Kapka Kassabova and Ben Judah: Writing Borders and Borderscapes in Contemporary Europe

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the role of border and borderscapes in two contemporary texts by writers based in Britain, Kapka Kassabova’s Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe [Kassabova, Kapka. 2017. Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe. London: Granta] and Ben Judah’s This Is London: Life and Death in the World City [Judah, Ben. 2016. This is London: Life and Death in the World City. London: Picador]. Reading these texts as narratives of border in the context of contemporary discourses on Europe and Brexit, the article shows how the texts challenge the general bordering tendency to represent Europe and Europeans as Britain’s Others, marked by difference and ethnic, cultural, and geopolitical borders. Examining the works in the context of the borderscape concept, the article shows how the texts’ border-crossings challenge such binary thinking and offer ways to locate alternatives to simplistic versions of national identity. The article shows a transforming discourse of borders that underlines their porosity and points to the emergence of new identities as the result of border-crossings. The borderscapes examined in the article (Bulgaria’s southern border and London) reveal diverse belongings and becomings in historical and contemporary contexts that generate new identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Borderscapes
• Europe
• Britain
• travel writing
• Kapka Kassabova
• Ben Judah

Introduction

Britain’s identity is conventionally imagined as residing in a contrast to Europe. A number of studies (Hall 1991; Goldsworthy 1998; Easthope 1999; Nyman 2000; Korte, Pirker, and Helff 2010) have claimed that there is a tendency to represent Europe and Europeans as England’s Others, marked by difference and separated from Britain by ethnic, cultural, and geopolitical borders. While such a discourse of Othering has remained powerful for the nation’s self-understanding, as shown in the analysis of the Brexit discourse by Van der Zwet et al. (2020), it is also marked by ruptures and ambiguities that problematize the maintenance of such polarized notions of identity and fixed conceptions of borders. This article aims to show how contemporary British narratives dealing with borders address ideas of transnational mobility and migration by emphasizing that border-crossings challenge such binary thinking. By addressing the varying role of the border in two cultural narratives addressing contemporary Europe, I will suggest that it is possible to trace a transforming discourse of borders that underlines their porosity and constructedness and points to the emergence of new identities as the results of border-crossings. Narratives and images, as Nyman and Schimanski (2021, 2) suggest, play an important role in understanding borders since they contribute to ongoing negotiation of borders in the public sphere and reveal the experience of living with them (see also Schimanski and Nyman 2021).

In my discussion of two contemporary non-fictional border narratives from Britain, by Kapka Kassabova and Ben Judah, respectively, I suggest that borders – national, cultural, ethnic, “racial,” socio-symbolic, and other – are also sites of debordering, negotiating and reassessing the power of the border. It is at the border where different identities come into contact with each other and generate new identifications. While the texts to be analyzed also address border patrolling and maintenance, they make clear that such processes are historical and constructed rather than natural and fixed, and that border discourses can be resisted. In border studies, such locations are referred to as borderscapes, places of cultural encounter and exchange as defined by the border theorist Chiara Brambilla (2015a, 20), where the processes of becoming and belonging are reorganized. As Brambilla (2015a) notes, borderscapes are fluid and mobile rather than fixed, and thus appear to resemble what Mary Louise Pratt (1992) calls contact zones and what Homi Bhabha (1994) refers to as spaces of in-betweenness.

My two close readings informed by borderscapes theory aim to show how border discourse and debordering phenomena are prevalent and extend from the nation-state to borderscapes that emerge beyond the actual border line. Rather than merely focusing on the geopolitical borders of Britain, the texts under study address the role of borders within Britain, as well in Europe, and show how borders and border discourse travel and assume different forms. The two texts have not yet been addressed in a border studies framework. I will first address the travel text Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe (2017) by the Bulgarian Scottish writer Kapka Kassabova in which she visits the southern border of Bulgaria, an uncrossable line in her childhood but also a site that now has a different identity and geopolitical role than in the past. In the second part of the analysis, I will address the journalistic non-fiction narrative This Is London: Life and Death in the World City (2016), by the London writer Ben Judah. I would suggest that it is a borderscape narrative that explores the role of transnational migration and the (re-)emergence of borders in today’s multicultural London. In my reading, I show how the text’s borderscapes extend to spaces within the nation-state and organize the various processes of becoming and belonging. While the two texts appear to have different foci, one locating the border and its ruptures in South-Eastern Europe, the other bringing the European border to Britain to disrupt established narratives of identity, they both seek to understand the border as crossable, negotiable, and hybrid rather than as securing the maintenance of sealed national spaces as claimed in contemporary Brexit discourse on Europe. In so doing, the article aims at contributing to the current understanding of thinking with border concepts to show their usefulness for the cultural analysis of transnational and border phenomena.

Framing the Issue: Borders, Europe, and Britain

While the study of borders and diverse border-related phenomena has been traditionally practiced by political geographers or scholars of international relations, in contemporary border studies the once fixed idea of the border as a line separating a nation from another, us from them, civilization from barbary, and knowledge from non-knowledge, has been recast, although such oppositions can be seen in nationalist discourses such as the Brexit discourse on Europe. Van der Zwet et al. (2020) see such polarization as a form of Othering based on drivers that are historical and socio-economic as well as being linked with identity, political rhetoric, and the media. Similarly, the discourse analysts Tong and Zuo (2019) suggest that the figure of the “illegal/EU’ im/migrant” has been used effectively in the British print media to Other the European Union. This reveals that, as border scholars claim, border is not a noun but a verb (van Houtum 2010, 124). Following van Houtum, bordering can be seen as a way of constructing barriers between nations, cultures, and ethnicities through official and everyday populist discourses, generating an understanding of difference as absolute and representing border-crossings as impossible. In contrast, the process of debordering aims at lowering such walls, suggesting that borders are porous and open for cross-border co-operation, mobility, and identity negotiation. Borders, however, are a fact: while intra-European borders were for a long time experiencing debordering, in recent years we have faced forms of rebordering promoted by appeals to the primacy of nation and security that extend from institutional control to what is known as “everyday bordering” (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2018, 228) involving practices of regulation where landlords are expected to report on their lodgers and universities on their foreign students. Regardless of the emphasis on bordering, the external borders of Europe are both unstable and frequently crossed by diverse migrants. This means that the actual borders of the European Union have moved to spaces beyond Europe and the Mediterranean, involving places such as Turkey and Mali, where the European Union is involved in operations targeting migration towards Europe (see De Genova 2017).

Consequently, the border is constantly redefined and relocated, becoming “dislocated, shifted, or displaced” (Peña 2021, 20). It is not only a marker of leaving a national territory and entering another one but a more extensive site of socio-cultural encounters and related identity negotiations in places far from the actual border. In other words, when understood as a borderscape, the border emerges as a flexible and movable site that is not a mere borderline but a constructed space of encounters. Borderscapes are sociocultural and symbolic locations that function, to quote Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, as “zones of varied and differentiated encounters” (2007, xxx) ranging from border management to those existing between individuals and groups. In Chiara Brambilla’s view (2015a), borderscapes are locations where the function of borders as sites of interaction is foregrounded, a conception that is in juxtaposition to the conventional idea of borders as sites of exclusion. As spaces of encounter, borderscapes are both transforming and transformative, revealing hybridity and mobility, not stasis or fixedness. To quote Brambilla, “borders are blurring; they move around and fold” (2015b, 139).

For Brambilla, borderscapes play a role in identity formation and function as “paradoxical structures that are both markers of belonging and places of becoming” (2015a, 24; emphasis original). Rajaram and Grundy-Warr have suggested that borderscapes are not utopian spaces but concrete sites of struggle, “terrain[s] of a multitude of political negotiations, claims, and counterclaims” (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007, xxx). While they are contested spaces with different claims on the part of different border crossers, borderscapes may also provide people with a sense of community and place, offering opportunities for transformation and hope for the future.

Since borders and bordering processes are not limited to those between nations, the emerging borderscapes provide conditions for the empowerment and recognition of the assembled identity in multicultural and convivial societies. Brambilla (2015b) refers to this formation of identity as a form of becoming. The space may offer varied moments of belonging through group formation and sharing of identity, although the term usually appears to have a progressive connotation (see Brambilla 2015b). However, since borderscapes are contested spaces with different claims, the processes of bordering that generate ideological and racialized boundaries between those inhabiting the borderscape may also become visible there.

Borderscapes are not limited to the geographical spaces around a particular borderline. Rather, while travelling and moving with migrants, they are spaces where the conflicts and encounters characterizing life at the border are relocated to other spaces. In so doing they reconstruct metropolitan and other spaces as extended borderscapes offering belonging as well as becoming, opportunities for affiliation as well as transformation. In the view of Johan Schimanski, the extended notion of the borderscape reveals that what takes place on the border also happens in more distant locations (2015, 36). Schimanski underlines the processual character of the border, which makes the concept apt for the analysis of aesthetic and cultural texts:

What the extended, woven, partly deterritorialised space of the borderscape allows us to see are the connections (and tensions) between agents, practices and discourses both in and beyond the local contiguity of the borderland or the material visibility of the border landscape. The borderscape is not purely an external effect of the border, but an assemblage in which bordering takes place. It thus allows us to see aesthetic works not only as representations of the border, but at the same time as part of the bordering process. (2015, 40)

While such a conception of border has not been widely used in literary studies dealing with the border, the idea of the borderscape as a location of transformation shares some affinities with such terms as the “contact zone” presented in Mary-Louise Pratt’s (1992) theory of transculturation, “borderlands” as discussed by Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) as sites of formation of hybrid, mestiza consciousness, and the Third Space of in-betweenness created by Homi K. Bhabha (1994); similarly, Abdul JanMohamed’s (1992, 92) border subject is capable of forming as a syncretic identity on the basis of experiences from two cultures. All of these terms resonate with the idea of the borderscape as a site of encounters, regardless of their different vocabularies. If such locations of encounter and transformation are read as borderscapes of belonging and becoming, we can see the benefits involved in the use of the term. Rather than reproducing the polarization that Richard Robinson finds in many critical discussions of borders and borderlessness, i.e. transnational global processes destroy nations, localities, and places (2007, 16–25), an understanding of the borderscape as a site of negotiations between different participants makes it possible to examine the contested site with reference to how new identities emerge. What distinguishes the borderscape concept from the abovementioned terms and is beneficial for literary studies, in addition to revealing the omnipresence of the various processes of bordering, is its better suitability for addressing geopolitical processes and encounters, migration, and mobility, since the other terms mentioned above emphasize hybridity and cultural mixing. Sergio Peña suggests that the borderscapes approach allows for an understanding of border representation in such forms as “narratives of struggles, choreographies of space, everyday life and survival tactics, and aesthetics such as graffiti, theatre, poetry, etc.” (2021, 20).

Studies addressing the connection between borders and processes in extended borderscapes such as metropolitan centres or Europe at large have been presented by other critics. For instance, Marcel Cornis-Pope and Andrew Hammond have examined the fiction of the German Romanian writer Herta Müller with reference to ideological and national borders, suggesting that for her exile characters in Germany militarized borders remain constantly present (2015, 148). In the case of Britain and its conventional self-understanding, the nation is thought to be separated from Europe by a border through stereotypes and Othering (see Hall 1991; Easthope 1999; Nyman 2000). As a strategy of Othering, British discourse about Europe has erected a border between the nation and its Others and insisted on the need to patrol and maintain it in order to exclude suspicious border-crossers. Indeed, Christine Berberich suggests that such an idea of Europe’s difference remains at the core of British national identity, but in her view, we also need to realize that it is “steeped in the past, in tradition, in myth, and [that] those images have, for centuries, been changed, adopted, adapted and manipulated” (2015, 167). Yet Europe may also challenge the role reserved for it in such thinking and become a borderscape, termed by Janine Hauthal (2018) as “a space of entanglement” that allows for transforming identities and new narratives of belonging problematizing established understandings.

The following analyses address the role and representation of borders and borderscapes in two contemporary border narratives from Britain: while one is set in the Balkans and the other in London, both address borders, border-crossings, and borderscapes. While the texts are differently located in terms of their geographies, they challenge historical and current borderings characterizing stereotyping British discourse on and attitudes towards Europe, albeit in different ways. Whereas Judah’s text overtly shows how British encounters with Europeans occur in contemporary London, Kassabova’s travel text is multilayered and relies on what Susan Bassnett finds central to the genre of travel writing: “all travel writing exists in a dialectical relationship between two distinct places – that designated by the writer and perhaps also by readers as ‘home,’ and that designated as the cultural other” (2003, xi). What this means is that the text’s discourse of border is layered: while it ostensibly addresses the Greek–Bulgarian border, it is embedded in discourses of borders and bordering in contemporary Britain and comments critically on their insistence of patrolling and migration control (see Tong and Zuo 2019; Schmidtke 2021). While the borders in the texts contain elements of danger associated with historical instability and the unknown, they also function as sites of belonging and becoming, and offer moments of community and glimpses of hope amidst diverse borderings.

Kapka Kassabova’s Memories of Border and Travel

Kapka Kassabova’s recent memoir/travel text tells of its narrator’s return to the borders of Bulgaria inaccessible to her in childhood. Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe focuses on its narrator’s return to Bulgaria after decades of absence abroad in New Zealand and Britain. The focus of the book is on “the last border of Europe” (xv), the borders between Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey that have been shifted several times in the past century in frequently violent situations and which have remained basically uncrossable during the Cold War. The book follows its narrator’s journey from her “borderless” (Kassabova 2017, xvi) Scotland to the contested border. On her journey along and across the border, the narrator is located in the histories of ethnicity and nation characterizing the borderscape that emerges as an uncanny space of memory and storytelling. Kassabova’s book is a significant contribution to the ways in which contemporary British writing can address European borders and peripheries without Othering them. Rather, it shows serious thinking about borders and their functions by using a border narrative set in the past as a “strategy to address personally and societally challenging themes” (Kurki 2021, 108). In so doing Border expands Kassabova’s previously recognized role as a chronicler of identity in post-communist Eastern Europe (see Linke 2013).

What I argue is that the book’s border imaginaries reveal a haunted and traumatized border of violent histories and terror, one that is located under “mountain[s] of madness” and hosts “phantom village[s] with gouged windows and a waterless stone fountain” (Kassabova 2017, 2). This space, however, is also a location where belonging and becoming emerge and adopt new meanings. Through the narrative, we gain an understanding of how the border transforms from an ideologically divisive and polarized line into a larger historically and culturally constructed borderscape where ideological bordering is replaced with debordering. In so doing, it also revises dominant British discourses on Europe and its borders by suggesting that appeals to increased border security and the politicization of migration characterizing the Brexit campaign may lead to traumas and terror rather than promote security. The book has a double focus: while ostensibly addressing the borders in the Balkans, it also comments on contemporary British border discourses where it is suggested that “[b]orders are […] tools for defending the UK’s economic interests, allowing for a properly managed migration regime” (Schmidtke 2021, 157). By selecting the Bulgaria–Greece border as its topic, the book appears to silence the current British discourse and comments on it in a less overt manner. As is conventional in travel writing, what is associated with the lands travelled through, is also linked with the values of home (see Bassnett 2003).

The relevance of Kassabova’s work to an analysis of British discourses on Europe is in its critique of bordering discourses, past and present. Kassabova’s journey starts from the “Red Riviera” (2017, 9), the touristic sites by the Black Sea once regularly visited by eastern European holiday makers, proceeds to the mountains of Strandja on the Bulgarian side, crosses over to Greece, and finally reaches the European parts of Turkey before returning to Bulgaria. As the title of the book indicates, it explores border phenomena as well as the concept of border more generally. For Kassabova, Bulgaria’s southern border, in particular, is one that both attracts and generates terror, owing to its role as a mysterious and forbidden zone of death, the “forbidden place[…] of [her] childhood” and “a terra incognita” (2017, xvii). This space, as the narrative reveals, becomes a borderscape characterized by ambiguity and narratives of various encounters. The legacy of the Cold War with its history of border patrolling is contrasted with stories of sites where much more distant histories and memories are addressed in ways ranging from esoteric mysticism to memories of genocide and death.

As is typical of narratives of dark travel where the narrator returns to sites of trauma and “engages with the history and collective memory of the place” (Clarke 2018, 59), the text foregrounds the history of the patrolled border as a site of danger and death. This is clearly shown in the narrator’s childhood memories on the beach:

Although Turkey was on the same side of the Black Sea, it was on the other side of the border, and the things that included the word border, granitza – even the sound of it was barbed, like the gra-gra of the seagulls – were best avoided, even I knew that. For example, to go abroad was to go “beyond the border”, which was like beyond the pale, a place from which there was no return. In fact, those who went abroad and didn’t return were called non-returnees. They were condemned in absentia and their families made to suffer in their place. (Kassabova 2017, 8–9)

The meanings of this Cold War border are multiple and can be seen in the geopolitical, linguistic, and epistemological references in the quotation. The border signifies absence and no-return, and the act of border-crossing has serious repercussions, even for those who are not involved in it themselves. What the border generates is a particular affective response: “you developed a permanent border-like feeling inside you, like indigestion” (Kassabova 2017, 9). This particular border, then, involves a particular structure of feeling that is felt by the subject as a feeling of uncertainty and suspicion, as also “the beach was awake with spying eyes” (Kassabova 2017, 9). In Kassabova’s text, border emerges in addition as a site of wilderness and threat, seen in the description of the location of the quiet and marginal “Village in the Valley” next to the border:

Beyond my lane, there were only old drove roads and wooden hills all the way to Turkey. At night, jackals came to the edge of the village and howled, and the village dogs howled back in an infernal orchestra. Unable to sleep, I sat on my balcony and followed the yellow eyes at the edge of the forest. Hornets the size of sparrows invaded the house and I squashed them with Russian hardbacks from the shelves, because a hornet sting can kill, people said. War and Peace proved ideal. (2017, 19)

The closeness of the border generates a borderscape that generates belongings and becomings, as indicated by Brambilla (2015a, 20). Rather than merely a progressive site of identity construction, this space is shaded by the Cold War border and its oppressive mechanisms of bordering, patrolling and surveillance sought in Brexit discourse as means to control migration as Schmidtke (2021, 157) suggests. The peculiar affective response to this border is explored further in the text: when the narrator approaches the borderscape, the Strandja mountains, Kassabova’s text reveals a visible change of landscape associated with a sudden loss of sense of self and of one’s sense of direction:

Strandja: you knew you’d entered it when traffic suddenly stopped and the forest engulfed you. The road became broken and muffled in jungle green, and the green was full of mossy lagoons and megalithic rock sanctuaries once used in Dionysian cults. […] Thrown by the ambiguous road structure and bent road signs that pointed into the wilderness, I lost my way. (2017, 13)

The scenery transforms into a Gothic landscape where “midge-like flies entered my [the narrator’s] nose and mouth” and where adders abound, locating the narrator in a threatening space capable of “slaps” and “vertigo” (Kassabova 2017, 13). The special status of the border is emphasized by the revelation that its inhabitants once “needed a special stamp from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, because this was the Border Zone” (Kassabova 2017, 21), and it is also referred to as a “twilight zone” guarded by the military (Kassabova 2017, 55). To underline its peripheral location at the borders of civilization, it is referred to as the “last outpost of Europe”, which doubles as “the terminus of wanted international fugitives, smugglers, desperados” (Kassabova 2017, 26). Such descriptions underline how the text’s borderscape resembles Sigmund Freud’s (1998) famous concept of the uncanny, something that is both known but at the same time threatening, suggesting that the border may be a location of trauma and repression. Some analyses of the role of borderscapes in narratives of forced migration have suggested that the borderscape may become an “uncanny site of terror” (Nyman 2020, 30). From the perspective of Homi K. Bhabha’s (1994) theory of hybridity, the experience of the uncanny may lead to a new, hybrid identity, a process that borderscape theory discusses as becoming (see Brambilla 2015a).

The borderscape entered is one of a wilderness at the border between nature and culture, away from civilization, but as such it also allows for the making of new border subjectivities. In the manner of the borderscapes of Northern wilderness analyzed by Schimanski, who underlines their role in transforming the subject (2015, 48–9), Kassabova’s narrator is on a journey towards a reconstruction of identity where Bulgarianness, or national identity more generally, if understood as based on ethnic and cultural difference, is problematized and addressed in a space of historical and ethnic encounters. This is clearly evident in the short vignette-like sections that provide contextualizing information on a variety of linguistic, folkloric, and other topics that the text addresses. Indicated textually by the use of small letters in chapter titles, reminding the reader of the practices in dictionaries, these sections often focus on uncovering issues and knowledges forgotten in national narratives, or explain the multilingual histories of relevant border issues. For instance, the vignette “strandja” addresses the different and ethnically and religiously mixed histories of the mountain region, “cold water” explains the linguistic and folkloric history of the last spring before the border (“locals call it Kreynero, a distortion of the Greek for cold water, kryo nero” [74]), and “thrace” discusses the history of the Thracian civilization and its subsequent multicultural legacy, with its “well mixed Thracian blood” (Kassabova 2017, 122), that geographically spans parts of the Balkans, Greece and Turkey: “A military buffer zone for half a century, this was the point where one ideology stopped and another began. Ideologies come and go, but one thing has changed: several thousand years ago after the Thracians drank their undiluted wine, this is still a land of vines” (Kassabova 2017, 123). The contemporary making of the region is, then, an on-going process, generating new ideologies, practices, and histories, forming a borderscape of negotiating between cultures and worlds with “Three alphabets, three currencies, three versions of history” (Kassabova 2017, 123). Since travel writers negotiate between the values of home and away (Bassnett 2003, x), Kassabova, in attempting to denounce nationalisms, is drawing the reader’s attention towards the fact that all national and cultural identities result from cultural encounters and mixing, and that appeals to national unity rely on selected remembering that Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) refer to as the invention of tradition.

Kassabova’s representation of the border during the Cold War emphasizes how borders have played a role in a divided world. Such a border conception is approached through stories about former border guards as well as discussions of GDR citizens attempting to leave the socialist bloc without permission. Referred to as “sandals,” since they usually left Bulgaria scantily clothed in the middle of the night, their attempts to cross the border were frequently unsuccessful. This heavily patrolled borderscape is one of violence and terror. The chapter headed “415” uses as its title the number of visiting holiday-makers who went “missing” in the period 1961–1989 and now rest in unmarked graves dug by the border guards responsible for their deaths (Kassabova 2017, 49). According to Kassabova, the number of known attempts by East Germans to cross the border is around 4000, and the book discusses several cases in detail: Thomas from Leipzig was attacked by dogs and shot, had his leg amputated, and served a prison sentence (2017, 49–50), and Felix, from Erfurt, attempting to cross the border with his friend Dominik in 1971, falls into the hands of the border guards because of their manipulated map: “it was a GDR-bought map, made especially for those like them, interested in borders, and GDR-manufactured maps of Warsaw Pact countries featured deliberately false borders” (Kassabova 2017, 89). While some were returned to prison in East Germany, others were brutally killed in the manner of the holidaymakers Brigitte and Klaus:

Out in no-man’s land, Klaus had pulled out a hunting knife in self-defence but was shredded in seconds by gunfire, and Brigitte’s Russian did not help because it was four in the morning and the corporal in charge had been on his feet all night and was tired and fed up, he explained later to a local forestry worker, so he liquidated her on the spot. “Liquidate” was a word used throughout the Soviet world for approved murder. Something strange happened next: the corporal kept firing, until one hundred and forty Kalashnikov bullets had been emptied into the couple. (Kassabova 2017, 97–8; emphasis original)

However, this construction of the Cold War borderscape as a thanatic space that is ruled by ideology and denies the crosser any sense of belonging is contrasted with more historical and contemporary narratives of border-crossings as well as with moments that point to transhistorical and transnational shared becomings. The former include the recognition of the borders of the region as mobile and transforming, seen in the history of the population with its often forced religious conversions and reconversions but also in the explicit mentions of negative experiences such as forced displacements of the people and the suppression of ethnic difference as revealed in their names and histories:

A friend introduced me to a retired miner called Hairi who lived in another Pomak village near the local mining town. Hairi, or Good in Arabic, became the less Arabic Hari in the 1970s. And in the 1980s, he became the fully Slavicised Zakhari. (Kassabova 2017, 225)

The present situation, however, reveals increased collaboration across the border: the towns across the borders are linked with each other through trade and tourism in the manner of Svilengrad in Bulgaria and Edirne in Turkey:

They were twins because what you couldn’t get in Edirne (alcohol, sex, casinos) you could get in Svilengrad (good shopping infrastructure, family values). In Svilengrad, you could almost hear Edirne’s chanting imams, and in Edirne, the beat of Svilengrad’s nightclubs. (Kassabova 2017, 126)

Through such everyday border-crossing mobility, the borderscape emerges as a site of shared belonging associated with debordering, even though entry into it is limited to those with the necessary documentation, as is also addressed in the text on several occasions.

In contrast to everyday border-crossings, the travelogue’s borderscape offers belonging and becoming through mystical and esoteric events that construct the borderscape as an uncanny and shifting space such as the search for a lost Egyptian sarcophagus and “the intergalactic portal” (Kassabova 2017, 71) by a team of Communist archaeologists, and the mysterious fire walking ritual (anastenaria). The latter in particular plays a significant role in the travelogue and is addressed in a chapter that tells of an extraordinary journey from the Bulgarian village in the valley to the border, “a place off the map” located in “a clearing in the border forest criss-crossed by hunting tracks and drove roads” (Kassabova 2017, 30) and known as “Homeland” (Kassabova 2017, 33) on the day of the Saints Constantine and Elena in March. It shows how the Bulgarian villagers travel there to participate in an ancient fire-worshipping ritual together with people from the four other villages, also from Greece. Dancing with the icons and enjoying the kurban, a special dish of lamb soup, the participants delve into a transhistorical event stressing their belonging to an ancient tradition that strengthens their identity. What is important for my reading of the border is the way the event is described:

The orgiastic vibes were already in the air at midday. It felt as if the ritual of the icons held a meaning beyond faith, revelry, or culture – there was something else here that was being re-enacted. I sensed it but couldn’t name it; it was something to do with the border. (Kassabova 2017, 32)

Here, the border is not primarily a geopolitical or ethnonational border that separates but a borderscape one that brings together different sides of the border, regardless of they are material or spiritual: fire-walking “is about seeking a balance between the human world and the spirit world” (Kassabova 2017, 38). Seeing this as an element peculiar to the uncanniness of the text’s dream-like borderscape, its act of naming this place as “Homeland” reveals that borders are mobile, not fixed, and the text is involved with debordering. In this episode, the process leads to a state of being where the boundaries between the self and the world disappear, signifying a becoming through “intense mediation, the change in body temperature, the dissolving of the ego and the communion with a divine energy” (Kassabova 2017, 41).

What this means from the perspective of conventional borders addressed in Kassabova’s travelogue is at one level that the rationality and exclusionary logic embedded in the idea of bordering is supplemented with transformative elements of the borderscape where the national border and self emerge as mere constructs that give space to a transnational self with no such ideological attachment. In so doing, the text promotes debordering and critiques the polarizations characterizing the relationship with Europe as imagined in dominant Brexit discourse. This borderscape is also performed, involving traditional music and dance, around and on the embers, with the icon, as well as joint sound making: “‘Sssss,’ one of the Greek women on the embers hissed, snake-like. […] The hissing was in honour of Saint Marina, I was told later, the patron saint of snakes and fire” (Kassabova 2017, 42). In other words, this performance of the border makes its special community-constructive identity evident, showing how the border is both a “homeland” but also a space of “estrange[ement] and defamiliariz[ation],” of “transformation and difference” (Welsch qtd. in Rosello and Wolfe 2017, 14). The presence of the ritual in the text, then, is a way of challenging the discourses and ideologies associated with the modern state and mechanisms of bordering, and it shows that the borderscape can unite people and create shared belongings. As a reflection on contemporary border discourse in Britain and Europe at large, Kassabova’s text emphasizes the opportunities of open borders for increased interaction but remains acutely aware of – and warns against – the potential of patrolled borders and “global barricading” associated with “old nationalisms” (2017, xvii), as they generate terror and violence.

Ben Judah’s Travels amongst New Migrants in the Borderscapes of London

The second analysis deals with the representation of borderscapes in the travelogue This is London by the British Jewish journalist and writer Ben Judah. Judah’s episodic travels through contemporary London, from Victoria Station to places such as Peckham, Ilford, and Elephant and Castle, involve encounters with especially Eastern European migrants and provide diverse examples of metamorphosing urban space. In these narratives of what Schimanski (2015) addresses as extended borderscapes, the travelogue shows how different groups transform the spaces of London, travelling there with different packages. In so doing, it continues the black British literary tradition of representing the transformation of London through migrant experiences as seen in the work of authors such as Sam Selvon and Zadie Smith rewriting urban space (see Procter 2003; Wolfe 2021). At one level these narratives of migration are instances of what McLeod in his Postcolonial London (2004) sees as parts of ongoing change in the metropolis, “offer[ing] alternative and revisionary narratives of subaltern city spaces which do not easily succumb to the demands of authority” (2004, 4), and which borderscape theory can read as forms of belonging and becoming. As indicated in its title, Judah’s book displays a changing British metropolis, revealing both ethnic ghettoization as well as the emergence of new identifications characterizing the borderscape. For John McLeod, commenting on the book from a diaspora studies perspective, its “degraded cosmopolitanism” and “multilingual vagabondage” (2017, 3) testify to the latest stage of London’s transformation into a city of global diasporas where such divisions are practically omnipresent (2017, 4). While I agree with McLeod’s view, my reading focuses less on the issues of diaspora and globalization but presents London as an extended borderscape, as outlined above. Consequently, in this section I will first examine the role of concrete borders in the text, then address the function of belonging as a means of ex/inclusion, and finally discuss the becomings enabled by this borderscape where British, European, and other identities intermingle.

The issue of the border is explicitly present in the text from its opening chapter, which focuses on the arriving migrants at Victoria Coach Station. This is a site where buses arrive from all over Europe – “Paris, Bucharest, and Rome” – and bring in large numbers of newcomers, “strangers,” who speak languages unknown to the narrator (“Sinti, Turkish, maybe Swahili” [Judah 2016, 1]). This multi-ethnic location, compared explicitly to Ellis Island (1), is an example of a transformed London that the narrator says he can “no longer recognize” (2) and feels ambiguous about: “I don’t know if I love the new London or if it frightens me” (Judah 2016, 3). Rather than a polemic against migration, Judah’s narrative tries to understand this change by addressing migration, encounters, and borders in ways that also account for the views of the migrants themselves, including interviews and an episode where the narrator performs as a Russian migrant worker sharing a “doss house” (2016, 147) with thirteen Polish and Romanian builders.

This “new London” is an explicit extended borderscape, which the migrants enter with their personal and collective histories that affect their adaptation to the new space. Rather than functioning as mere stereotypes, as is the role allotted to Eastern Europeans in much writing from the West and based on strategies of “Balkanism” and clichés that emphasize the migrant’s Otherness (Korte 2010, 5), Judah’s book shows them as individuals and thus challenges the spectacularization of migration The interviewees report on their reasons for moving to Britain, often representing it as the only available choice, as a form of forced migration, as shown in the words of the Romanian street musician in the first chapter:

“The harvest was bad. This was my last chance.” […]

“I’ve come to London to fiddle and beg.” […]

He says the crops in northern Romania sold for nothing. He says two weeks ago his fridge went empty and when his children mewled like pregnant cats from hunger he knew he had no other choice but to go to the Roma loan sharks. He says he quivered as he went in. The Fiddler knew he was useless to them: he had never been abroad before, speaks less than five words of English, and has no skills appropriate for a contract. (Judah 2016, 8)

Lured to London to play the violin, though by no means a skilled fiddler, the Roma migrant has ended up sleeping on the streets. In this case, the borderscape reproduces border dilemmas and generates narratives of exclusion. In a scene that constructs a spatial contrast between the affluent and the moneyless incomers, a group of six Roma “beggars” are shown to “sleep[…] in front of the glare of an estate agent’s window […] where electric screens shimmer behind them with house prices: five million, two bedrooms, six million, eight bedrooms” (10), while others “sleep in front of a Sainsbury’s local” (Judah 2016, 10). The border is based on class and ethnicity, separating hosts and migrants to underline how bordering is performed in the metropolis. To underscore the spatial nature of the borderscape, the narrator maps the locations where the migrants sleep and perform by marking an [X] in his map “to plot their territory” (Judah 2016, 13). The text makes it explicit that the borderscape reiterates the way in which the Roma are positioned in Romania, maintaining their distinct identities and social background: “Everything looks like a chaos here but it is not. Each [X] is an encampment of Gypsies from a different village in Romania” (Judah 2016, 13). The new space the narrator enters, wearing the clothes of a tramp, is an extended borderscape, a reproduction of Romania, complete with its own border conflicts and discourses: “We are not from this village. I hate those Gypsies. They are thieves. Our village is down at the bottom of Park Lane. At the edge of the streets of the Arabs” (Judah 2016, 13).

A particular concept characterizing this borderscape is that of in/visibility. To be safe, the migrant has to be invisible, and before being able to settle down for the night, they must “keep walking until this late, when they are almost faint, otherwise they get told to move on” (Judah 2016, 15). The border regime, however, is one of visibility: migrants are the target of gazes of threat, including those of policemen, drunks, junkies, and other tramps. Writing of the role of in/visibility in the context of the border, Brambilla and Pötzsch draw on Hannah Arendt’s work and suggest that citizenship and political agency demand “public visibility” (2017, 71): “visibility can oscillate between an empowering role (visibility as recognition) and a disempowering one (visibility as control)” (2017, 71). In the case of the Roma migrants, to be visible is usually a threat, but Judah’s act of representing the migrant seeks to recognize them and thus to empower the migrant. Invisibility, in contrast, is a sign of dehumanization and non-recognition, an experience raised by some of the migrants in the book, and it is also problematic in the sense that public invisibility means invisibility in terms of political representation. However, as invisibility also provides security, the volume refers to the underground foot tunnel where the Roma spend their night as “an invisible village” (Judah 2016, 17). This act of naming underlines that belonging, a shared identity and sense of togetherness, is a means of survival in this hostile borderscape:

As the hour drags on I meet the other villagers: their figures become voices and stories. […] The sixteen villagers bundled up into these rancid blankets begin laughing and joking. […] They are burying themselves into each other under the urine-reeking jumble of flowery cream and checked blankets they have, to recycle every bit of body hear. (Judah 2016, 21)

What these new borderscapes populated by migrants of various kinds contribute to is a transformation of Britishness that is addressed by showing how a formerly British space has been deterritorialized and repopulated. For instance, the British working class has left Edmonton Green, which is now populated by “minorities: Turkish, African, Asian. Community-sized minorities: Nigerians, Romanians, Ivorians. And family-sized minorities: Tibetans, Haitians, Chechens” (Judah 2016, 319). The transformation of such formerly white British locations into ethnicized spaces reveals how the borderscape offers belonging to migrant groups but also reveals the presence of different borderings, including those of class and ethnicity. Neasden in North London, once at the core of poet John Betjeman’s England (53), a “suburb of birdwatchers and Sunday bridge clubs” and of “thatch-cottage serenity” (55), has become a site of a poverty, a “slum” populated by Eastern European migrants where “gabled semis” become “clammy tenements” (Judah 2016, 56). The demeaning discourse, however, is not aimed at the migrants but at the social and economic factors governing the formation of low-rent locations attracting migrants. Describing the notes on the windows of the corner shop, the narrator pays attention to their contents, advertising rooms for “Europeans, Sikhs or Hindus” (58) and informing the locals of the possibility of making cheap telephone calls that indicate the transformation of the space: “Romania 1p. Pakistan 4p. Poland 1p. The loneliest village in London has become heavily Eastern European. Two Polish village boys in black baseball caps strut up and down clutching after-work beers. A Romanian guy in a fake Armani jacket and joggers does the same” (Judah 2016, 58). In Judah’s book, clothing is an aspect of the construction of identity in the borderscape, as it is claimed to contribute to one’s reading of the other’s ethnicity:

And so they [the British] make their judgments based on clothes. These are very powerful things. Someone who looks a little darker than the English, with features a little more rounded, or angular, at a glance, the Londoner will think is French or Italian. But put on a hoodie, a puffa jacket and a tracksuit, the Londoner will see a Romanian, a Bulgarian or an Albanian. (2016, 148)

While this new London is multicultural, the text underlines that the different ethnicities sharing the same space are not in proper contact with each other but subject to constant borderings. This is evident in its description of Neasden Lane, where the different groups are present but not interacting: “Ghanaian women inspect fruit and veg piled high outside the Kashmiri butchers. Pakistani, African and Eastern European lives float past each other. Barely touching” (Judah 2016, 60). This reveals that this borderscape is characterized by belonging, not becoming. Rather than a site of what Paul Gilroy refers to as conviviality (2004, xi), or harmonious urban co-living, some parts of Judah’s London are characterized by processes of exclusion and bordering that separate groups from each other: “The white community is living as white community. The African community is closed here as African community. But who is trying to understand the other? Nobody” (Judah 2016, 322).

While Judah’s representation of London’s borderscape shows how closed some of the communities inhabiting it are, at the same time it critiques the exclusion and displacement that bordering has generated and reveals that they are not universal phenomena. In narrating the borderscape, the book shows how the borderscape has also created opportunities for the formation of new identities and agency and thus generates moments of “counter-hegemonic borderscaping” (Brambilla 2021, 84). This can be seen in its description of moments of becoming and transformation in a way that Brambilla and Jones (2020, 289) see as characteristic of the borderscape: it provides the marginalized with a voice. A particularly important example of this concerns the case of the group of Filipinas, who often serve as housekeepers in rich families. Often maltreated, sometimes even raped and “enslaved” (216) by their employers, the Filipinas have constructed a network that helps its members to escape extreme conditions and find better employment: they “all help each other: the word goes round, somebody needs to make an escape; and they message and message until they have it all sorted out” (Judah 2016, 220). Other similar becomings through alliances include cross-cultural marriages, addressed in a chapter featuring a Registrar. In her view, mixed marriages, often “difficult” because of different pressures, are increasing. The fact that the borderscape brings people together is associated with the particular characteristics of London’s conviviality: “only […] in this city where love is free. […] She guesses maybe a quarter of the Polish girls are marrying something new” (Judah 2016, 238). The phrasing used in this section underlines the possibility of this emergent borderscape enabling border-crossings that may negate the effects of bordering. This possibility of becoming and forming new alliances in the borderscape is addressed through the marriage of a Polish “checkout girl” and an African “security guard”. Their wedding becomes a mixing of Polish and Nigerian cultures, bringing together builders and guards, plasterers and carers, all shown to enjoy convivially a culturally hybrid feast of

whisky and palm-oil wine and red rice with plantain and Tyskie beer and sour cream soup and whole trays of cassava fufu and amal .[…] There was one song – then another – Polish rock, then Nigerian dance, as everyone became light-headed, and lost themselves in the swirl of smiles, where your heart flutters, and you might meet someone. (Judah 2016, 240)

What is significant is that this moment of mutual conviviality is located in a particular place and time, in an English garden with “one of those lingering and beautiful fallings of the light there is only in England in the early summer” (Judah 2016, 240). This is a moment when the identities of the borderscape are fused with Englishness and transform the latter, showing that established identities based on borderings can be reconstructed. By associating such becomings with a sense of hope, the emergent mixed identities critique views that construct the transformation of London and Englishness as a mere threat. Judah’s (2016) text associates conventional Englishness based on bordering and exclusion often with the past, as seen in such examples as “line drawings of the glories of Victorian London” in underground footways (15), the Saturday edition of the Evening Standard becoming mere debris for the cleaners on the London tube (103), the reconstruction of pubs on the Old Kent Road as mosques or nightclubs (203), and Mayfair mansions turning into homes (or prisons) for Gulf princesses (Judah 2016, 202). However, in its representation of events such as the Polish–Nigerian wedding, the text reveals that the city is a site of counterhegemonic becomings that deconstruct established borders within the city and between its inhabitants. Like the migrants in earlier Black British fiction, the new migrants are involved in “a politics of presence” that changes the urban environment (Wolfe 2021, 184).

As a collective narrative of London’s – and by extension of future Britain’s – transformation, Judah’s book is a form of becoming that seeks to undo borders and imagine a possibility of forging a new Britain. While the paths of the people inhabiting this space often merely cross each other, they are united through the narrator, spatial markers such as the North Circular, and also the overwhelming idea of the border that all locate the transformations in shared space. This new narrative, suggestive of the possibility of regenerating and reinvigorating urban space and its established borderings, is, to use Fredric Jameson’s terms, a way of linking “the private” with “the collective” and to present a “providential narrative” (2015, 231) that counters the nationalist appeals to border-making and patrolling. As a part of Europe, Judah’s Britain is an example of Graham Huggan’s postcolonial Europe, a space where the “(after-)effects of colonialism” (2008, 242) become visible through transforming cultural landscapes and identities. This also reveals the persistent legacy of bordering processes.

Conclusion

Through an analysis of two contemporary border-focused texts from Britain, I have suggested that their discourses of Europe and migration address diverse border-related phenomena with reference to both history and the present and thus challenges conventional understandings of the European as Other. My application of the borderscape concept has underlined how borders, rather than being merely fixed and divisive, are porous and ambiguous, and may lead to new transnational alliances and to emergent, and even hybrid, identities. In Kapka Kassabova’s narrative, the border, while physically located between Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey, is a post-cold war border where previously hidden links and connections are now open and cross-border interaction an everyday phenomenon generated by debordering. Through its references to tradition, performance, and identity, Kassabova’s text shows that the new belongings and becomings peculiar to this borderscape reveal how it reconstructs the meaning of the border by challenging established ideologies and borderings. While ostensibly focusing on a European border, Kassabova’s border discourse and her critique of patrolled and violent borders also serves as a response to dominant public discourses in Brexit Britain demanding harsh measures. In contrast to Kassabova’s book, in Judah’s narrative the borderscape is physically located in Britain and in London in particular. What the book reveals is that the metropolis is a borderscape where it is possible to trace processes of both bordering and debordering. While the former can be seen as extended borders that have travelled with migrants to their new place of living and have been erected between migrants and hosts as well as between different groups of migrants, the book also reveals possibilities for debordering and new interethnic connections. In both narratives, the borderscape is associated with the new and transforming, which challenges the established discourse, where Europe, Europeans, and migrants at large are Othered as threats to the national identity based on bordering.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).