Language as a border crossing
Writing as a praxis of belonging
Snowdrops are bursting through the sutures of late winter around my childhood home, signaling the onset of spring. They are intimate, tiny porcelain bells that remind me of our ability to renew and rebirth ourselves into something better. My house is cold and heat is a luxury, but the coffee is hot and my chosen family is even warmer in their presence and aliveness.
I’m excited to unfurl myself like a physalis fruit from its paper lantern leaves as we emerge deeper into spring. The taste of physalis reminds me of Berlin in summer, joyfully picking up boxes like Happy Meals from Edeka. Small white feathers of fledgling wood pigeons now stick to my muddy boots as I go on my daily morning walk, turning over these things in my mind. The voices of older birds ring around me.
Inspired by both
’s prompt in her latest newsletter for The Isolation Journals, Butterly, Flying Home, and ’s ‘When Death Comes: After Mary Oliver’, I tinkered with a song that’s very close to my heart and represents for me the dichotomous messiness and beauty of young love or intoxicating infatuation—Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart covered by Nouvelle Vague. The atmospheric sounds of ocean waves and children joyfully screaming in Nouvelle Vague’s cover always felt all-encompassing and amniotic for me, balancing out the inherent darkness of the song. It’s a song that’s been emotively present for me in all my past relationships, glowing somewhere in the background.Love will tear us apart, after Joy Division
Mirrored hearts
taking different roads.
Desperation, failings
tearing us apart.
Why is the bedroom so cold?
Exposed
A taste in my mouth so good,
Bites hard.
Cry out
love.
When we write, as Amina Cain notes in A Horse at Night: On Writing, we create a feeling of border crossing for the reader:
‘What does a reader do with these literary landscapes? Is it enough just to see them? Pamuk suggests that to link them creates more than an aesthetic experience, that there is something to be gained in that linking, that in doing so we ourselves are moving outside of our own borders, able to more deeply apprehend our connection to all that exists.’
Pulling apart Joy Division’s lyrics I am crossing the borders of my present experience into the realm of past loves, intensely imagined. Language confronts us—reminding us of what we are latently carrying. And as Cain poignantly inquires, ‘Maybe we carry things that don’t actually belong to us.’
Writing can become a praxis of belonging. The interior play of language can provide different lenses through which to inspect the self and analyse what allows us to feel more belonging to the world. It is an intimate conversation with the mind and body. This Dasein analysis allows us to see ourselves and the world as they really are. But, critically, writing creates a radical space to imaginatively craft a more fulfilling and regenerative life-world for ourselves, beyond the borders of our existing one.
What song, poem or literary work has been stuck in your head? What words have spoken to you lately? What might these words represent for you?
Inspired by the concept of papelitos guardados (ref: The Latina Feminist Group, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios, Duke University Press, 2001), I invite you to write down some of these lyrics/words alongside a memory that they evoke in you on a scrap piece of paper and keep this little paper in a safe, hidden place for you to return to—to perhaps analyse in solitude or share with others. Our stories have liberatory nutrients.
Love where this took you and the bite of your pared back response. 🧡