non-explicit’, and name very few specific sites as they would be recognised on a traditional map. The language used is also often ‘displaced’, a dynamic carried through the translation, another form of ‘displacement’. As Roger Bromley notes in the concluding chapter of Cross Addressing: Resistance Literature and Cultural Borders, texts written in the language of the colonizer often act to violate this language, “Transformation and textual negotiation are key features of the uses of language in border writing: this is also true of its narrative practice” (Hawley (ed.) 1996, p. 276). In Signs Preceding the End of the World for example “jarchar”, meaning to leave, which has an Arabic route and had to transition from Spanish and then to English, became “to verse”, thus the novel creates a new language of movement, required for a new understating of border crossing, and a new map of contemporary migration.
Indeed languages and translations can act as journeys or border crossings in their own right, imposing their own territorial constraints.
In a world full of travellers, borders control and regulate how we move around and who can or who cannot move from one space to another. It is precisely these movements of people (and ideas, capital and things) that contribute to the constant evolution of cultures. Translation is one way in which ideas can move across borders; intercultural communication implies that borders have already been crossed in some way. The existence of borders indicates that there is movement across them, which someone considers needs to be controlled. (Evans and Ringrow 2017, p. 3)
Makina herself is a site of this ‘language journey’: “You are the door, not the one who walks through it” (Herrera 2015, p. 18) says one character to Makina because she runs the switchboard in her village and speaks three languages. She is a site of transition. She embodies the US/Mexico border through translating between local languages and English before she even physically approaches the line of demarcation.
In The Gurugu Pledge languages are also mixed up, broken down and played with. The author takes words from French, Spanish and Latin thus spanning more than one colonial past while at the same time expressing a neo-colonial present. Much of the novel's structure is based around a poem in Latin. Written by the father of Peter, known previously in his village as Ngambo (most characters have multiple names), the poem is in the Conceptismo style (from the 17th century Spanish tradition), written in French and with a gloss (a notation on the poem) in English in an unnamed African country which used English as its primary language, “or imposed language, imposed by rich whites…”(Laurel 2017, p. 12), as one character states, re-imposing the history of these borders and the current map of Africa. Later in the work, another character states that people use, “Eat or manger, according to whichever history the whites chose for you” (Laurel 2017, p. 64).
The Story of Peter’s father’s poem is told in 3 parts and is about Charon, his boat and the payment made, a retelling of the ancient story from Greek mythology. Charon is the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the newly deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron which divided the world of the living and the dead. The poem represents the journey to come for these young people, the price they will pay and the danger it involves. These fractured journeys and selves are reflected in the very structure of these novels. As I said previously, in The Gurugu Pledge, narration swaps in and out of third person, with the ‘voice’ of the story frequently changing. The author states this is because all of their voices needed to be heard, creating, I would posit, a more accurate map of this area in Morocco.
The Final Border
In both works the final physical border crossing is in fact a culmination of all the borders that have come before, though we meet the characters at the gates of Europe or America, their very beings hold the journeys taken, borders crossed and maps traversed up until that point. And in Signs Preceding the End of the World, even when Makina is in the USA, echoes of the border continue and she continues to cross them. This is often embodied in language. The people Makina meets in the US are both “homegrown” and “anglo”—“Their gestures and tastes reveal both ancient memory and the wonderment of a new people” (Herrera 2015, p. 63). They speak an “intermediary” tongue described as a “hinge pivoting between two like but distant souls, and then two more, and then two more, never exactly the same ones; something that serves as a link.” (Herrera 2015, p. 63) and “their tongue is a nebulous territory between what is dying out and what is not yet born” (Herrera 2015, p. 63), thus creating “the world happening anew…” (Herrera 2015, p. 66).
And what of the border itself, the site of physical transition. As soon as she crosses the sky it already looks different to Makina, “more distant or less blue.” (Herrera 2015, p. 40), is has gained something, distance, and lost something, colour and familiarity, just as Makina will. She arranges for her crossing back while she is still at home because of a friend who returned and:
…everything was similar but not the same: his mother was no longer his mother, his brothers and sisters were no longer his brother and sisters, they were people with difficult names and improbable mannerisms, as if they’d been copied off an original that no longer existed; even the air, he said, warmed his chest in a different way. (Herrera 2015, p. 20)
The border changes the make-up of things, the transition from one to the other is visible even in sentence structure. When Makina meets her brother he has assumed an American identity and will not come home. He has become, through the process of border crossing, another person. She is not his sister. His mother is not his mother. The boy she knew is gone.
The fragility of the body, its ability to be appropriated, damaged or destroyed also takes more concrete form. In Signs Preceding the End of the World they find a corpse at the border. From afar it looks like a pregnant woman, but it is in fact a bloated body. And in The Gurugu Pledge hospitals don’t treat “blacks without papers” (Laurel 2017, p. 77) reasserting the idea that vulnerability is actually an imposed state rather than a natural one. Towards the end of the novel, a journalist who visits those living on Mount Gurugu shows a video of dead Africans on a beach, and states that they have not drowned, but been shot, presumably by state actors (Laurel 2017, p. 178), thus reinforcing Jones’ description of the border as creating the violence which takes place there. Border crossing in both novels is a form of death “I’m dead, Makina said to herself…” on the first page, and later in the text someone asks her, “Off to the other side?” (Herrera, 2015, p. 14), directly linking the transition between Mexico and the USA to that between life and death.
In discussing the relationship between the migrant and the society to which they move, Iain Chambers suggests an appropriation of the metropolitan by the figure of the migrant. In this way he links migrant experience and the cityscape:
There is an emergence at the centre of the previously peripheral and marginal. For the modern metropolitan figure is the migrant: she and he are the active formulators of metropolitan aesthetics and lifestyles, reinventing the language and appropriating the streets of the master. (Chambers 1994, p. 23)
Makina’s character also speaks to this relationship, though in stronger words. Having been caught without papers by a police officer she has to write poetry on behalf of another arrestee:
We are to blame for this destruction, we who don’t speak your tongue and don’t know how to keep quiet either. We who didn’t come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take your jobs, who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hours. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you’d never known, who deliver your dope, who deserve to be chained by neck and feet. We who are happy to die for you, what else could we do? We, the ones who are waiting for who knows what. We the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians. (Herrera 2015, p.99)
Here the presence of Mexicans in the Big Chilango (the name given to the American city described
