BORDERLINE CITIZEN: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood by Robin Hemley (University of Nebraska Press, 2020).

Robin Hemley's "Borderline Citizen" is a wide-ranging, engrossing collection of essays that combines memoir, travel, history, political analysis, and personal meditation. Throughout these thirteen essays, Hemley wrestles with questions of national identity, patriotism (and its ugly relative: jingoism), the love of place that persists even within histories of evil, and the confusions that arise when boundaries align according to the most arbitrary of motives and understandings. It describes visits to exclaves, enclaves, land swaps, refugee camps, far-flung possessions, graveyards, and dizzyingly complex (and sometimes tense) borders.  It provides a description of the Russian city of Kaliningrad, which was once the Prussian city of Königsberg, whose most enduring son remains the philosopher Immanual Kant. (His afternoon perambulations were reputedly regular enough for the housewives of that city to set their clocks upon seeing him.)  It describes a visit to Cuba, and a meeting of American college students with an African-American activist living in exile because of accusations of various crimes. 

Let me distill several essays. The Netherlands and Belgium share what Hemley calls “the most unusual border in the world”, known as ‘the Baarles’: there twenty-pieces of Belgian territory can be found within the Netherlands, and seven pieces of Dutch jurisdiction nestle snugly within Belgian arms. The result is mostly comedic. (I say ‘mostly’ because one tragedy is recounted that lends a somber note to an otherwise charming chord.) Another excursion finds Hemley traveling to the border between India and Bangladesh, where people from exclaves of both countries were brought home by an elaborate land swap. The return of citizens to their home countries sounds like it should produce an unmitigated positive end. Alas, like most well-intentioned endeavors there are bumps in the road: refugee camps that continue as of the publication of this book.

The trip to the Falkland Islands (Isla Malvinas) is an experience with  colonial overreach. An archipelago off the southern coast of Argentina, the Falkland Islands persist to this day as hard, desolate lands that stake an almost ghostly connection to the motherland. Here Britishness seems ossified, a strange 19th century remnant that bears little resemblance to contemporary Britain. The majority of Falklanders are island born and that is where their real allegiance lies. It is here, too, that Hemley encounters a menace present just below the surface of civil encounter.   One breathes a sigh of relief when he leaves those antiquated prides and furies behind.

Finally, Hemley provides a wonderful meditation on graveyards, which he enjoys visiting. Perhaps graveyards are the ultimate exclaves, or maybe enclaves. It’s hard to determine how we should classify the individual plots one finds there. A catalog of graveyards is presented and the distinctions made bring to my mind both Borges and Benjamin. The meditation leaves us with those gardens where the dead are everywhere in beauty – in the best examples – and in strifeless communion.  

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Recommended for: travelers, memoirists, history buffs; those interested in unusual locales, politics, international affairs, global studies; readers of  creative-non-fiction, and professors preparing syllabi for a wide range of college courses.