Liminal border state of affairs

I recall my visits to Podlasie, a area on the Polish border with Belarus – the border which divides extraordinary, primeval Puszcza Białowieska, the oldest Central European Forest, in half. I first visited the Forest on the age of ten. There was an oak tree in entrance of the home the place I stayed. It regarded like Kilimanjaro the wrong way up. The Forest itself appeared like Narnia to me. The bison had been grotesque, surreal and enchanting.

Twenty years later I visited the Forest in winter. I locked myself in a buddy’s cottage, which I needed to stroll just a few kilometres by way of the snow to get to. The closest neighbour, a forester, lived a kilometre away. My cellular connection was very weak. To make a cellphone name, I needed to climb a hill and stand beneath the antenna. The night time sky was woven with stars. Through the day, I met a wolf on the trail. Its eyes regarded sensible and calm – I had the sensation that we had been standing reverse each other for a really, very very long time, like centuries. This assembly would stay with me just like the optimistic hint a portray leaves as soon as faraway from a wall after a few years.

The Forest is a society with ‘Mother Trees’. Ecologist Suzanne Simard describes them as ‘hub trees’ sharing extra carbon and nitrogen by way of a mycorrhizal community – like a world extensive net of messages about attainable hazard or good mild spots. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s principle of rhizomes and roots additionally involves thoughts. The non-linear community that connects us with vegetation and animals makes excellent sense right here. Thinker Éduard Glissant observed that roots ‘make the commonality of errantry and exile’, which could appear an oxymoron to us. However there’s a level to it, ‘for in both instances roots are lacking’.

Refugees, exiles, immigrants and nomads abandon their roots. They abandon the graves of their ancestors and wander rootless. But, ‘the tale of errantry is the tale of Relation’, provides Glissant. Refugees are a shifting ingredient associated to the place and its inhabitants. They make a brand new particular entity. The border they want to cross is a assemble of the Westphalian world order, which Carl Schmitt deemed Ius Publicum Europaeum (European public regulation), comparatively recent and never sacred, not delineated by gods. Achille Mbembe requires a borderless globe, for a freedom of mobility. Refugees who lose their lives trying to cross the Polish-Belarusian border are minimize off from their households in Africa or East Asia. Who will go to their graves?

A humanitarian disaster has been ongoing inside this Forest for 3 years. The face of the Forest has modified – or quite the face of the Forest has been modified.

* * *

I returned to Podlasie in 2022 after the Polish right-wing authorities launched a state of emergency in areas alongside the border. The military had begun guarding an space of the Forest that was closed to everybody apart from its inhabitants. I needed to know the way I might assist. Or possibly I needed to grasp for myself what was taking place. The military didn’t let me inside the world to go to my buddies residing in Narewka. Carl Schmitt in his 1921 essay ‘On Dictatorship’, which he later developed in Political Theology, describes such a state of emergency, whereby an authoritarian ruler can ignore the regulation in case of surprising circumstances and introduce new guidelines: ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.’

In 2021 President Alexander Lukashenko in collusion with Vladamir Putin began handing out visas to refugees and immigrants from Iraq, Afghanistan, and different Center Jap and African nations. Belarusian authorities pushed for his or her switch throughout the border to Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, weaponizing refugees towards the European Union, thus waging hybrid warfare. Lukashenko’s authorities knew that an more and more right-wing-leaning Europe needed to restrict immigration. And his immigration coverage was direct retaliation to sanctions that the EU had imposed after the rigged Belarusian presidential elections in 2020 and repression of the opposition.

In August 2021, when a gaggle of refugees from Afghanistan appeared on the border close to the village of Usnarz Górny, the Polish right-wing, anti-immigration authorities, led by the Legislation and Justice get together (PiS), was nonetheless in energy. The refugees, who weren’t allowed to use for asylum, had been pushed again by the Polish guards on the one facet after which once more by the Belarusian guards on the opposite, caught within the Forest with out meals, water or shelter.

Shortly thereafter, the Polish authorities launched a provisional state of emergency in its border areas with Belarus. Nobody apart from residents had been allowed to remain within the designated zone. Any help given to refugees turned punishable. In January 2022 the PiS authorities started constructing a razor-wire fence alongside the border, which is now roughly 180 km lengthy, 5.5 metres excessive and price PLN 1.6 billion (350 million euros) – the cash coming from an EU funds for highway building. Poland used cash de facto from the European fund regardless of the objection of Ursula von der Leyen. The state of emergency, first scheduled till 1 March 2022, was prolonged till the tip of June. And the present authorities beneath Donald Tusk has since reintroduced a closed zone alongside the border.

In 2022, and once more in August and November 2023, I helped refugees within the Forest from the bottom camp of volunteer group Grupa Granica (Border Group) and at a seminar organized by Researchers on the Border. I spoke primarily with those that assist on the border: the activists, volunteers, residents and guests, who achieve this from the kindness of their hearts, and are exhausted, traumatized and harassed. It turned clear to me that the work they do must be executed by the state, which has as a substitute constructed a fence on which individuals and animals die. All my interlocutors repeated the identical sentiments about volunteering close to the forest: I don’t need to discuss it anymore, it has turn out to be traumatic, I’m very drained.

I returned as soon as extra in Could 2024 on the invitation of the Poezja w Puszczy (Poetry within the Forest) pageant. The thought for the pageant developed on the spur of the second in 2016 when Kasia Leszczyńska, a translator of German-language literature into Polish, was contacted by a poet residing in Hajnówka, a small border city the place Catholic and Orthodox church buildings are neighbours, and Belarusian is heard on the streets as usually as Polish. The poet was decided to ascertain a poetry pageant in Podlasie and the primary occasion befell in 2017. The Tropinka Affiliation for Dialogue, which promotes intercultural dialogue and the promotion of Podlasie tradition, was additionally based at the moment. I acquired their invitation for a residency place and stayed in the identical location for the pageant.

The pageant is low key and intimate – you can say there’s magic in it. Poets and the general public wander by way of the Forest for half a day, stopping at designated locations the place poets recite their work. María Baranda opened the proceedings by studying her poem Todos los árboles del mundo (All of the bushes of the world) in a peaceful voice, concluding with ‘de esa noche quieta, primera y última, donde siempre estarás con todos los árboles del mundo’ (of that quiet night time, first and final, the place you’ll stay with all of the bushes on the earth) – all of the bushes within the Forest round us, which we had managed to guard from being felled first beneath the directive of the PiS authorities.

I closed our procession by studying a number of of my poems in the midst of the Forest, proper subsequent to a fallen tree; in response to regulation, all collapsed bushes, of which there are a lot of within the Forest, have to be left to decompose, offering meals for fungi and bugs. We admired a number of such fungi alongside the best way, documenting them on our cellphones, stretching out our procession for a kilometre. I learn a poem from North Parables, written a few years in the past in a nature reserve in northern Finland, a unprecedented forest the place people are uncommon visitors and lichen hold from bushes in garlands. I learn a poem from the ocean at night time is a muscle of the center in regards to the lack of a liked one, written in the midst of a Norwegian forest, the place moss grows like hair on stones and rocks are lined with lichen tattoos.

And I felt as if these Forests had merged. As if I had been an echo of the Forest. We had been standing in the midst of an historic forest and I used to be studying about an historic forest. The Forests intertwined. And immediately a big chook broke away from the department.

I name the water and a chook rises up

and reveals me its wing

and there’s a forest, and there may be smoke, and there may be fog

the fog laughs, your fingers are soiled, your legs are soiled

the fog laughs, then the chook breaks away from the forest

like a sound from silence

the sound of rain, I hear tiny footsteps

towards the birch leaves, towards the maple leaves, towards the oak leaves

towards the earth, towards the water

 

and I thanks for the footprint on the water of the dried-up river

I thanks for the leaves of the tree trunk that won’t develop

I thanks for the melody of the identify that I can’t name

After our stroll within the Forest, we had been invited for dinner at Fanaberia, a regionally famend restaurant in Białowieża based by Sławek and Lucyna Droń. As a toddler, Sławek got here to Podlasie for holidays along with his grandfather, who was the pinnacle of the Baptist church in Białowieża from 1948 to 1984. Fanaberia is an establishment: a port, a base, a gallery, a gathering place. Literary conferences, movie screenings and exhibitions are organized there. We sit down on the desk and Ruth instantly serves us pumpkin soup. I slowly really feel the heat spreading by way of my physique. Sławek sits down subsequent to us – tall in a light-weight shirt and denims, gray-haired, his face an open, legible house. I ask him about after they began the restaurant, the work on the partitions, who he employs within the restaurant and on what phrases. He replies with an anecdote about certainly one of his staff:

I needed to dig a trench for a pipe with Abraham as soon as. We had been digging, digging, and immediately he began laughing so laborious, so I requested him what was occurring, and he stated: ‘I used to be digging not too long ago, three kilometres from right here.

The border with Belarus is three kilometres east of the restaurant, beneath which Abraham managed to move by digging a gap. Sławek employed Abraham someday later. At first, he was not conversant in kitchen work. ‘Now he makes better pierogi (Polish dumplings) than the locals,’ says Sławek laughing.

Other than Abraham, who fled from Ethiopia, there are two members of workers from Eritrea (certainly one of them is an obstetrician by career) and Ruth from Congo, who took our order after we arrived chilly and hungry after our stroll within the Forest. She is of common top, strikes easily and has attentive eyes. She got here right here to work two years in the past, on the age of sixteen. Her mom disappeared on the border and Ruth was despatched to an orphanage. The director referred to as Sławek to see if he might discover her a job. She speaks French and Swahili. She realized issues slowly, cleansing and setting the tables.

‘Many people want to apply for asylum but sometimes have to wait for up to five or six hours before the border guard arrives, so I’ve heard,’ says Paulina Weremiuk, a neighborhood border resident, whom I’m talking with for the second time since she acquired the Paul Grüninger Award in St. Gallen, Switzerland, for serving to refugees within the Forest. Since then, she has helped sporadically. Now it’s primarily activists who take care of refugees. ‘It was physically and emotionally exhausting,’ she says, ‘I had to set a boundary for myself.’

I see two completely different boundaries or borders operating considerably parallel to one another. Paulina teaches English at a major faculty in Narewka. She will be able to solely go to the Forest at weekends. Lately she acquired a message from the Border Group, a name to go to a younger man within the Forest. He wanted water, meals. 4 hours handed from the second Paulina acquired the message till she returned residence. She couldn’t stick with him any longer: he had requested for worldwide safety, however Paulina needed to go to work the following day. Another person got here to assist him.

Paulina lives in Narewka and comes from close by Hajnówka. After we talked in November, her voice was heat and smooth, flowing easily into me. Now it’s damaged. ‘I thought the world would see us helping.’ As an alternative, she feels hostility. She is afraid of impending aggression. She fears that her assist might be used towards her. Volunteers and activists are accused of collaborating with smugglers. Did anybody inform on Paulina? In Narewka, nobody will say something instantly, however she has been accused of smuggling refugees. It hurts her that trusted individuals gossip.

A number of days later, an entry seems on the Fb profile of an ultranationalist group Narodowa Hajnówka (Nationwide Hajnówka) calling to chase activists and ‘illegal immigrants’ away: ‘After a few hours of walking, we came across a large group of illegal immigrants that escaped from us. We will repeat this type of action’ … ‘where the state fails, citizens must show up’. On 25 July 2024, the Senate adopted a regulation on using weapons on the border, which has since been signed by the president. A soldier who makes use of weapons in an irregular method is now exempt from legal responsibility. Violence has been sanctioned.

Each crack of a department damaged within the Forest makes Paulina suspect that somebody wants assist. She is offended in regards to the new rules that don’t permit her to go for a stroll together with her canine to her favourite locations. She is afraid whether or not she will be able to invite buddies from overseas. Can individuals of color or these with Arab facial options freely go for a stroll within the Forest?

I ask if Paulina has hope for the longer term. However she replies that she had hoped Donald Tusk’s new authorities would have a long-term plan and take note of individuals on the highway, residents and nature. As an alternative, it has re-established the emergency zone and took one third of her Swiss award in taxes.

Katarzyna Leszczyńska had an analogous hope. Kasia has mild, curly hair and a smile that immediately makes buddies. She lives between Zurich, Warsaw and the Forest. She was in Zurich when the PiS closed the border in 2021. ‘The whole region became an anathema,’ she recollects. She felt responsible for not being there and never serving to. ‘It was a liminal situation,’ she says, and I see one other border squeezing the Forest. She started to really feel afraid of the place that was so pricey to her. What helped her to take care of the disaster? Assembly refugees, figuring out that she might do one thing for them.

As soon as, buddies referred to as to ask if Kasia and her husband, Manfred, might cover two males – in all probability a father and his young-adult son – of their barn. Nevertheless, they most well-liked to cover them of their outdated, wood railway , which they’d transformed into a comfortable place to spend the night time. ‘It was tragic that in a supposedly democratic country you have to wonder and worry about how to get two people from a barn to a wagon!’ A neighbour’s canine ran as much as them and began licking their fingers. The older man, who had not proven any emotion to this point, in all probability attributable to exhaustion, immediately regarded fearful. Kasia took the youthful man’s hand and began petting the canine with it, till he lastly began petting it himself. After three nights, they disappeared. Generally water and meals left in and close to the Forest additionally disappears.

The explanations activists from Grupa Granica keep on the border and assistance is regularly related. After I go to the bottom in the summertime of 2023 to rearrange my longer keep for the autumn, I move armoured army automobiles. Troopers may be seen in all places: at fuel stations, in cafés, in retailers. The activists’ base comprises a warehouse filled with sneakers, garments, sleeping luggage, energy banks, telephones and dry, high-calorie meals: from December 2022 to January 2023, activists have supplied help to 14,500 individuals.

Many different organizations, associations and grassroots initiatives contribute to the work of activists. Kuchnia Konfliktu (the Battle Kitchen Basis) gives sizzling soup. Stowarzyszenie Interwencji Prawnej (the Affiliation for Authorized Intervention) makes positive there’s at all times one lawyer on board who explains methods to apply for asylum. There are translators of Arabic. ‘It’s good that French,’ I hear on the primary day. ‘That could come in handy.’ The Egala Affiliation legally helps the activists themselves. There’s additionally no scarcity of psychologists. A separate room on the base serves as a small infirmary, the place I find yourself after stumbling and splitting my chin whereas strolling at night time. A physician helps me. The partitions round us are tightly wrapped in dressings, plasters, bandages. I really feel like an fool – I’m not the one who must be helped.

After I return on the finish of 2023, fatigue hangs within the air like thick fog. Of the individuals I meet, a few of them have been serving to commonly for 2 years and lived on the base. Others come for a number of to a dozen days. A number of are employed by the group like Magda, who’s round 50 years outdated. ‘I was standing a few metres from the soldier when he was pointing a gun at me,’ she says. I’m sitting on a mattress on the primary flooring of an outdated wood cottage in a village proper subsequent to the border. Through the First World Struggle, the Russian military burned the village. After it was rebuilt, the Nazis burned it down in the course of the Second World Struggle. It was rebuilt once more in response to the sample. The even format of the wood homes and their structure are harking back to cottages from the eighteenth century.

‘It’s very cosy right here,’ says Matthias, who has come to assist from Germany for 2 weeks. I’m drained after driving all day. Magda sits on the ground and doesn’t cease speaking and speaks quick. Her voice is a herd of deer operating by way of the Forest. I can’t sustain with them. My thoughts delves into the moss. I hear fragments of staccato sentences. The Forest is her Heimat (homeland). She has a small farm together with her husband. A teenage son. Her chickens not too long ago died. Most likely poisoned grain. It damage her. Magda takes photographs. As soon as the Forest was her matter. She reveals me photographs of bushes, morning fog, cranes by the river. Now she is documenting the work of the Border Group. She doesn’t add credit to her photographs. She’s not doing it for publicity. I see the Afghan’s frostbitten toes. Syrians in sleeping luggage. A medic treating a wound on the leg of a person from Senegal. ‘Shoot then if you’re so courageous,’ she informed the soldier, turning on her heel and operating residence to get a digicam to seize the scene.

From the Border Group base, I am going to the writers’ residency in Hruszki. Researchers on the border meet for a seminar on the humanitarian disaster. ‘I came to the Forest ten years ago to live in peace,’ says artist and director Kasia Hertz. There was no peace right here since then. First, activists fought towards tree felling. Now, they’re preventing for the lives of refugees within the border zone. In accordance with anthropologist Elizabeth Dunn, who offers with compelled migration, the Forest did the border guards’ soiled work. Does that absolve the guards? Does Puszcza have intentions? Kasia has a fragile voice, blonde bangs and enormous, darkish eyes. She talks about how she helps escaping youngsters to beat the trauma of the Forest. It helps them create a brand new narrative about what they’ve skilled. One woman got here up with a narrative a few tree beneath which she might take shelter. Below its leaves she was heat at night time. The tree revealed the moon to her in order that the night time wouldn’t appear so darkish.

The extraordinary nature of the Forest has disappeared. I really feel tense. Wherever we go, there may be armed presence. As soon as we’d have gone deep into the Forest. This time we’re going to see the fence. I’m reminded of thinker Wendy Brown’s phrases, for whom a wall doesn’t testify to a nation state, fairly the other. For her, the epidemic of constructing partitions is proof of the corrosion of a sovereign state, not its energy. Why do I have to see a barrier? Isn’t a photograph sufficient for me? I need to really feel the earth the place it’s divided. We take a look at the fence from completely different views, as if it was a portray that positive factors from a barely zoomed-out view.

The gate for animals is padlocked. There have to be a bell someplace for the bison. The Forest is an ecosystem, a rustic in itself – by dividing it artificially, we break the connection between vegetation and animals that used to maneuver freely by way of its territory, on the lookout for meals or shelter. What’s our position then? ‘Human beings offer hospitality only to human beings,’ claims Jacques Derrida. ‘True, what a strange thing it would be to go and offer hospitality to an animal, all the more to a plant! Let’s be reassured, hospitality is certainly a human attribute,’ he provides however doesn’t cease there. After some additional consideration, he arrives at some hyperbole that conjures up us to be humble: ‘If you don’t do justice to hospitality towards animals, you’re additionally excluding gods.’

How many individuals has the border ‘swallowed’? I’m checking the report on the Border Group web site: over fifty. Greater than 300 have been reported lacking. On the Orthodox cemetery in Narewka, within the nook subsequent to at least one one other, are three small burial mounds: Mohsen Ahmed Mugahed (Yemen, 26 years outdated), Waseem Abojesh (Syria, 21 years outdated), Ganiyu Olashile Raji (date of demise 7 December 2021). The border guard publishes the variety of individuals attempting to cross the border on its web site: by July 2022 there have been virtually forty-four thousand; over forty-one thousand had been ‘turned back’ – in response to the guards’ nomenclature – or pushed again. Solely the primary refoulement is registered. Refugees expertise violence on either side.

A dependable report was ready by Felipe González Morales, who till 2023 was the UN Particular Rapporteur appointed by the Human Rights Council. Nevertheless, this report, to this point, is a love letter to nobody. In accordance with the Affiliation for Authorized Intervention and Defending Rights at Borders, 9,515 push-backs have been documented throughout Europe from Could to August 2023. Each third particular person is a toddler. The brand new EU migration regulation assumes that every member state will settle for 30,000 immigrants or pay 20,000 euros for every particular person not accepted. The Polish authorities vetoed the regulation, regardless of some courts deeming the push-back regulation unlawful.

Coming back from the border, we discover a banner with a photograph of a lifeless bison and two individuals from the Bison Lovers Affiliation within the parking zone. They’re consuming tea from a thermos, a small drum subsequent to it. Not removed from there in Stare Masiewo on 12 November, a army truck killed a bison. The soldier will need to have been driving 100 kilometres per hour. Nobody was held accountable.

Many refugees lose their lives attempting to cross the slender Svislach River. The river and the border line up like lovers. Cyril, the 32-year-old son of Zala Marciale from Cameroon, drowned in it. Who was he? We drive close by to the village of Dublany. In accordance with the 2021 census, two ladies dwell right here, however the village appears deserted. As if individuals fled 100 years in the past in panic. It’s as quiet as in outer house. Wood huts stand empty. Cotton wool lies within the home windows with golden baubles positioned on high. Orphaned apiaries. You may hear birds in all places. They really feel secure, they fly shut. The highway bends upwards. You may’t see the river beneath. All you may see is razor wire and a discipline kitchen, from which smoke curls: the military on the border. Behind us on the hill is a border guard automobile. The guard drives away. We wander across the hill for some time. We return to the automotive. The guard is ready on the highway. A girl and a person get out. They need to see our IDs. ‘You can’t come any nearer than fifteen metres,’ a closely made-up guard instructs me. Is the border burning? They’re noting us down. They haven’t any proper to do that, however I don’t need to know the remainder of it. It’s chilly, ashen and boring. The guard says, ‘It’s good right here, isn’t it?’

* * *

I need to reclaim the Forest for myself. As a part of the Poetry within the Forest pageant, we go for a stroll to its enclosed kingdom. There’s a warning hanging on the entrance gate: ‘Attention! Soldiers, policemen and other officers! If you enter the Białowieża National Park’s strict safety space by way of the gate with out being on responsibility, you’re breaking the regulation.’ You may solely enter the Forest with a licensed information. Fewer and fewer individuals come right here; they’re afraid. The information exhibiting us round may be very excited; she misses the Forest now that she spends most of her days within the laboratory. The bushes, the good forest infrastructure with lichens clinging to bark, branches protruding from beneath the forest flooring just like the fingers of a drowned particular person calling for assist, fallen bushes sleeping on the bottom – I used to be in a gallery of individuals was pines, spruces, oaks. Daphne was a laurel tree to flee the grasping Apollo. However Apollo wasn’t discouraged: he liked Daphne even within the type of laurel. I imagine that was the case. The Cherokee referred to as bushes ‘Standing People’.

This appears to be what eternity appears to be like like, I then thought. I looked for phrases for it, to no avail. ‘Every poetics,’ writes Glissant, ‘is a palliative for eternity.’ The large primeval Forest on the Polish-Belarusian border is a residing fossil. It hosts many endangered species. Their design amazes me. Their Polish names endearingly tickle my creativeness: fungi pniarek obrzeżony (red-belted conk) and pniarek różowy (Rhodofomes roseus). They resemble auricles. The Forest hears greater than us.

 

A model of this essay will seem in Each Sides Face East: Borders De Todos Lados, Educational Research Press, edited by Christian Fernandez Huerta, Alisa Slaughter and Julia Sushytska, with contributions by Ukrainian, Mexican and different worldwide writers.