Statelessness and the Poetry of the Borderline

Abstract

In his 1976 essay, ‘The Borderline Concept’, the psychoanalyst, André Green wrote: ‘I can be a citizen or heimatlos (homeless), but to “be” borderline – that is difficult for me to imagine.’ This chapter takes Green’s writing on the borderline as a starting point for reflecting on the condition of statelessness. How might we describe a poetry of the borderline? And how might such descriptions help us think again about the geographies of modern writing? The chapter addresses these questions with a study of two poets from different ends of the same history of exile and displacement: W.H. Auden, whose voluntary 1939 departure from England coincided with the first convulsion of national frontiers in Europe, its colonies, protectorates and mandates, and the Oxford-based Palestinian poet, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, whose writing captures the reality of today’s borderline living with an original clarity. Like his friend, Hannah Arendt, Auden’s writing is a thought experiment in imagining different forms of human and political belonging. Eighty years later, writing out of the same history, Qasmiyeh’s remarkable 2008 poem, ‘Holes’, brilliantly refuses to authenticate his own suffering for the benefit of others. This resistance against the terms of literary humanitarianism is a powerful claim for the ‘right to have rights’.