Many writers fear paralysis before the blank page. It is commonly known.  Ironically, equally numerous texts have been written about the subject. The notion of writer’s block is now belaboured almost to the point of dullness. My interest here, however, rests on the idea of a block (blockage, blockade) rather than any experience tailored to the rather narrow identifier of ‘writer’ alone.

 

Block (noun)

interruption or cessation especially of train of thought by competing thoughts or psychological suppression

 

(verb)

to make unsuitable for passage or progress by obstruction

 

Blockage (noun)

an act or instance of obstructing: the state of being blocked

 

Blockade (noun)

broadly: a restrictive measure designed to obstruct the commerce and communications of an unfriendly nation

 

In Teju Cole’s Open City, the protagonist is allowed many freedoms. My primary focus when I read the novel for the first time several years ago revolved around the flâneur, as a concept and a character. One who roamed. Scintillating, such access. I, too, wanted to wander unfettered, unchecked. The novel itself seemed to celebrate the very notion, its first words being: And so when I began to go on evening walks… It is—or attempts to be—one extensive intellectual and geographic peregrination. 

 

By the fifth chapter, relatively early on, the protagonist visits a detention centre where irregular migrants are incarcerated. There he meets and listens to Saidu, a survivor of the Liberian Civil War. Saidu flees the military camp on the outskirts of Monrovia, returning to the city on foot. He is transported to the north of Liberia, and then walks again to the neighbouring country of Guinea, from where he is helped into Bamako. In Mali, he is assisted again by a Mauritanian truck driver and carried over to Tangier. Afterwards, he walks to the border between Morocco and Spain where he faces his first obstruction documented in the novel:

 

 

Under what tradition, literary or otherwise, might Saidu’s travels be documented as the movement of a flâneur? Saidu is no loiterer, his travels have a purpose: America. He is no ‘thinker’, no ‘observer of society’, not in the way Cole's protagonist is. What insights might an undocumented immigrant carry about the structuring of society? About the systems that uphold hierarchies and his place within such systems? About the narrativisation of struggle and those whose stories are excluded from national myths? From Spain, Saidu crosses over to Portugal where he spends two years until he flies to New York. It is in America that he experiences a more absolute obstruction. At the time of his conversation with the protagonist, he is scheduled for deportation after twenty-six months in detention but there is no date, just this waiting and waiting… Within the same chapter, shortly after the passage about Saidu, Teju Cole’s protagonist flirts with the idea of a vacation in Brussels. There is no anxiety, no waiting. There is no blockage. He has every right to be there, being an American, being middle-class.

 

Who gets to wander? How does the State—the overarching Limit/Barrier/Block—intervene upon our impulse to roam? For many, the inhibitions posited by the State are only made explicit during attempts at trans-national passages. The tyranny of borders, and the inhumanities of airport officials as they question and search. The threat and actualisation of violence. At the margins of the State, all blockages become not only apparent but conspicuous. Yet, we find solace in the liberty to move within our nation-states without barriers that exceed the intermittent interrogation by government forces. A few police stops along the road during a drive from one town to the other are nothing compared to the fear of deportation or detention. For people living under apartheid, however, perpetual blockage becomes the daily reality. 

 

In an acceptance speech for the Berlinale Documentary Award, Israeli filmmaker Yuval Abraham, standing next to Palestinian co-director Basel Adra, mentioned, We live 30 minutes from each other but [...] I am free to move where I want in this land. Basel, like millions of Palestinians, is locked in the occupied West Bank. In Palestine, under Israel’s settler-colonial regime, the familiar geographies of home are equally oppressive as any border control measure. They offer little respite. For Palestinians living in Gaza, daily stop-searches devolve into bombardments and displacement. The blockage expands, pushing millions from their homes in Northern Gaza towards Rafah, in the Southern Gaza Strip, bordered by Egypt. While over 1.5 million Palestinians resist settler colonialism in Rafah, blockades are enacted, and the people are refused food and medicine by the Israel ‘Defence’ Forces—one might wonder how genocide, including the massacre of children, constitutes ‘defence’. Under occupation, the resident becomes a prisoner. A friendly visit might extend into indefinite incarceration (but there is no date, just this waiting and waiting...) The wanderer, the ‘flâneur’ becomes a fugitive. Under occupation, benign writer’s block does not exist. Rather, psychological and physiological suppression. Rather, censorship. Rather, the assassination of poets and storytellers. 

 

What hegemonies are predicated upon the creation of the prisoner and the fugitive? White supremacy. Racial capitalism. Ethno-nationalism. Genocidal rhetoric. Settler colonialism.

 

While Israel threatens further attacks against Rafah, we continue to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. We resist the notion that freedom is only befitting to a certain category (race/nationality/class, etc) of person. Borders, barriers, blockades are not intrinsic to human life. We resist the brutality inherent in the hegemonic values sustained by the restriction, obstruction, incarceration and eventual capitulation of the black and brown body. We call for a free Palestine in our lifetime. We call for a free Palestine now.

 

unwavering,

Ese Emmanuel.