A Shard of Glass
Excerpt from A Magical Line, by David Dunne.
Chapter 1, "On the Fence", continued.
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In 2016, I was living in Vancouver and working at the University of Victoria, as Director of the MBA Program; my commute between the two cities a glorious ferry voyage threading its way between pine-clad islands against a backdrop of snowy mountains.
In How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division, Elif Shafak muses about what it means to live away from your home country. “Motherlands are castles made of glass,” she writes. “In order to leave them, you have to break something—a wall, a social convention, a cultural norm, a psychological barrier, a heart.”[i] To be an émigré is to carry these shards in your pockets, and they will return to cut you at a time of their choosing, not yours. On the evening of June 23, as I sat on the ferry to Vancouver, I felt a sharp edge.
I casually opened my phone to check the latest news. “Jesus,” I muttered under my breath. The UK had voted to leave the European Union. I wondered what it would mean.
For a while afterwards, nobody paid much attention to the border, which had existed only in theory since its dismantling in the early 2000s. But soon it came into sharp focus: the UK/Ireland border was now the western border of the EU, and with the UK no longer a member, it would have to be controlled in some way. Politicians in Northern Ireland and the Republic, and some in the UK, argued that this could reignite the Troubles.
I had long forgotten the border where I grew up, with its false certainties, its tribalism, and its hatred. I had blithely assumed, like many, that once it was away from the headlines, the problem was slowly being solved and communities reconciled, allowing permanent peace to take root.
Yet here we were talking about the Troubles again. The border was a shard of glass in my heart.
It was a showery afternoon in November day in 1995 in Guildhall Square in Londonderry (Derry). Quoting Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, US President Bill Clinton urged the citizens of Northern Ireland to “believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.” Where were the miracles now, almost thirty years later?
My wife Carol Ann dropped me off at Vancouver airport in September 2022. Once I passed through security, I bought a drink, sat down, and celebrated. After a long wait through the pandemic, I was finally going to Ireland to do my research. I took a selfie; looking back at it, I see the nervous anticipation I was feeling.
I was returning to the border I left almost a half-century ago, to understand what it means to live with one foot in a different country, to see what has changed, to rediscover what I had forgotten, or failed to see in the past. Beyond that, I was happily On the Fence, eager to see what I could learn.
In the weeks that followed, I would travel along the border, encountering young and old, extreme and moderate, fearful and courageous, blindly optimistic and darkly pessimistic, to understand what living on a border meant to them.
If Gloria Andalzúa was right, that a hybrid border culture was emerging, it was a design-thinking culture. “La mestiza,” she wrote, “constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes.”
Could I find that space, that borderless space, that transcended divisions? It meant questioning old assumptions, and it was OK not to know everything, even not to know what to ask. But I was acutely aware of what it all meant: a quest to explore not just the in-between zone of the border, but also myself, to face faded memories and old ghosts, to understand my place in the world. I was back On the Fence, where I felt most at home.
[i] Shafak, Elif. How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division: The powerful, pocket-sized manifesto. Profile Books, 2020.