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Border
Lines and Border Regions,
Political
and Personal
Dennis Fox
March 2016
Published
in Fifth Estate (Summer 2016)
(Special Issue on No Borders!)
As I wandered through Albania a few months ago, as unlikely a place as
any during a six-month journey around the planet, a friend emailed a
link to “Anarchist Traveling vs. Tourism.”
The comments mostly reminded me that I’m not attempting an anarchist
tour, whatever that might mean. I’m not looking constantly for
political insurrection or utopian experimentation even though,
inevitably, my anarchist lens focuses on signs of inequality and
resistance, cops and soldiers, graffiti and posters (the circle-A,
everywhere in Athens, is absent here in Oman). I read local news, look
for infoshops and protest. Still, while lenses sharpen focus, they also
create limits, blurring whatever’s outside their range. I want to see
into the blur and bring into view things that any preselected lens
might obscure.
And everywhere I go, I run into borders both political and personal.
What brought me to Europe last fall was a conference in Budapest on the
historical and cultural implications of radical psychology and
psychoanalysis. My only post-conference plan was to make my way towards
an April family visit in Okinawa. My route south through the Balkans
and then east has been shaped by curiosity and spontaneity, but also by
weather, cost, my energy level, and sometimes by visa complexities
preventing last-minute border crossings. I move from one country to the
next when it feels like it’s time, by bus or train when I can, watching
the countryside slide by and the rhythms of local passengers sitting
nearby. At borders, I show my passport, answer questions, switch
currencies. I try to remain most places long enough to not feel pressed
to run out everyday to one more must-see destination. To stay in
apartments where I can cook. Meandering at times through towns and
neighborhoods where tourists don’t often go, I try to take photos
without being obnoxious, which sometimes means not taking them at all.
Crossing borders expands my sense of the world. Seeing one old fort or
walled city after another gets repetitive, but their presence almost
everywhere highlights thousands of years of shifting power. A visit to
the Hungarian National Museum clarifies central European migration,
dominance, and resistance since long before Rome controlled the heights
of Buda overlooking Pest across the Danube. I understand Yugoslavia’s
creation and disintegration better after visiting Belgrade, and then
taking a long train ride to Podgorica, Montenegro’s capital. In
Albania’s capital, Tirana, a professor quoted in the news about
political change, organized crime, and tribal justice gave me his take
on historical incursions into Muslim Albania by Christian Serbia to the
north and Greece to the south. The city’s Fuck Serbia graffiti is more
blunt, helping make sense of a chatty engineering student’s earnest
comment that “We respect George Bush” for supporting Kosovo, culturally
and historically Albanian.
Comrades in Athens arranged for me to talk about anarchism and
psychology a few blocks from where Syrian and other refugees sleep in
Victoria Square. One showed me around Exarchia, the city’s anarchist
center, where a new squat had just opened up to support refugees, and
where, they tell me, cops don’t go except in force. A couple of weeks
later in Tel Aviv I stayed with a comrade from Anarchists Against the
Wall and later joined a West Bank peace march—not an anarchist action
like others I’ve been to in Palestine, but still a crossing of borders,
including some of my own.
Most Muslim countries bar anyone whose passport shows a visit to
Israel, but that’s no longer true here in the eastern Arabian
Peninsula. The United Arab Emirates and the Sultanate of Oman, ruled by
hereditary monarchs, may not be as bluntly controlling as Albania used
to be, but even with a benevolent face they’re the most politically
repressive and culturally traditional places I’ve ever been. In the
UAE, a rich country boasting Dubai’s massive eye-catching architecture
and artificial islands shaped like palm trees, life is good for
Emiratis, at least for those unbothered by the risk of prison,
flogging, perhaps amputation or death for transgressing law or custom.
But 85% of the residents are foreigners, more than half from India,
Pakistan, and Bangladesh, working here for years before returning home.
In Oman, with less oil than the UAE, most Omanis have ordinary jobs,
but the economy depends on foreign labor. The streets in my Muscat
neighborhood have a decidedly non-Arab vibe. Restaurants tout biryani,
tandori, and curry, kids play cricket, and wall postings advertise
apartments for “Indian executive bachelor” or room shares for
“Pakistani Muslims only.” It’s as if Emiratis and Omanis have colonized
the Indian subcontinent by bringing the population here.
Along with adjusting my sense of the world, crossing geographic borders
challenges my sense of myself. One lesson I absorbed growing up in
1950s Brooklyn was how lucky I was to have been born into the best of
all possible worlds—not only the best country, and the best borough of
the most important city, but I was also white, Jewish, a boy. What
could be better? I couldn’t imagine being anything like me if I’d been
born in Africa, or a girl, or Catholic. And sure, over the decades I
overcame much of that internalized specialness, understood better the
distortions of my childhood lens. So it’s confusing—disappointing—that
when I pass a woman completely covered in black except for her eyes and
hands, looking down at her iPhone, my first reaction is to stare,
surprised. Surprised by someone using an iPhone!
Maybe I cross borders not to discover the exotic but to discover
myself. To normalize difference, but even more to normalize similarity.
This reminds me of my first visit to Ramallah in 2005, when I took
pictures of hardware stores, schools, families walking to restaurants.
It seemed important to record that Palestinians weren’t all destitute
refugees or armed fighters, but people like us. Like me.
Elsewhere I’ve written
about dipping into the personal growth world over the past few years,
which for most of my life I dismissed as a distraction; this was my
topic at the October Budapest conference. Early anarchists wrote that
political and personal change depend on each other. In practice,
though, anarchist projects often fail, groups lose members or fall
apart, because we don’t learn well enough how to work through tensions,
or we don’t want to bother, or we think that learning “better ways to
communicate” or “how to express empathy” is just New Age psychobabble
designed to undercut political action. There’s something to that, and
indeed my work in critical psychology
examines how mainstream psychology strengthens the status quo. But
still: when we behave in ways we don’t want to—competitively,
possessively, jealously, selfishly—we don’t always have enough insight
into ourselves, or enough skills, to make things right.
People sometimes talk about trying to find themselves—to establish a
firm identity. In the same way that national and religious borders mark
who’s in and who’s out, internal borders reflect who we are and who we
are not. There’s comfort in that. Belonging. Focus. But there’s also
benefit in the opposite, in a sense losing ourselves for a time.
Softening a hardened self-image lets new possibilities emerge. Instead
of sharp lines between Known and Other we can try to set aside our
quick judgments, old likes and dislikes, and use our internal borders
as invitations to explore broader regions. This can be hard.
Discovering internal barriers I didn’t even know I had, moving through
them without knowing what to expect on the other side, has sometimes
been scarier than crossing through passport control into potentially
dangerous territory. Both can be disorienting and uncomfortable,
bringing out old anxieties, reminders of work still to be done.
Some approaches to internal exploration grow out of Buddhism, Tantra,
and other perspectives on self and connection that teach putting aside
assumptions and goals and learning to be in the moment, to appreciate
slowness in every realm from cooking and eating to touch and sex. Right
now I’m exploring Miksang, a Buddhist perspective on photography and
perception emphasizing simplicity, seeing what’s really there instead
of whatever our internal lenses predispose us to see. Other approaches,
traced back to radical psychology and psychoanalysis, owe much to
Wilhelm Reich’s work on sexual repression and personality development.
Intentional communities I’ve visited on earlier trips to Germany (ZEGG) and Portugal (Tamera),
insisting that their emphasis on sexuality and relationships is
fundamental to their work for global peace, use regular group forums to
address the emotional complexities of reshaping old habits, revealing
inner tensions otherwise left to fester. There’s a lot of
cross-fertilization out there.
Sitting here in Muscat, the anarchist and personal growth worlds both
feel distant as the Call to Prayer wafts in from the mosque down the
street. I don’t understand the words, and if I did maybe my anarchist
lens would object. In this particular moment, though, I’m enjoying the
chant.
Parallels, Intersections, and Clashes: Journeys through the Fringes (2015 article)
Anarchism and psychology (2011 article)
Anarchism
Sexuality and Personal Growth
Travel and other photos
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