The Folly of Fortifying Borders
Good evening, my friends. Tonight, I want to talk about walls and fences – those borders, bulwarks, and barriers that seem to divide our world. From the pixelated “walls” of social media to the imposing sprawl of the Great Wall of China, these structures come in many forms, telling countless stories. But make no mistake, these walls are not monolithic; they are active agents in shaping our reality.
Why, you ask, are walls becoming so fashionable these days? In this 21st century, where we’re supposed to be progressing as a species, we’ve seen the resurgence of nativist and nationalist sentiments, fueled by an “immigrant crisis” that’s often blamed for the failings of neoliberalism. “If only we can get those guys out, we’ll finally get what’s coming to us,” the refrain goes, even without a shred of evidence to support such claims.
Take, for instance, the rise of Donald Trump and his rallying cry to “Build the Wall” – a 2,000-mile border structure between the US and Mexico, meant to stop the influx of “corrupt Mexicans” and “bad hombres.” Millions of Americans heard that message and thought it was a good idea, endorsing his plan with their votes. The promise of safety and the restoration of “greatness” by fortifying walls seems to electrify the air, scaring migrant communities, silencing minorities, gentrifying neighborhoods, and justifying reckless acts of state-sanctioned brutality.
But this surge of fundamentalism is not limited to the US alone. In the past year, we’ve witnessed the flourishing of similar sentiments across Europe, with the far-right parties showing remarkable resilience and staying power. The immigrant crisis, once again, is often cited as the culpable variable in the failing experiment of neoliberalism. “If only we can get those guys out, we’ll finally get what’s coming to us,” the refrain echoes, even in the absence of supporting evidence.
The Futility of Fortification
Now, I must confess that I was born and raised in a time of concrete walls, angry partitions, and sharp geopolitical tensions. The Cold War hissed and sizzled, dividing the Soviet states and the Western bloc with an Iron Curtain that ran through Eastern Europe. In South Africa, the Afrikaner settlers had a name for their social order designed to protect white supremacy: “apartheid” – a wall by any other name, one that trusted that the black Africans of that land could not live by themselves or make sense of their worlds without the colonial benevolence of segregation.
My own personal experience with walls, however, is a more intimate one. You see, when I was just 15 years old, I lost my best friend, my mentor – my father. He died in Kinshasa, and with his passing, a wall sprouted between us, tearing father from son, locking me away in the meantime as his voice, still resonant in my tearful dreams, called softly from the endtime.
In my quest for reconciliation, I began seeking the sacred, the transcendent, the distant – where souls presumably lived away from the messy carnality of mortality. I yearned to return to the past, to time-travel away from a timeline that had let me down, to fill the hole of my loss with the blackness of his face. But the more I probed, the more the story of transcendent sacredness and distant souls began to fall apart.
The Myth of Containment
It was then that I sought solace in the familiar – in the confident blueprints of reductive materialism, in the gravity of Newton’s falling apple, in the elegance of Einstein’s equations, in the poetry of the machine. But no matter how I tried, my father remained irreparably removed from me, a ghastly phantasm never to be held or loved or known again. Buried and done with, he was neither within nor without. Where was he?
This search for answers led me to a story from Yorubaland, a tale that I’ve come to love dearly about the irony of containment and the futility of our attempts to keep things away. It’s the story of Ẹ̀jọ́pọ̀, the tortoise, and his quest to gather all the wisdom of the world, storing it away in a gourd that he hangs around his neck. Fearing that such a prized possession might be open to theft, Ẹ̀jọ́pọ̀ decides to hide it away on top of an Iroko tree, only to find himself frustrated and unable to complete his mission, ultimately smashing the gourd in disgust and releasing its content back into the world.
As Bayo Akomolafe eloquently states, “Things spill, slip away, breach borders, resist containment and definition, stray away from algorithms.” In the realm of quantum physics, we meet a world that dances away from our essentializing practices, a world so rapturously perverse and promiscuous that no language is adequate to describe it. Perhaps, a gasp is the most eloquent way to meet this world, which isn’t made up of things but relationships – an intradisciplinary insurgency that challenges our notions of fixed identities, safety, and finality.
The Folly of Fortified Privacy
This ontology of co-emergence, of things touching and shaping each other in ways that defy our attempts at fortification, is something I’ve come to understand more intimately through my own experiences. Take, for instance, the time I promised my daughter Alethea that I would do whatever she wanted for the day – a dangerous unschooling experiment, as I’ve since learned. On that fateful day, she led me not to the pool, as I had expected, but to a nearby lake, where she urged me to remove my shoes and simply stand in silence, allowing the abundance of life around us to overwhelm me.
In that moment, I realized that the world is not dead at all, and that we are derived only in the concatenation and entanglement of body-ideas, never independent of each other. It was as if Alethea, in encouraging me to be silent, had brought me back to my father, showing me that he had never been separate all this while. She had recognized the sacredness of the ground upon which we stood and, like the voice from the Burning Bush, urged me to meet it on its own terms.
As the folks at The Garden Continuum so eloquently put it, “We want privacy, but we don’t want to offend. We want connection with our neighbors, but not too much.” And in our quest for that elusive balance, we’ve turned to walls and fences, believing that they will provide the safety and security we so desperately crave.
But the truth is, these fortifications are nothing more than a mirage. The more we try to keep the outside at bay, the more we create the very conditions for compromise. The myth of security and safety is now suspect in an age of exposure, where the very apparatuses we’ve built to protect us have become the means of our undoing.
Beyond Walls and Fences
So, what are the implications of this ontology of co-emergence for our quests for supremacy, for mastery, for safety, for justice, for homecomings? I believe the answer lies not in the construction of ever-higher walls, but in the recognition of our inherent interconnectedness, our vulnerability, and our response-ability to the world around us.
As the folks on Reddit have discussed, traditional privacy solutions like fences and walls can have their limitations, particularly when it comes to large, irregularly shaped properties. Instead, we might consider exploring more natural, holistic solutions that blend seamlessly with the surrounding landscape, creating a sense of privacy and seclusion without the need for rigid fortifications.
At A1 Landscape Construction, we understand the importance of finding that delicate balance between privacy and connection. Our team of experienced designers and craftsmen can help you explore a range of innovative privacy solutions, from strategically placed plantings and water features to custom-built structures that harmonize with the natural environment.
By embracing an ontology of co-emergence, we can learn to dwell in the dissolve, to find beauty and wonder in the messy mangle of things. We can cultivate new geometries of touch, new languages of exposure that acknowledge our flailing disassembly and resituate us in the ecologies we once told ourselves we had transcended.
The walls that once divided nature and culture, development and its exteriorities, this and that – they are falling apart, fading away. And in their place, we are called to embrace subversive spiritualities, ecological awarenesses, rituals of radical hospitality, and ethical reconfigurations that respond to the times of scandalous disclosures, spillages, leakages, and the loss of safety and privacy.
For in the Great Meantime, where most Christian theologies posit we have to wait for the end of times, lies the beauty of the world – where haloes spill, where everywhere is the burning bush, and where we are required to remove our slippers, not just in the small area closest to the flames. The question, then, is not “what to do,” but what kinds of worldly doings we are already immersed in, what practices we are a part of.
In noticing these performances, we do not become holy or supreme or better, but we become remade, reconfigured with new response-abilities and capacities to address our troubles. For it is the case that our usual modes of engagement often perpetuate the very events we seek to escape.
My friends, the time has come to notice the wilds beyond our fences, to embrace the insurgency of vulnerability that blasts open time and knows that the past is yet to come. In doing ancestral work, in opening our doors to the stranger, in learning how to grieve, we are gesturing toward the community, dismantling the attenuations of modernity and its individuation of our always roving selves.
So let us not dishonor the stars by seeking to reach them, trusting that the homes we seek are seductively near, some creative risks away from the familiar. Let us learn that distance is not synonymous with separation, that the stars are already pressingly close, stirring with our bodies, tricksters of eternal night.
The future is not a distant place we must wait for, but a dance we are already performing, a mangle of things that spill, slip away, and resist containment. And in that mangle, we find the beauty of the world, the sacredness of the ground upon which we stand, and the possibility of a new way of being, beyond the folly of fortified borders.
