lens of Border Theory

Globalization is considered a process of reducing borders and making the world close and connected, however,   beyond geographical demarcation, there are new forms of borders emerging; the influence of borders is manifested in various aspects of human experiences:   social hierarchies, psychological identities, judicial frameworks, and cultural narratives. According to Thomas Nail, “Borders are everywhere” and we are always in the process of crossing them. They are not only flexible but also stringent. With borders, our identities are deeply linked and we are always having a sense of association and also dissociation at the same time. Borders are always in the process of renovation by those who are in power, these are the one who defines the division in social, economic, political and geographical spaces. There are not only hard borders but also soft borders with virtual borderlines (Diener, and Hagen). The way a border is divided may differ entirely based on facilitating the political and socio-economic benefits and according to Nail, “ While the technologies of division themselves may differ throughout history according to who wields them, when, where, and so on, the cut or process of social division itself is what is common to all of its relative manifestations” (Nail).  By means of a system called Kinopolitics, all the processes related to borders and identities can be analyzed in Global politics which initiates the process of movement or migration. Kinopolitics is further divided into the ideas of flow, junction and circulation as described by Thomas Nail. The division of the process of border crossing helps to deconstruct the politics of movement. In this article, the text Exit West by Mohsin Hamid is analyzed particularly while references to the other texts are given generally as they will help us to analyze the dynamic evolution of borders and the fluctuation in identity formation from the global perspective.

The idea of globalization gives a sense of wholeness and cohesiveness of the world as a metaphor for a village The definition of globalization as given by Kolb is, “globalization is the word used to describe the growing interdependence of the world’s economies, cultures, and populations, brought about by cross-border trade in goods and services, technology, and flows of investment, people, and information” (Kolb). This idea is also affirmed by Thomas Neil in his The Border Theory as more borders have emerged in the era of globalization (Nail), and more security concerns have arisen due to the rise in the non-state actors. The reasons for the emergence of borders are many such as protection against invaders, aggressive external threats of enemies, illegal inflow into the country and many other problems and issues with risks in security. Borders are maintained through border material, the types of borders which are now seen in the era of globalization, Nail describes them as, “miles of new razor-wire fences, tons of new concrete security walls, numerous offshore detention centers, biometric passport databases, and security checkpoints of all kinds in schools, airports, and along various roadways across the world” (Nail).

In Exit West by Mohsin Hamid which is a story of migration and experiencing various new geographical lands, he has depicted borders in the form of black doors which are liminal places and are meant for crossing. The liminal spaces are the spaces of engagement, a place of exchanges, movement or transferring from one place to another. Through liminal spaces a transition occurs or a transformation not only of identity but also a transformation of self to get adjusted in a hybrid culture. These doors with black spaces are similar to the black mirrors of our mobiles and computers, he has so introduced a new form of teleportation using digital technology, and the physical borders in the novel are porous and work more of a junction giving his characters a direction and redirection. The movement with the black doors tends to open up exposure to many other cultures, societies and people and so the characters have to face many other forms of borders and boundaries and have to change their identities to encounter kinopolitics at a global scale.

To define a borderland, “it is not something which constitutes a state but it is a space between states” (Nail).  There is a dimension of performance related to borders, crossing borders constitutes an event. The space where the border exists is a no man’s land, but it is also a place of exchange. Border spaces are called limnology, a place of transition or a place of in-betweenness between two identities and a point of contact. In the play, The Cherry Orchard by Antone Chekhov certain characters are rigid enough to negate the fast-evaporating traditional boundaries as the boundaries of social change are transforming into a new phase of social and global trends. The hierarchy that Ranevskayas enjoyed had been challenged by the sociocultural and economic grounds by a fast-emerging middle-class business people who have crossed the hegemonic boundaries that have kept them under serfdom for generations and the rising business class has now challenged the status quo and the traditional hegemonic hierarchies.

Globalization has devolved the hard use of borders as the process of globalization soft borders have emerged considering borders as the imaginary lines not only separating geographical identities but at the same time developing a connection with them. “The border is always in between and in motion, it is a continually changing process” (Nail). There is a continuous construction and reconstruction of borders, repairing and reopening of border walls. The case of the reopening of the American-Mexican wall is to get cheap labour but to eliminate crime there is again closing off the wall. This is why in Mending Walls it is said “Something there is that doesn’t like a wall” (Frost). So there is always a flow and a redirection of walls. Flows have “chance, certainty and event” (Nail). With the border, movement is the concept of arrival and departure. Kinopolitics “is the idea of social flow” or “Politics of movement” as described by Nail, whether across time as the historical process of migration or horizontally occurring at the different palaces in the same time such as the process of immigration and landing to another country. The movement of people from place to place and the motivation for getting into this process are a lot more concerned with the political policies of states. The motivation behind this can be better security, economic opportunities, a better lifestyle or any other.

Flow is a process and so is globalization. “If the border is the political ground of our time, the flow is our conceptual starting point” (Neil).  Flow is a difficult process as there is a continuous resistance for them and they are stopped and blocked continuously. Globalization is the redirection of flows. In Exit West the journey by Saeed and Nadia is an exquisite example of flow, they are seen in a continuous flux of migration. They are experiencing new places and are in a continuous process of adapting to the new places, this is their direction and redirection until they choose to live separately with their interests and so create a border among themselves. The socio-cultural and economic differences of one territory influence its residents and the effects of another territory’s characteristics by passing through a process called hybridization. The world is a place of infinite dynamic processes which are somehow connected in one form or another which Deleuze calls Rhizome, Hybrid is on the move. “Division is not simple blockage— it is redirection.”(Nail).

Social Motion, “A society without any kind of border … is a purely per-social border (Nail)” Social flows can be easily understood by the processes of inclusion and exclusion Makina’s brother in The Signs Preceding the End of The World  is redirected as he crosses the border he got an option to join the army and thus finds a way to keep up with his illegitimate migration and makes it legitimate for him of living there. He is in the movement of social flow which ultimately makes him become a soldier in the United States Army where he works and earns his wages. He is a person who is included and excluded but also more of a redirected person. This is the reason there are border walls not to include or exclude but to redirect the flow of social motion.

Foucault in The History of Sexuality talks about the power in all bodies and how all political institutions utilize these powers. The bodies in the process of migration are used for political purposes and legislation for migrants is made for the political, social and economic benefits (Foucault). Nail gave the idea of “Expansion through expulsion”.  These two ideas intertwined that unless there is expulsion there would be no expansion. A German geographer Friedrich Ratzel has given the concept of organic borders that to expand the borders the invaders have to expulse the natives from their land- expelling the Indigenous people which he calls Lebensraum which is similar to an idea of expansion through expulsion (Cohen). There is deprivation after the expulsion of originality or indignity. The division of borders is in the hands of the most powerful. The idea of divide and rule by the colonizers was to make division within society, the accumulation of resources was made by benefiting from this social division and at the same time making people subordinate. For Marx historical materialism expulsion of peasants for expansion. Expulsion of indigenous people from their lands by the colonizer. And the landowners, indigenous people were projected as vagabonds. Without expulsion, there would be no private property.

Border crossing is an ingrained idea of globalization which is all about journeying, and passing through multiple lives. The movement defines the migrant and migrant as “the center of the history of political power” (Nial). We are always in a social position throughout history. People go abroad and live there but they psychologically have to face social motion. “Human movement is socially directed” (Nial). Kinopolitics is all about politics and the political history of the movement. Pakistan itself is the junction of civilization, in the novel Exit West, the unnamed city where Saeed and Nadia are residing according to Hamid Lahore has a great history of social and cultural change.  The politics of movement addresses humanity as a migrant because through the process of migration different societies, cultures and civilizations have survived.

People always migrate to have a better environment, economic benefits, and for more amiable climate and so according to the historical practices of humanity, we all are migrants.  When there was no concept of the state there was the concept of social motion. There is always a motivation behind border crossing. The motivation of movement in Yuri Herrari’s novel The Signs Preceding The End Of The World is linked with globalization, as the brother of Makina attempts to cross the border for better economic perspectives while Makina is motivated to bring back her brother to his homeland (Herrera, and Dillman). The era of globalization has also seen borders within nations, countries and states. Civil war, utilization of border patrolling units within the country, curfew, checkpoints, and use of tear gas on the citizens, however, at one aspect borders have become porous but on the other side these new borders have moved into the place of the international borders and people in a country come into the stranglehold of new types of borders with the new security threats. Hamid rigorously worked in the new forms of emergence of borders in the book Exit West as:
“The curfew Saeed’s parents had been waiting for was duly imposed, and
enforced with hair-trigger zeal, not just sandbagged checkpoints and razor
wire proliferating but also howitzers and infantry fighting vehicles and
tanks with their turrets clad in the rectangular barnacles of explosive
reactive armour. (35)”
 The effects of terrorism and the rise of non-state actors have made security threats mostly affecting common citizens. Identity forgery is a common practice by the malicious group and so stringent borders have emerged making life miserable and stultified. The parents of Saeed and Nadia along with these two lovers had to face countless boundaries within the city they are residing in.

The doors in Exit West are the junction or states which are a source of redirection. Immigration for migrants is a form of redirection. Sometimes you feel at home in places which are not your home it is the process of defamiliarization with your homeland and adopting flexible adaptability for the new places providing better prospects. Statis is a process in which things do not stop it is just perceived for some moments that it is stopped as if statis is a moment of deciding for a new direction or to redirect one’s flow in a new way. A junction is a place of choosing or making a new direction either from darkness to light or exploring a new world from known to unknown. Nadia’s daring claim that she was “moving out on her own, unmarried woman, the break involved hard words from all the sides” (18). She stood at a junction which connects tradition with global cultures, she knows the barriers of her family and society and her shift from the traditional is seen as unprecedented and she was facing the perplexity of crossing her limitations and boundaries within and without. She alone was not passing through the junction of transition it was her parents too who were stubborn enough to become inflexible even on the verge of the city they were living, the city was under hegemonic destructive forces and was going to lose its peace.
At another point in Exit West, we find the couple on the verge of the junction, at the end of the novel after moving together around the globe and confronting global borders and keep moving they finally reach Marin, a place where they experience a different sensation with their interests and potentialities flowing apart. An epiphanic movement came to their life when they realized they had better choices and different interests than being together and at this junction of their relationship they chose to flow towards different directions in life:
A spoilage had begun to manifest itself in their relationship, and each
recognized it would be better to part now, ere worse came . . .  Nadia was already
packing her things into a backpack . . . they stood facing each other at the threshold of the shanty that had been theirs, and they did not shake hands either. (125)
 
Identity is always in flux in the process of globalization, there is heterogeneity rather than indigenous elements in the identity of persons. Deleuze’s repetition and difference attempt to see identity in the process of globalization as one that repeats its prior self which is inherent in its cultural and ideological Indigenous self which repeats itself by recurring in a new cultural practice that it is adopting (Deleuze, and Sacher-Masoch). Likewise, Heaney’s poetry depicts borders of various layers having themes of cultural conflict and heterogeneity in a British colony. Ireland has a long history of colonization controlled by stringent imperialist designs. Globalization which is considered a new form of imperialism has culturally, historically, linguistically and socially tarnished Irish history through violence, aggression and power. The British remained as a demonized aggressor over Ireland turbulating its identity and indigeneity. No country has remained impeccable from oblique imperialistic designs of globalization Hegelin’s concept of the history of the world as Western globalization is a linear historical process. 

In the Exit West Young people going for business learning learn the art of corporate identity, the identity which is created as a result of inner self-reflection to strengthen the inner culture of a company is altogether different than what is projected to the world in the form of branding. The protagonists Nadia and Saeed through their market studies are learning about life and the various forms of identities one has in a world of globalization, “an evening class on corporate identity and product branding—but that is the way of things, with cities as with life,”(9). The identities of people in the Exit West are masked as they are described with their physical features and not with their names. Their identification is by their objects, as the woman living in Sydney is being identified as a migrant by the objects in her drawer such as “birth control pills, . . .  passports, chequebooks, receipts, coins, keys, a pair of handcuffs, and a few paper-wrapped sticks of unchewed chewing gum”(11). The passport, chequebooks, and receipt proclaims that the woman has pale skin and is a migrant or she might be a refugee having a shelter in another country. Our identities are also linked with our geographical location, the place we are born and the places we travel represent ourselves and our destinies, “Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians” (13). Globalization has tried to integrate the localities and geographies by a process of integration into the world communities the personal identities of the characters are foregrounded and their experience with the geographies is explicitly shown.

Hybridization is another aspect of globalization. You are not only a migrant, native, hated, homeless or at-home, nomad. The nomad tries to consolidate its group yet remains incomplete at heart The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. The idea of inclusion as well as exclusion makes one a hybrid. This is a kind of inclusive disjunction and the movement is in a continuous flow. Makina is a hybrid as she has a greater ability of adaptability, she knows many languages and so her hybridity helps in her greater adaptability to new cultures and experiences.

Mohsin Hamid in Exit West has presented Nadia as a woman who presents herself in a completely covered gown a symbol of religious conformity but her identity is hybrid, her religious practice is only confined to her appearance to create a boundary between her inner self and the outer world. This wall of water from her jugular vein to her toes is protection against invaders, it is a defence mechanism to keep the spoilers away and to keep her appearance and identity. Saeed and Nadia when making transient movements by changing places to live around the globe Saeed tried to create a home-like environment. As they got settled in London, within their little apartment Saeed to end his nostalgic feeling of his homegrown placed the picture of his parents on the table, thus completely hybridizing the space by not only accepting it but also transforming it with the nostalgic feeling of the past:
“Saeed removed the photo of his parents that he kept hidden in his clothing and placed it on a bookshelf, where it stood, creased, gazing upon them and transforming this narrow bedroom, at least partially, temporarily, into a home. (75)”
 
One function of borders is to make “exchange” as elucidated in the book, Crossing Borders, Dissolving Boundaries, borders are liminal places and from here the process of exchange occurs, exchanges are of people, goods, ideas, money and endless other things. In Exit West, Mohsin Hamid the analogy of border is made by a mobile phone where mobile phones become an extension of border exchanges.  Exchanges of communication, the flow of information and a counter flow, Rotation of opening and closing of the border. The novel expresses the change through a visual description of the technology as well as a verbal description through the characters simultaneously and concurrently explicating the boundary between the visual and the verbal within the narratology of the text. These liminal borders are presented through mobile phones which are more liminal than the geographical borders where there is sealing through razor wires, walls and patrolling. There is a detailed description of how Hamid has used the idea of mobile technology and the exchanges it can make:
“His phone could make calls. His phone could send messages. . . . allowed him to access Nadia’s separate existence, at first hesitantly, and then more frequently, at any time of day or night, allowed him to start to enter into her thoughts, . . .  He made her laugh, once, then again, and again, he made her skin burn and her breath shorten with the surprised beginnings of arousal, he became present without presence, and she did much the same to him. (28)”
 
Here Hamid has used mobile phones as an extended form of exchange made on the border space, the idea is very profound that through technology and the virtual world, one can cross borders and reach places and people and experience emotions and feelings. Saeed and Nadia were living geographically distant but their connection and bondage had been so powerful that the spaces of miles between them were dissolved by the technology.

            A more powerful emergence of a counter flows observed in the era of globalisation. Societies create boundaries and limitations on individuals to regulate their conduct according to the traditional and structural powers. The personality of Nadia is unconventional and depicts a counter flow in the social borders. According to George Simmel’s The Social Boundary, “Wherever the interests of two elements are concerned with the same object, the possibility of their coexistence depends on a boundary line within the object separating their spheres.” Here the object in Nadia’s case is her own life which society demands her to live by becoming her complainant towards the desires of her family. However, the life of hers she wants to spend is independent of social and family pressures. The ideology of life then becomes a boundary between Nadia, her parents and the society where she is living. She has settled herself separated from her family and independently living, has a boyfriend with which she spends time, she also rides a bicycle, in a war-torn, military-ridden city, so life according to Simmel is completed when within our social relations we come across someone with which we become a unified whole “For if we were to depend only on . . . the arbitrary and in coherent fragments of some soul, instead of a unified human being whom we can understand and count on . . . until a human being emerges, complete enough to meet the needs of our inner and practical life” (Simmel).

The impact of globalization has not shattered the perspective of time. Saeed’s father in   Exit West is unwilling to leave the war-torn country she does not want to leave behind the place where he had spent his whole life with his wife. He is not ready to leave his past. For Saeed to leave his father and the space of his youthful days had been very nostalgic to him but he still has the support of Nadia who is very dynamic to change. Saeed’s realization that his father cannot leave the place and his struggle to cross the limnology of the past for a better future come to the resolution of leaving behind his father because for his father his mother has not gone:
“Saeed’s father said, “Your mother is here.”
Saeed said, “Mother is gone.”
His father said, “Not for me.”
And this was true in a way, Saeed’s mother was not gone for Saeed’s father, not entirely, and it would have been difficult for Saeed’s father to leave the place where he had spent a life with her, difficult not to be able to visit her grave each day, and he did not wish to do this, he preferred to abide, in a sense, in the past, for the past offered more to him. (59)”
 
To conclude, borders are very much ingrained into us, the purpose of borders is not only to restrict or create divisions but there are three functions of borders as described in Crossing Borders, and Dissolving Boundaries, these are integration, segregation and exchange (Viljoen).  Along with this Thomas Nail has elucidated the idea that the study of borders is all about kinopolitics. It is the politics of movement, deeply ingrained in societies and there is a social history of motions. The functions that borders perform are flow, junction and circulation (Nail).  The rigidity linked with the borders has transformed into a more flexible, workable form. Deleuze idea of “Rhizome” is also linked with the idea of the function of a border, as a border acts as a way to connect heterogeneity, it is a way to make connections, it works as a junction for the direction and redirection of laminar flow of humans, their activities and their relation. Thus, globalization has reinvented many new forms of borders and identities which helps to explore the politics of movement.