#on borders

The Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy... Borders are set up to define the spaces that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.

The world is not a safe place to live in. We shiver in separate cells in enclosed cities, shoulders hunched, barely keeping the panic below the surface of the skin, daily drinking shock along our morning coffee... Shutting down. Woman does not feel safe when her own culture, and white culture, are critical of her: when the man of all races hunt her as prey. Alienated from her mother culture, ''alien'' in the dominant culture, the woman of colour does not feel safe within the inner life of her Self. Petrified, she can't respond, her face caught between los intersticios, the spaces between the different worlds she inhabits.

My father never went back to Lvov either. To "visit" the place where an unhealed wound gaped would be like visiting purgatory, like visiting volcanoes (their interiors), like setting up camp on the edge of a crater spewing flames. The word visit, so frivolous, lighthearted, swift as a windshield wiper on a rainy day, presupposes a speedy return. There and back, a picnic, a walk, and then home again, maybe in time for the evening news. But if what you're visiting is home, then what do you call it? Making a pilgrimage to your own memory, to something that doesn't exist—is that a visit?