Negotiating Nationality

Thomas King's "Borders" is a personal story about getting trapped in the borderlands because of King's mother refusing to identify with a Canadian or American nationality. This relates quite nicely to what I said yesterday regarding a refusal to acknowledge geopolitical borders that create countries. It's important to recognize that borders as we understand them today didn't always exist and the people that were on the Americas before European colonization had absolutely no voice when it came to white people deciding to draw them. Be aware, I use the term white loosely.

King says that giving up and just complying with the border security's demands "would have been easier" (137). Sure it would have. But that doesn't make it right. The arbitrary nature of borders are just that: arbitrary. It is so often forgotten that they don't actually exist, and that the only way they function is by social acceptance of them. "It would have been easier" to accept the border, but by resisting it, the narrator's mother actively challenges its very existence 

Not labelling herself as a "Canadian" or "American" citizen, but as Blackfoot also does something interesting in this text. It resists the way that dominant ideology demands we identify ourselves. What does nationality mean, other than some form of ownership by the state? Not a lot. And yet, we are continuously asked to self identify with it, as though that proves something intrinsic about ourselves. By doing so, we perpetuate cultural and national stereotypes, and particular regional attributes that supposedly define us.

Take myself, for example. Only a few years ago my family discovered that my parents' marriage indicates that all of their children are eligible for Belgian citizenship (my father is the "real" Belgian in this case). Suddenly, with very little knowledge about the country, its politics, or even cultural values, I was a part of it. The word 'Belgian' appeared on paperwork and resumes where before, only Canadian had existed. Questions like "Does this change who I am?" and "Do I write Belgian-Canadian or Canadian-Belgian?" haunted me. Particularly that last one. I mean, one is alphabetical which seems right, but really my birthplace should take precedence shouldn't it? If anyone knows the proper answer, I'd love to hear it.

I came across George Melnyk's book poetics of naming a few months ago while researching for a paper, and he says that "a name is a metaphor for the self" which makes sense in some ways, because how we choose to define ourselves obviously indicates something, but in other ways I question it. Melnyk goes on to say that:

Personal names, how they come into being and how we relate to them, express all the dimensions and elements of language because they are metaphors for us, interpretations of who we are, in our culture(s), In personal names reside the totality of ourselves, our realities, the universes we inhabit both physically and psychically (2)

I think that the most important point here is Melnyk's reference to interpretation. Interpretation is based on perspective, and let's be honest, no one has the same perspective even if we'd like to pretend we do. So what happens when we are reduced to our nationalities? What happens when our nationality is what ultimately defines us at the border crossing and our personal ideas of ourselves are erased? Do we become part of the larger metaphor for the national self? What happens when we try to resist it?

What happens, very simply, is that we get caught in the borderlands. A name, a nationality, an identity even, is only valuable if those around you recognize it as such. I applaud Kings mother for having resisted the easier route, because it is acts like these that help to redefine the border. The border needs to be questioned. Not with the naive assumption that if we question it, it will change, but with the understanding that if we question and redefine it, the border becomes permeable.

The borderlands is a negotiable space, even if the reality of the border is undeniably under national control.