[amazon_link id=”1908526335″ target=”_blank” ]Walls: Travels along the barricades[/amazon_link] by Canadian writer Marcello Di Cintio is an excellent work of reportage from several of the world’s most intrusive physical barricades. His travels took him from Belfast to the West Bank, the US-Mexico border to that between Bangladesh and India, and others too – Cyprus, the Western Sahara, Ceuta and Melilla. It is very well written and like any good reporting, takes the reader to unknown places and makes them real.
The common theme is the walls or fences proclaimed as security measures in fact create and deepen divisions between the people on either side. The walls once built create the need to maintain them as distrust grows, inevitably, because social contacts between the people on either side are severed. It is hard to draw any conclusion other than that they should never go up in the first place.
[amazon_image id=”1908526335″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Walls: Travels Along the Barricades[/amazon_image]
These barricaded borders are an extreme example of the social and economic effects of any border. Economic activity is reduced around any line on the map. I’ve always been fascinated by the invisible borders that characterise every city. There is no built structure separating Tower Hamlets from the City of London but there could hardly be a sharper or less permeable division between two social groups than between the global elite working in the finance sector and the inhabitants of one of London’s and the UK’s poorest boroughs. And of the cities I know, London is one of the least geographically segregated.
Getting people to meet and spend time with people who are different – in all kinds of ways but including in the amount of money they have – is the only way any walls, visible of invisible, will ever come down. Reading about them is a start, I suppose, taking that first step of sympathetic imagination.
I’m reminded of the close to Timothy Garton Ash’s ‘Free World’:
“There are many divisive walls in today’s world. There’s the wall being built between Israelis and Palestinians, which in places looks uncannily like the Berlin Wall. There are the high walls of trade protectionism around both Europe and the United States. But behind them are the biggest walls of all: the mind-walls. If we raise our voices, these walls will come down. We are many, and we have not spoken yet. It’s up to us.”
Stirring stuff.
P.S. The German phrase “Mauer im kopf” sounds so much better than mind-walls.
It’s a good phrase in either language. Although it seems to me more a question of speaking to each other than raising our voices to the skies.