Notes on Borders

The strangest border I ever crossed was the one between two villages in eastern Slavonia where the only thing dividing the two was a single road and a slightly different name for the same bread. I have been thinking about it for years.

A border is a piece of fiction we agree to enforce. That doesn’t mean it’s not real — fictions are some of the most real things humans make. Money is a fiction. Property is a fiction. Mondays are a fiction. The point is not that borders are fake. The point is that they require constant, expensive maintenance. Soldiers. Stamps. Stories.

What a border has to do

For a border to work, it has to perform three jobs at once:

1. Sort people, into those who belong and those who do not.
2. Sort stories, into those that are ours and those that are theirs.
3. Hide the third thing — the obvious truth that there is far more on both sides of the line than on either side alone.

The first job is the one most often discussed. The third is the one most often ignored.

A small note about Croatia

I live in a country whose borders are younger than its grandparents. I do not say this to dismiss them. I say it because it should make us more careful, not less, with the question of what a border is for. A border that was drawn in living memory carries the memory of its drawing. It carries also the memory of what was lost in being drawn — relatives suddenly on the wrong side, a dialect suddenly foreign, a kind of bread suddenly imported.

The cost of a border is not paid at the border. It is paid in the interior, in slow forgetting.

What I am asking for

Not the end of borders. I am not naive. I am asking only that we keep, in some quiet room of our political imagination, an awareness that the line we draw between us and them is something we did, and that it can be re-drawn, softened, or — in small, specific cases — set aside.

The border between two Slavonian villages still exists. But on Sundays, when the church bell rings on one side and the people from the other side walk over the road to attend, it briefly becomes the thing borders almost never get to be: a place, rather than a line.