A line runs through

In 2004, Belgian artist Francis Alÿs performed The Green Line. He held a can of leaking paint, and strolled along the armistice border in Jerusalem – effective until 1967, after which Israel occupied Palestinian-inhabited territories east of the line. His “line-making” was a playful act, articulating the border as an arbitrary mark on the ground. “Sometimes,” said Alÿs, “doing something poetic can become political. Sometimes doing something political can become poetic.” A sentiment that also holds true in literature. While watching Alÿs’ video recently at the Tate, it wasn’t hard to imagine Manto’s Toba Tek Singh lying “on that piece of ground with no name,” refusing to move. It prompted a discussion on literary works that challenged our notions of geographical borders, and while first in line was Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, others — poems, short stories, graphic novels — were also unearthed.

The dangerous thing about borders is how, in their construction and maintenance, they come to inhabit a naturalised space, creating the assumption of a landscape that has always been (and always will be) divided in that way. Yet this reading is compromised if we peer even most briefly into the past — national lines perpetually shift in the wake of wars, annexations, trade agreements. Manipuri-born poet Robin Ngangom quietly captures this arbitrariness in My Invented Land — “My homeland has no boundaries. At cockcrow one day it found itself inside a country to its west.” The Shadow Lines, which I first read at university, still conveys rare timelessness. Its most famous passage is one where the narrator discovers, with compasses and a map, the futility of boundaries. Yet the lines that also resonate in this age of frequent travel are Thamma’s — “But if there aren’t any trenches or anything, how are people to know? I mean, where’s the difference then?” The narrator’s grandmother cannot fathom how a border is the airport, not the frontier.

Nowhere, though, are we more privy to the emergence of boundaries than Jamil Ahmad’s The Wandering Falcon. Set around the permeable borders of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, the characters are caught between crystallising nation states. As Dawa Khan, leader of the nomadic Kharots, says, “What is this I hear about closing of borders... It’s impossible to do that. It’s like attempting to stop migrating birds or the locusts.”

As historically evident, the “enchantment of lines” leads to horrific partitions and violence, unfathomable loss and suffering. Drifting House, a collection of short stories by South Korean Krys Lee, sheds light into lives divided by boundaries. Following the country’s overnight division in 1953, millions of Koreans today face upheaval and alienation — whether living on the wrong side of the 38th parallel or scattered across Korea-towns of the diaspora. In the title story, Lee follows three siblings as they journey across a snowy landscape to China to find their mother. “Houses loomed like ghosts. The government’s face was everywhere…” Among several moving passages, one, where the eldest brother realises he can no longer carry his little sister, captures, in stark simplicity, the terrifying failure of the modern state. “He cleaned her face with his mittens…Then he closed his eyes, twisted their mother’s scarf around Gukhwa’s neck, and choked her.”

As sparse as Lee’s muted voice, is Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. Narrated through a series of wordless pencil drawings, the graphic novel bursts with immigrant stories of survival and hope. The idea behind it came, Tan explained in an interview, from his experience of being half-Chinese at a time (1970s) and place (Fremantle, Western Australia) when this was fairly unusual. “I was constantly asked ‘where are you from?’ My response was ‘here’.” This sense of jumbled borders — geographic and ethnic — is captured in My Brother at The Canadian Border, a prose-poem by Iranian-American SholehWolpé. “On their way to Canada… my brother and his friend…stopped at the border and the guard asked: Where you boys heading? My brother: Mexico. The guard blinked and said: This is the Canadian border. My brother turned to his friend, grabbed the map from his hands... You idiot, he yelled, you’ve been holding the map upside down.”

Borders, for their power to be expressed, rely on the cooperation and collusion of subjects in relation to them. Wolpé’s poem offers, similar to Manto’s writings, not merely a dismantling, but an ultimate act of resistance against boundaries. A joyful, blatant disregard.

Janice Pariat is the author of Boats on Land

@janicepariat

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