Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

by Salman Rushdie

  But our extremely pre-human ancestors did not have “motives” in the sense that we understand the term, the scientist in the room protests. The sea neither appealed to them, nor did it disappoint. They had no intuitions, but were driven by the imperatives hidden in their uncracked genetic codes. There was no daring here, no heroism, no adventurous, transgressive spirit. These beach-crawlers did not travel from water to air because they were curious, or in search of jobs. They neither chose nor willed their deeds. Random mutation and natural selection were their mighty, impersonal driving forces. They were just fish who by chance learned how to crawl.

  But so, in a way, are we. Our own births mirror that first crossing of the frontier between the elements. As we emerge from amniotic fluid, from the liquid universe of the womb, we, too, discover that we can breathe; we, too, leave behind a kind of waterworld to become denizens of earth and air. Unsurprisingly, then, imagination defies science and sees that first, ancient, successful half-and-halfer as our spiritual ancestor, ascribing to that strange metamorph the will to change its world. In its victorious transition we recognize and celebrate the prototype of our own literal, moral, and metaphorical frontier crossings, applauding the same drive that made Columbus’s ships head for the edge of the world, or the pioneers take to their covered wagons. The image of Armstrong taking his first moonwalk echoes the first movements of life on earth. In our deepest natures, we are frontier-crossing beings. We know this by the stories we tell ourselves; for we are storytelling animals, too. There is a story about a mermaid, a half-and-half creature, who gave up her fishy half for the love of a man. Was that it, then, we allow ourselves to wonder. Was that the primal urge? Did we come questing out of the waters for love?

  Once upon a time the birds held a conference. The great bird-god, the Simurgh, had sent a messenger, a hoopoe, to summon them to his legendary home far away atop the circular mountain of Qâf, which girdled the earth. The birds weren’t particularly keen on the idea of this dangerous-sounding quest. They tried to make excuses—a previous engagement, urgent business elsewhere. Just thirty birds embarked on the pilgrimage. Leaving home, crossing the frontier of their land, stepping across that line, was in this story a religious act, their adventure a divine requirement rather than a response to an ornithological need. Love drove these birds as it drove the mermaid, but it was the love of God. On the road there were obstacles to overcome, dreadful mountains, fearsome chasms, allegories and challenges. In all quests the voyager is confronted by terrifying guardians of territory, an ogre here, a dragon there. So far and no farther, the guardian commands. But the voyager must refuse the other’s definition of the boundary, must transgress against the limits of what fear prescribes. He steps across that line. The defeat of the ogre is an opening in the self, an increase in what it is possible for the voyager to be.

  So it was with the thirty birds. At the end of the story, after all their vicissitudes and overcomings, they reached the summit of the mountain of Qâf, and discovered that they were alone. The Simurgh wasn’t there. After all they had endured, this was a displeasing discovery. They made their feelings known to the hoopoe who had started the whole thing off, whereupon the hoopoe explained to them the punning etymology that revealed their journey’s secret meaning. The name of the god broke down into two parts: “si,” meaning “thirty,” and “murgh,” which is to say “birds.” By crossing those frontiers, conquering those terrors and reaching their goal, they themselves were now what they were looking for. They had become the god they sought.

  Once upon a time—“a long time ago,” perhaps, “in a galaxy far, far away”—there was an advanced civilization, free, liberal, individualistic, on a planet whose ice caps began to grow. All the civilization in the world could not halt the march of the ice. The citizens of that ideal state built a mighty wall, which would resist the glaciers for a time but not forever. The time came when the ice, uncaring, implacable, stepped across their lines and crushed them. Their last act was to choose a group of men and women to travel across the ice sheet to the far side of the planet, to bring news of their civilization’s death, and to preserve, in some small way, the meaning of what that civilization had been: to be its representatives. On their difficult journey across the ice cap, the group learned that, in order to survive, they would need to change. Their several individualisms had to be merged into a collectivity, and it was this collective entity—the Representative—that made it to the far side of the planet. What it represented, however, was not what it had set out to represent. The journey creates us. We become the frontiers we cross.

  The first of these stories is medieval: the “Conference of the Birds” by the Sufi Muslim poet Fariduddin Attar. The second is an account of Doris Lessing’s science-fiction novel The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, itself inspired by the doomed journey toward the South Pole of Scott of the Antarctic and his companions—but also by Lessing’s own long-standing interest in Sufi mysticism. The idea of overcoming, of breaking down the boundaries that hold us in and surpassing the limits of our own natures, is central to all the stories of the quest. The Grail is a chimera. The quest for the Grail is the Grail. Or, as C. P. Cavafy suggests in his poem “Ithaka,” the point of an Odyssey is the Odyssey:

  Setting out on the voyage to Ithaka

  You must pray that the way be long,

  Full of adventures and experiences.

  . . .

  Be quite old when you anchor at the island,

  Rich with all you have gained on the way,

  Not expecting Ithaka to give you riches.

  Ithaka has given you your lovely journey.

  Without Ithaka you would not have set out.

  Ithaka has no more to give you now.

  Poor though you find it, Ithaka has not cheated you.

  Wise as you have become, with all your experience,

  You will have understood the meaning of an Ithaka. *30

  The frontier is an elusive line, visible and invisible, physical and metaphorical, amoral and moral. The wizard Merlin is responsible for the education of a boy called Arthur, who will one day draw a sword from a stone and become king of England. (The wizard, who is living backward through time, knows this, although the boy does not.) One day Merlin changes the boy into a bird, and as they fly over the countryside he asks Arthur what he sees. Arthur notices the usual things, but Merlin is talking about a thing that can’t be seen, asking Arthur to see an absence: From the air, there are no frontiers. *31 Later, when Arthur has possessed Excalibur and his kingdom, he will learn that wizards are not always wise, and the view from the air isn’t much use on earth. He will fight his share of frontier wars, and he will also find that there are frontiers which, being invisible, are more dangerous to cross than the physical kind.

  When the king’s best friend, the king’s champion, falls in love with the king’s wife, when Lancelot of the Lake trespasses on the territory of the king’s happiness, a line has been crossed that will destroy the world. In fact the collection of tales known as the Matter of Britain have, at their heart, not one but two illicit, transgressive loves: that of Lancelot for Guinevere, and its occult mirror-image, the incestuous love of Arthur and Morgan le Fay. Against the power of these line-crossing lovers, the Round Table cannot stand. The quest for the Grail cannot cleanse the world. Not even Excalibur can prevent the return of darkness. And in the end the sword must be returned to water, and vanish beneath the waves. But wounded Arthur on his way to Avalon is crossing yet another line. He’s being transformed, becoming one of the great sleepers who will return when the right moment comes. Barbarossa in his cave, Finn MacCool in the Irish hills, the Australian wandjina or ancestors in their subterranean resting places, and Arthur in Avalon: these are our once and future kings, and the final frontier they are fated to cross is not space but time.

  To cross a frontier is to be transformed. Alice at the gates of Wonderland, the key to that miniature world in her grasp, cannot pass through the tiny door beyond whi
ch she can glimpse marvelous things until she has altered herself to fit into her new world. But the successful frontierswoman is also, inevitably, in the business of surpassing. She changes the rules of her newfound land: Alice in Wonderland, shape-shifting Alice, terrifies the locals by growing too big to be housed. She argues with Mad Hatters and talks back to Caterpillars and, in the end, loses her fear of an execution-hungry Queen when she, so to speak, grows up. You’re nothing but a house of cards—Alice the migrant at last sees through the charade of power, is no longer impressed, calls Wonderland’s bluff, and by unmaking it finds herself again. She wakes up.

  The frontier is a wake-up call. At the frontier we can’t avoid the truth; the comforting layers of the quotidian, which insulate us against the world’s harsher realities, are stripped away and, wide-eyed in the harsh fluorescent light of the frontier’s windowless halls, we see things as they are. The frontier is the physical proof of the human race’s divided self, the proof that Merlin’s utopian sky-vision is a lie. Here is the truth: this line, at which we must stand until we are allowed to walk across and give our papers to be examined by an officer who is entitled to ask us more or less anything. At the frontier our liberty is stripped away—we hope temporarily—and we enter the universe of control. Even the freest of free societies are unfree at the edge, where things and people go out and other people and things come in, where only the right things and people must go in and out. Here, at the edge, we submit to scrutiny, to inspection, to judgment. These people, guarding these lines, must tell us who we are. We must be passive, docile. To be otherwise is to be suspect, and at the frontier to come under suspicion is the worst of all possible crimes. We stand at what Graham Greene thought of as the dangerous edge of things. This is where we must present ourselves as simple, as obvious: I am coming home. I am on a business trip. I am visiting my girlfriend. In each case, what we mean when we reduce ourselves to these simple statements is, I’m not anything you need to bother about, really I’m not: not the fellow who voted against the government, not the woman who is looking forward to smoking a little dope with her friends tonight, not the person you fear, whose shoe may be about to explode. I am one-dimensional. Truly. I am simple. Let me pass.

  Across the frontier the world’s secret truths move unhindered every day. Inspectors doze or pocket dirty money, and the world’s narcotics and armaments, its dangerous ideas, all the contrabandits of the age, the wanted ones, those who do have something to declare but do not declare it, slip by; while we, who have nothing much to declare, dress ourselves in nervous declarations of simplicity, openness, loyalty. The declarations of the innocent fill the air, while the others, who are not innocent, pass through the crowded, imperfect borders, or make their crossings where frontiers are hard to police, along deep ravines, down smugglers’ trails, across undefended wastelands, waging their undeclared war. The wake-up call of the frontier is also a call to arms.

  This is how we are thinking now, because these are fearful days. There is a photograph by Sebastião Salgado that shows the wall between the United States and Mexico snaking over the crests of hills, running away into the distance, as far as the eye can see, part Great Wall of China, part gulag. There is a kind of brutal beauty here, the beauty of starkness. At intervals along the wall there are watchtowers, and these so-called sky-towers are manned by armed men. In the photograph we can see the tiny, silhouetted figure of a running man, an illegal immigrant, being chased by other men in cars. The strange thing about the picture is that, although the running man is clearly on the American side, he is running toward the wall, not away from it. He has been spotted, and is more afraid of the men bearing down on him in cars than of the impoverished life he thought he had left behind. He’s trying to get back, to unmake his bid for freedom. So freedom is now to be defended against those too poor to deserve its benefits by the edifices and procedures of totalitarianism. What kind of freedom is it, then, that we enjoy in the countries of the West—these exclusive, increasingly well-guarded enclaves of ours? That is the question the photograph asks, and before September 11, 2001, many of us—many more, I suspect, than today—would have been on the running man’s side.

  Even before the recent atrocities, however, the citizens of Douglas, Arizona, were happy to protect America from what they called “invaders.” In October 2000 the British journalist Duncan Campbell met Roger Barnett, who runs a towing and propane business near Douglas but also organizes wetback hunting parties. *32 Tourists can sign up for a weekend hunting human beings. “Stop the invasion,” the billboards in Douglas say. According to Campbell, Barnett is a legendary character in these parts. He thinks it would be a “hell of an idea” for the United States to invade Mexico in return. “There’s a lot of mines and great beaches there, there’s farming and resources. Think of what the United States could do there—gee whiz, they wouldn’t have to come up here anymore.”

  Another citizen of Douglas, Larry Vance, Jr., thinks Mexicans are like the wildebeest of Africa: fair game for predators. “Where a native population has been diluted by invaders it runs into a bloodbath. We abhor violence but we realize that people have the God-given right to defend themselves.” Perhaps the running man in Salgado’s picture is being chased by Mr. Barnett’s thrill-seekers, who are in no doubt that they are the defenders of the right, or by supporters of Mr. Vance’s organization, the Cochise County Concerned Citizens—that’s four C's, not three K's. The Mexican view of things is different, as Campbell reminds us:

  “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us,” is the much-used remark by Mexicans who have made it. To an extent this is true: the settlement of the Mexican-American war of 1846–48 meant that, for the sum of $18,250,000, the whole of California, most of Arizona and New Mexico and parts of Utah, Nevada, Colorado and Wyoming passed to the U.S.

  But history, as they say, is made up of interviews with winners, and nobody’s asking the wall-jumpers and wetbacks for their worldview right now. And if, in the aftermath of terrorist horror, many more of us are prepared to accept the need for a border gulag-world of sky-towers and manhunters; if, being afraid, we prefer to sacrifice some of what freedom means, then should we not worry about what we are becoming? Freedom is indivisible, we used to say. We are all thinking about dividing it now.

  Think for a moment about this image of a running man, a man who has nothing, who is no danger to anyone, fleeing the land of the free. For Salgado, as for myself, the migrant, the man without frontiers, is the archetypal figure of our age. Salgado has spent many years among the world’s displaced peoples, the uprooted and the re-rooted, chronicling their border crossings, their refugee camps, their desperations, their ingenuities: creating an extraordinary photographic record of this most important of contemporary phenomena. The pictures show that there has never been a period in the history of the world when its peoples were so jumbled up. We are so thoroughly shuffled together, clubs among diamonds, hearts among spades, jokers everywhere, that we’re just going to have to live with it. In the United States, this is an old story. Elsewhere, it’s a new one, and it doesn’t always go down well. As a migrant myself, I have always tried to stress the creative aspects of such cultural commingling. The migrant, severed from his roots, often transplanted into a new language, always obliged to learn the ways of a new community, is forced to confront the great questions of change and adaptation; but many migrants, faced with the sheer existential difficulty of making such changes, and also, often, with the sheer alienness and defensive hostility of the peoples among whom they find themselves, retreat from such questions behind the walls of the old culture they have both brought along and left behind. The running man, rejected by those people who have built great walls to keep him out, leaps into a confining stockade of his own.

  Here is the worst-case scenario of the frontier of the future: the Iron Curtain was designed to keep people in. Now we who live in the wealthiest and most desirable corners of the world are building walls to keep people out. As the economic
s Nobel laureate Professor Amartya Sen has said, the problem is not globalization. The problem is a fair distribution of resources in a globalized world. And as the gulf between the world’s haves and have-nots increases (and it is increasing all the time) and as the supply even of essentials like clean drinking water becomes scarcer (and it is getting scarcer all the time), the pressure on the wall will build. Think of Lessing’s ice, inexorably moving forward. So if we send representatives to tell the future who we were, what story will they have to tell? A story, perhaps, of a jeweled people, sitting tight on their treasure hoards, “wearing bracelets, and all those amethysts too, and all those rings on their fingers with splendid flashing emeralds, [and] carrying their precious walking sticks, with silver knobs and golden tops so wonderfully carved,” and waiting for the barbarians, as Cavafy tells us—Cavafy again, that Borgesian mythomane who is also one of the great poets of miscegenation—

  Because the Barbarians will arrive today;

  Things of this sort dazzle the Barbarians.

  At the frontier there has always been the threat, or, for a decadent culture, even the promise of the barbarians.

  What are we waiting for all crowded in the forum?

  The Barbarians are to arrive today.

  Within the Senate-house where is there such inaction?

  The Senators making no laws what are they sitting there for?

  Because the Barbarians arrive today.

  What laws now should the Senators be making?