Trump’s
visit this weekend has brought up the subject of walls for me. Why we build
them, what they mean, and why they are so often the only thing left of us when
we’re gone.
From an
archeological standpoint, it makes sense that walls last. We build them to do
just that, after all. They don’t decompose like our bodies or our clothing, and
they tend not to break like pottery or furniture. There’s a reason that cultures
from Ancient Egypt to the modern United States have chosen to build monuments
to their honored dead. Stone keeps its shape.
And yet,
when I was reading Nagra’s poem, “Hadrian’s Wall,” I started to ask myself if
walls are really the best thing for us to leave behind. The eponymous structure
was built sometime around Emperor Hadrian’s visit to Britain in 122 AD, in
order to, as Nagra puts it, “keep out the barbarous,” (Breeze) (Nagra). We don’t
know just why the emperor chose to
build it, but there are theories. It was certainly a military undertaking,
built by the legions and staffed by auxiliaries, and it certainly marked the border
between Roman Britain and the unconquered north. But the idea that it was meant
purely to stop invasion by raiding Scots is flawed. For one thing, the
fortification would have done little to stop a determined assault. There are
records of raiders going right over to get at defenders, wreaking havoc even
among the disciplined Roman forces. For another thing, it’s full of gates, and the
route it follows is not the best possible line of defense. (Breeze)
Why, then,
build a seventy-mile-long wall to mark your border? The answer then was the
same as the answer now: not to defend yourself from attack, but to define your
territory and the people in it. Hadrian’s Wall served not just as a
fortification, but also as an immigration and customs depot. The men who worked
it decided, on a quite literal level, just who and what was allowed into the
empire. It was Hadrian’s men who decided what was barbarous, and indeed Nagra
uses both meanings of the word here. It may mean uncivilized, but it also means un-Roman,
and the two were one and the same in the minds of the “zealous emperor” who built
his wall (Nagra). A figure modern Americans are all too familiar with. A figure
who, this weekend, this very city protested against.
Maybe that’s
why I’m so hesitant to consider walls a fit memorial. I think they tell us,
above all else, what their builders feared. What they wanted to keep out. We
build houses to keep us safe from the elements. We build fortresses to keep us
safe from enemies. And we build borders to keep us safe from the foreign, the
unfamiliar. Nagra writes,
“I’ve come to this wall crowning
England,
this symbol of divided man,
to honour the lineage of our tall
ideals;
to ask, the more stacked, the more
shielded
a haven, the cleaner the stock?” (Nagra)
We hold our walls up as signs of civilization, of structure
and order and “the lineage of our tall ideals.” We revere ancient feats of
engineering because surely this is a
sign that these people were advanced. That they knew what they were doing. That
they were like us, with our obsession with borders and border control, with our
skyscrapers and thousand mile fences. When we build these walls, we want to
think that they’re meant to preserve what’s within from harm, but just as often
they are meant to preserve it from pollution. To keep the stock clean. I’ve seen
so many ancient walls since we came to London—the Mithraem, the colosseum, the
old city wall—each of them a sign of Rome’s need to impose its own sense of
order on the world. We build enclosed spaces where we can control what happens
within, and then we call it civilized, and we call all beyond it barbarous. But
this idea rings hollow to me. Those barbarous people we fear have walls of
their own. Hadrian’s raiding Scots did not live under the open sky, but in towns
and villages they built with as much care as the Romans. They too built spheres
of control. They too feared what was foreign. Perhaps they feared that wall,
and hated the Romans all the more for it. After all, I think fear is perhaps as
natural a reaction to walls as a reason for them. Particularly when the walls are
meant to keep you out of lands you have just as much a right to as their
builders.
Nagra asks,
“Where will our walls finally end?”
I’m afraid
it won’t be soon.
Works Cited
Breeze,
David. “English Heritage.” History of Hadrian's Wall, English Heritage,
www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/hadrians-wall/history-and-stories/history/.
Nagra,
Daljit. British Museum. Faber & Faber, 2017.
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