Hold/held/holding

Holding the line

Reading Along the Line was a real pleasure. It is a wonderful piece of research, writing and artistic practice that offers a rich a care-full exposition of how the political meanders powerfully, but also gently, alongside the personal in this research process. The research underpinning this work was undertaken at time where, to borrow Fall's words (136), ‘certitude trembled’ under the upheaval of Covid-19. A time where, as Sharp (2023: 1653) highlights, the central tenets of feminist geopolitics were laid bare – ‘the global and the intimate are always, everywhere, already entangled’ (Sharp, 2023: 1653).

As Along the Line explores, tracing the border in such a context proved an inherently everyday, material and muddy exercise – walking boots, and a willingness to trudge, being key to the methodology. Whilst at times the border is concrete, tangible and stark in Fall's journey, at others it points to ‘mobile shifting territories’ (121) where ‘the ghosts of paths’, marshlands and streams absorb the line within their slippery materialities, always on the move. This is an account of borders that are solid and fluid, set in stone and sunk in mud. As tape flutters and rivers flow, borders are inscribed and entangled, wrought through rotting branches, brambles, twigs and trees (68) alongside more permanent infrastructures. As humans, in the words of Fall made ‘their own territories and (drew) their own maps’, dogs, cats and weather systems (131) respected no such cartographies.

Within this fluidity, my response to this work centres upon ideas of ‘holding’ and being ‘held’. As I read and absorbed the images and text, I was struck by how ideas of being held, and of holding, animated the pages. I found this especially interesting given the muddy, transient nature of the borders and borderings being described. How do you hold (literally and intellectually) the muddy and ever changing, the improvised and messy alongside the concrete? We might think of the book and research underpinning this as an exercise in holding the line, or as chapter three (Holding the Line) does – thinking with surveyors, geometers, planners and technicians ‘who held the line with maps and digital databases’, alongside border workers who also hold the line in the most traditional, militaristic sense of the phrase (164). But to hold, or be held, means many things. It can mean grasping, carrying or supporting with one's hands, embracing and bearing the weight of something or someone. On the other hand, holding someone can mean detaining or confining, keeping something or someone in position with or against their will. We might understand feminist geopolitics itself as an exercise of holding – holding space for a wide range of sites and accountabilities (Sharp, 2023; Dixon and Marston, 2011), or even analysing the process of holding others in safety (Koopman, 2011). It is within the complexities of holding, and being held that the following three brief responses emerge. The first is to consider how the book moves us towards gentle (see Jackman and Squire, 2023) holdings of the border through ‘loveliness’, and how this might in turn, muddy our understandings of the border and its complexities. It then turns to reflect on the practice of academic research and being a researcher in this context, before finally, thinking about how the text might further complicate working with and alongside the border.

Lovingly/loveliness

Writings on borders, are as Fall highlights, predominantly centred upon violence (180). Such a focus is necessary and vital, the stark realities of this made apparent everyday in the news and lived experiences of those at the forefront of such violence. These realities are also present in this text, as Fall looks back to border crossings made during the Second World War. Yet, elsewhere, the book simultaneously manoeuvres away from flashpoints and tensions (158), instead orientating toward the ‘ordinary’ and ‘peaceful’ (180) by examining a border that, in ‘normal’ times, feels somewhat absent in Fall's everyday life. Explicitly acknowledging the inherent privilege of this standpoint, Fall (135) carefully articulates these complexities, speaking of the ‘absurdity, ugliness’ and ‘contradictions’ of territory but also its ‘loveliness’. Border blocks act as ‘beacons and watchful guardians’ (111) that kept Fall and others feeling ‘oddly safe’ (109). As Fall seeks to metaphorically and materially, hold her family in safety, to bear the pandemic with them and for them, there is also a sense of being held in similar ways by the state. Whilst far from benevolent, there is a sense of envelopment that we rarely see written about, but which nonetheless shapes everyday experiences of this border as a family and researcher make their way along the line, held within its confines whilst simultaneously held captivated by what it represents, enables, and disables. This is perhaps represented in the artwork of the front cover – Fall depicted holding a map whilst stationary on her bike, surrounded by cones, barriers and other representations of bordering. She is both holding and being held.

Through the archives too, we see a certain care and gentleness emerge. Alongside the gentle holding of historical maps and materials by Fall, we see all kinds of agencies enlivened and given space. The line, at times, has been ‘lovingly maintained’ (168), while maps – designed to pin down and demarcate – have been ‘painstakingly’ painted (131) with trees. I was particularly taken by this and the attention to their ‘tiny shadows’ and ‘rivers with stony shores’. We learn of the cleaners who help to hold the line (133), alongside the ‘forest wardens, guides’ and artists who are involved in hand painting ‘hundreds of trees that at the right angle’ look as though they are ‘growing out of the page’ (161). As Juliet articulates, this a territory of care not guns, of stones carefully placed by artisans rather than blockaded through military might.

The use of words like lovingly, and loveliness, of artisanship and artistry, are not usually associated with the border and I found their presence initially a bit jarring, perhaps because they could, in the wrong hands, romanticise the inherent divisiveness of the border. As I read on, however, they became extremely important (and are clearly in the right hands). Not only do they rupture the masculinised, militarised border, but they point toward the diverse affective registers and creative practices that animate the border in this context. In doing so, they open the door to think about and with the relational, with care, and with gentleness in ways that speak powerfully to the contradictions of this particular border (with purchase no doubt for examining borders elsewhere). To consider loveliness is to be confronted with something uncomfortable and in this discomfort lies possibilities.

‘A balm rather than a bane’

A second opportunity emerges by thinking about what this text means for a gentle but extremely powerful holding within academic writing and practice. Covid offered openings here. The research in Fall's words (102) had a ‘lack of imposed boundaries’ from funders, allowing a self-confessed ‘wandering geographer’ (116) to follow an ‘unexpected compulsion to witness and photograph the new improvised border fences’ materialising in the landscape (142). Within this process, and amidst the fraught uncertainties of Covid, research emerged as a ‘balm rather than a bane’ (101). There was ‘delight’ in this (89) and a re-enchantment of sorts with a process that ordinarily within the neoliberal academy does not begin with ‘blind wonder’ that slowly works outward, nor does it allow for a creative process that might take a day to create a page of comic. For Fall, at least in my interpretation, the conditions of crisis created a way of holding the line, the border, in an unusual way. As we have already explored, this is a much gentler holding of the line, one premised on personal deep immersion and lived experience that travels a different path from more violent contexts. But it's also a holding fast, an exhale, and a resistance to the neoliberal academy, a reassertion of a kind of practice and research that may otherwise be impossible. For once, Fall writes (61), ‘we had time to listen’. At the same time, perhaps we might think of the border doing its own holding – offering a way of navigating the complexities of the pandemic for an academic, an artist, a mother, a partner – all of these things collapsing in on each other spatially and temporally during exceptional times. Indeed, Fall writes that the research process enabled a processing or making sense of a difficult situation, a process enabled through a holding of the border, irrespective, or perhaps because of, of its muddy and fluid realities.

Holding

When thinking about these holdings I was reminded of the work of Satizábal and Melo Zurita (2021). Writing about a very different context in the aftermath of an earthquake in Mexico City, Satizábal and Melo Zurita (2021: 270) explore how the Brigada Feminista ‘metaphorically and physically held and continue to hold the bodies of marginalised women’. Doing so, they argue, was a key part of ‘emancipating territories of violence produced by the state’ whilst also enacting ‘embodied territories of care, resistance and possibilities’. Holding, in this sense, provides a context through which to understand or explore how ‘socio-material orderings emerge, endure, or are disrupted through meanings and practices that are rooted in the body, and embedded within the liveliness of the Earth’ (Satizábal and Melo Zurita, 2021: 283). For me at least, when reading Along the Line, I was struck by how Fall's holding of the line, and the holding of the author by the border, might carry similar openings and opportunities to think about the muddiness of borders in different ways – to hold in tension, within this context at least, violence and peace, the muddy and maintained, the artisan and the army. It embraces, to borrow the words of Saville (2021: 102) an openness and willingness to ‘being part of the world … affected by objects and beings’. Amidst the flowing, marshy, fluid nature of some of the sites described, what does it mean, or perhaps what can it mean, to be hold or to be held by the line?