu Pledge we see this clearly when one of the protagonists states: “They told me I no longer have a country, that’s what they said at the border: you’ve no country any more, now you’re just black.” (Laurel 2017, p. 75). This happens as he crosses into Morocco. The transition between one state and another is thus both physical, as in the crossing of a boundary between two territories, and internal, changing the very nature of his identity. Makina’s search for her lost brother in Signs Preceding the End of the World can also be viewed as a search for a stable identity within a new culture. Whereas the characters portrayed as living on Mount Gurugu in Morocco, located near the Spanish territory of Melilla, speak of their stories and journeys as a way of both commemorating and shedding their pasts, a process which feels necessary for them to survive this passage into a new culture that awaits them on the other side of the fence.
In his exploration of diasporic identity Brah also expresses this link been migrant identity and the repetition of narrative:
This means that these multiple journeys may configure into one journey via a confluence of narratives as it is lived and re-lived, produced, reproduced and transformed through individual as well as collective memory and re-memory. It is within this confluence of narrativity that ‘diasporic community’ is differently imagined under different historical circumstances. By this I mean that the identity of a diasporic imagined community is far from fixed or pre-given. It is constituted within the crucible of the materiality of everyday life; in the everyday stories we tell ourselves individually and collectively. (Brah 2003, p. 183).
Although this echoes the repetition of stories within the camp on Mount Gurugu, I would argue that a diasporic perspective does not cover the transient nature of the migrant camps we now have at the borders of Europe and within Europe itself, that this situation more generally, and specifically within The Gurugu Pledge, somehow creates a further displacement, as there is nowhere to settle, yet history has also been lost. This is also represented by the ‘invisible’ nature of these spaces within traditional maps, and the invisibility thus transferred to the occupants.
One character in The Gurugu Pledge states: “none of us are from anywhere” (Laurel 2017, p. 121), during the process of storytelling, and another, “…I will not mention anyone or anywhere by name” (Laurel 2017, p. 15). As Carol Phillips notes, a migrant’s relationship to home can become complicated, both as a form of protection (to be identified by their true origins may endanger the traveler), and emotionally as there is often no possibility to return to the place in which you once ‘belonged’: “Our identities are fluid. Belonging is a contested state. Home is a place riddled with vexing questions” (Phillips 2001 p. 6). A map of this nature thus naturally draws lines between countries and interspaces which may seem geographically distant and culturally disparate.
Signs Preceding the End of the World goes as far as to use geographical markers as chapter breaks—The Earth, The Water Crossing, The Place Where The Hills Meet, The Obsidian Mound, The Place Where The Wind Cuts Like A Knife, The Place Where Flags Wave, The Place Where People’s Hearts Are Eaten, The Snake That Lies in Wait, The Obsidian Place With No Windows Or Holes For The Smoke. These headings are laid out to depict Makina’s journey, creating a map personal to her, ‘drawn’ in her own words and reflective of her culture, while also suggestive of the ancient pathway to the underworld as understood in ancient Aztec mythology and consequently referencing Spanish colonial history in Mexico. The Gurugu Pledge instead uses stories with geographical descriptions to map people’s journeys and experiences across the continent—even though this is most often done without place names.
In fact, both works can be described as ‘geographically non-explicit’, and name very few specific sites as they would be recognised on a traditional map. The language used is also often ‘displaced’, a dynamic carried through the translation, another form of ‘displacement’. As Roger Bromley notes in the concluding chapter of Cross Addressing: Resistance Literature and Cultural Borders, texts written in the language of the colonizer often act to violate this language, “Transformation and textual negotiation are key features of the uses of language in border writing: this is also true of its narrative practice” (Hawley (ed.) 1996, p. 276). In Signs Preceding the End of the World for example “jarchar”, meaning to leave, which has an Arabic route and had to transition from Spanish and then to English, became “to verse”, thus the novel creates a new language of movement, required for a new understating of border crossing, and a new map of contemporary migration.
Indeed languages and translations can act as journeys or border crossings in their own right, imposing their own territorial constraints.
In a world full of travellers, borders control and regulate how we move around and who can or who cannot move from one space to another. It is precisely these movements of people (and ideas, capital and things) that contribute to the constant evolution of cultures. Translation is one way in which ideas can move across borders; intercultural communication implies that borders have already been crossed in some way. The existence of borders indicates that there is movement across them, which someone considers needs to be controlled. (Evans and Ringrow 2017, p. 3)
Makina herself is a site of this ‘language journey’: “You are the door, not the one who walks through it” (Herrera 2015, p. 18) says one character to Makina because she runs the switchboard in her village and speaks three languages. She is a site of transition. She embodies the US/Mexico border through translating between local languages and English before she even physically approaches the line of demarcation.
In The Gurugu Pledge languages are also mixed up, broken down and played with. The author takes words from French, Spanish and Latin thus spanning more than one colonial past while at the same time expressing a neo-colonial present. Much of the novel's structure is based around a poem in Latin. Written by the father of Peter, known previously in his village as Ngambo (most characters have multiple names), the poem is in the Conceptismo style (from the 17th century Spanish tradition), written in French and with a gloss (a notation on the poem) in English in an unnamed African country which used English as its primary language, “or imposed language, imposed by rich whites…”(Laurel 2017, p. 12), as one character states, re-imposing the history of these borders and the current map of Africa. Later in the work, another character states that people use, “Eat or manger, according to whichever history the whites chose for you” (Laurel 2017, p. 64).
The Story of Peter’s father’s poem is told in 3 parts and is about Charon, his boat and the payment made, a retelling of the ancient story from Greek mythology. Charon is the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the newly deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron which divided the world of the living and the dead. The poem represents the journey to come for these young people, the price they will pay and the danger it involves. These fractured journeys and selves are