Border as Genesis: A Review of Groundswell by Yanara Friedland
Groundswell by Yanara Friedland. Essay Press, 2020. 132 pages. $15.95.
Groundswell, Yanara Friedland’s latest collection of essays, is a poetic, thought-provoking enquiry into the nature of borders, an augury of what Walter Benjamin referred to as messianic time. In Friedland’s words, “[Messianic time] is the experience of immediacy, and nonlinear connections between past, present and future events.” In Groundswell, Friedland moves from a once-divided Berlin, to the German/Polish border; journeys to a Jewish cemetery in the Arizona desert where she lives and works at a detention center for migrants being returned en masse to the countries they’d fled: “What we love we must be very far away from; loss is what must be enacted. Severance is the great locutor.” In messianic time, immediacy is a tangible, urgent connection. In messianic time, every detail pulses with intention.
In her introduction, Jill Magi provides this analogy, drawn from painting: “How difficult it is to make a border by actual edge meeting edge—usually a border is executed by placing one brushstroke atop a territory that already exists. Or it is made through blending, so that the border eases into territory, sometimes only suggesting that one plane has ended and another has begun.” A border is secondary, then, created from existing locations. But Friedland opens her book boldly, claiming border as genesis: “I come from the border, Grenze, Grenzstreifen, nation, wall, barbed wire, west that is east that is a city and also a consciousness of rivers. I come from the swell, a city built on swamp. Whatever ground it is that grew me, the lines run firmly through it.” Friedland resists any impulse to place a border anywhere external to the self, questioning borders not only of nation states, languages, and citizenship, but borders that would separate past from present from future; borders that would separate individual from other, parent from child, story from bureaucracy, dreams from waking. Her narrative rises from her desire for an “inner cartography...a map both coming from far away and from deep within.”
Groundswell gestures towards chronology, from Friedland’s childhood to her adult return to Berlin; to her year spent in London seeking the histories of “asylum seekers, refugees, undocumented migrants, and stateless people”; to her home in the Arizona desert where she works for a time collecting oral histories of those moving through the “lost minutes that do not get noted in historical accounts, the feeling of uncertainty, humiliation, and anger mount in one’s throat, like the glowing specter of a sunrise in late winter.” But for the most part, Groundswell conveys “border as text itself...The framework a choreographic atlas...To etch out a cultural commons that the geopolitical space rejects…” These ellipsed phrases are delivered upon her invitation to be “somewhat of a keynote speaker” following her time as a visiting scholar within the linguistics department of a German university. (“I am not a scholar,” Friedland writes, “especially not a linguistics scholar.”) The talk is not a success. She’s pelted with reproachful questions afterwards, questions of methodology and system which she doesn’t answer. Instead, rescued by a friend, she leaves, and the friends drive together to a lake for a swim. Or, Friedland suggests, “maybe none of this will happen.”
In “Formation,” she describes life in the Hinterhaus, a small apartment facing the back courtyard of the primary house. “The enclosure of courtyards, the way they render the sky square shaped, remains emblematic not only of Berlin but also of my childhood.” This essay is told both in the fractured, detailed memory of childhood, and from the perspective of the author returning in her 20s, where she finds her own memories have become blended “with the rare color footage of Berliners of earlier times, observing armed forces cart in stones, mortar, and barbed wire.” Her own memories, not only her own, but the borrowed memories of others.
As an adult, Friedland finds herself once again in Berlin, where she’s received a university position as “a researcher of uncertain discipline”—and therefore in a position of trespass. Outside the university walls, she discovers “the Archive of Human Destinies,” a basement repository of over one thousand life stories, oral histories that span the previous century of this place; in the archives, Friedland is a grave robber. Thus opens the middle passage of the book, where Friedland draws from the specific, individual narratives found in the archives, sometimes collecting different narrators beneath one title, alternating as if sharing a mic or umbrella. Sometimes these narratives are told in first-person, as if transcribing oral histories. Sometimes they’re told in third-person, taking on an almost fable-like transparency. There’s a sense of wonder here, as if finding herself in the presence of these archives of witness is something that barely exists on the corporeal plane:
There is the first world, the poor world, meaning it is where everything actually happens. The second world, much later much farther, is the rich world where one can reflect on what has happened, shape it again like beeswax between one’s pungent hands...The first world is forever in one’s skin. It runs deep, like groundwater. But one can only fully wake to it if removed.
Groundswell can be used to mean a sudden surge of public feeling, but comes from the nautical observation of a broad, deep swelling of the sea, often the result of seismic disturbance. A groundswell may overpower existing realities, often suddenly, without warning. What’s changed is neither rational, nor predictable, but the nature of reality itself. Friedland’s Groundswell is gently, yet urgently, unsettling, refusing simple conclusions as it guides the reader through its pages, as a troubled current runs within the sea.
