Boundaries In Beloved

D'un part, il y a donc le dehors; d'autre part, le dedans; entre les deux, le caverneux.

—Jacques Derrida, "Tympan"

What is a boundary? A cascade of words related to "boundary" springs to mind, inundating it, in pell-mell disorder: zone, edge, margin, frontier, horizon, border, barrier, wall (as in "the Berlin Wall," "the Great Wall of China," "the Israeli-Palestinian Wall," the 700-mile wall between the US and Mexico that some Republican politicians want to build), front, as in All's Quiet on the Western Front or "Popular Front," partition, hedge, fence, pale (as in "That's beyond the pale"), gate, door, threshold, anteroom, foyer, borderline, borderland, in-between, boundary line, fault line, fissure, rift, border zone, terminal, term, terme, barrier, barricade, demarcation, zone, meridian, limit. That last word, "limit," the limit of my list, has many idiomatic uses, as do many of the other words: "Speed limit"; "The sky's the limit"; "That's the limit"; "He's (or she's) the limit"; "limit case."

A boundary or limit is a curious thing. It is a line, infinitesimally narrow, but never so narrow that it does not have a this side and a that side. When you are on this side, you are within a safe and pure enclosure, enveloped by the boundary line. Everything on the other side is the other side, over there, beyond the pale, in another territory, foreign, strange, uncanny, radically other. When you cross that infinitesimally narrow line, suddenly the valences reverse. You are now within another domain. The land you have just left is now other, strange, distant, even if it is your own homeland. Moreover, that infinitesimally narrow line has a way of expanding into a strange between-realm called the zone or the borderland, as in the book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa. The slash in her title marks a frontier between the two chief US languages, English and Spanish, but the book dramatizes many other borders, for example that between gay and straight. Anzaldúa's subtitle, "The New Mestiza," in its mixture of languages and in the mixture of races and cultures it names, is itself the linguistic embodiment of a borderland.

Jacques Derrida has more than once reflected, with exuberant eloquence, on the strangeness of borders. This strangeness, however, is not just a fancy theoretical construct. It can be experienced, that is, passed through, proved on your pulses. In my own experience, the borderland is, for example, that strange space between the two border-crossing booths when one drives into Canada. First, you cross into Canada, and then, strangely, you pass the US Customs booth. In that strange in-between space, you are in Canada, but you have not yet left the US. You are in a borderland, la frontera. When you fly back from Canada, you cross into the US, paradoxically, while you are still in the Canadian airport. The border-crossing is inside Canada. You are in Canada and in the US at the same time. Where are you during the plane ride? Babies born on transatlantic flights, I am told, have a choice of citizenship between the country they flew from and the country toward which they are headed. Up there at 35,000 feet, you are in no country, but in an in-between place, a greatly extended border. When you have gone through the security checkpoint in any airport, you enter another version of that in-between space. The US detention camp at Guantánamo Bay is a sinister version of it. It is neither in the US nor outside it, so the "enemy combatants" imprisoned there are stateless, nobodies. They are defined by the Bush administration as not subject to US laws of habeas corpus, the right to have a lawyer, the right to confront accusers, the right to speedy trial by jury, etc., nor are they protected by the Geneva conventions for treatment of prisoners of war. They can be tortured with impunity, just as they can in the secret overseas prisons to which some of our "enemy combatants" or "suspected terrorists...