When I lived in the U.S. a friend of mine used to daydream about a game of soccer.
Ours was an uneasy friendship formed in the aftermath of a political fight. But by the end of the time that we knew each other, we clearly were friends, rather than acquaintances, or enemies. Often we were at each others throats – or more accurately, I was at his. Not over ends, for we were both clearly on the same side. But we often clashed over means: he was more conciliatory and more gentle than me. And he had a habit (amusing in retrospect) of coming up with the most extraordinarily bizarre and impractical ideas at fraught, stressful and wildly inappropriate moments.
Still, we were friends. When I froze into a fierce numbness that left me impervious to pain, inflicted or received, he was one of a few people willing to deal with me on that thorny ground. When his house burned down, I was one of the people sifting the wreckage. When I left, he was one of the people who said goodbye.
And though I am no soccer fan, I share his daydream.
Coming from where he came, one might hesitantly speculate that his dream was bound up, in some deeply complicated, convoluted and circuitous way, with the desire to exorcise one particular soccer stadium and release the ghosts of one particular September. Though a more obvious precedent would be Christmas 1914, when the guns fell silent in parts of France and in isolated places along the line, soldiers emerged from their trenches – like rats from their runs – and for a moment regaining their personhood, kicked a football about No Man’s Land. And sang carols.
At that time I lived not so very terribly far South of the Canadian border. I had used to go across with friends sometimes. Up to Toronto, or even just to Windsor on a sunny Sunday morning for dim sum, slowing them down at the checkpoint on account of my foreign passport. But by then that was a line that I could no longer cross and return. Not legally.
And that line began to loom in my head. It had always loomed a little, but now it loomed large.
And in defense I began to imagine places changed. Walls abandoned, fortresses thrown down, checkpoints daringly remodeled as houses and hotels, bridges across rivers, spacious courtyards where once were immigration halls, barbed wire unsnarled, schools jubilant with speech from many places. Un mundo sin fronteras.
The line drawn by that calm judicious pen? Just another field, indistinguishable from the next, where some friends might meet sometimes on a Saturday afternoon to kick a football around. Not a place to watch with dread. Nor a place that runs red.
Borders are scratched across the hearts of men
By strangers with a calm, judicial pen,
And when the borders bleed we watch with dread
The lines of ink across the map turn red.
~Marya Mannes, Subverse: Rhymes for Our Times, 1959
Realised I’d omitted to cite a source.
and your incredible word writing talent.
I, too dream of the day when borders, where they exist, which will be rare, will be drawn by the people who live there, without benefit of “help” from faraway benefactors who seek only to assist the residents in making a gift of their resources to faraway benefactors…
I am very proud that you are my honorary great granddaughter. đ
Thank you. I still dispute the ‘great’ đ
Y’know, this reminded me of a very good novel–The Shadow Lines– by Amitav Ghosh.
The novel deals with the lines drawn dividing India and East Pakistan, later Bangladesh. The existence of these dividing, shadow lines–now apparent only at border controls and airports–make no sense whatsoever to the people whose lives were turned upside down. The people whose place of birth is now “messily at odds with their nationality.”
I’ll have to read it! I totally loved The Glass Palace which is one of his I think.
Yeah, The Glass Palace is by Ghosh and I really like that one a lot. I like Ghosh a lot–what can I say? But I will admit that The Shadow Lines is my favorite. Let us (the bootribbers, that is, not using the royal/editorial pronoun here) know what you think of it when you get a chance.