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“Our age is a checkpoint,” writes Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah. The photograph on this issue’s cover, taken by Alex Webb, depicts a fence in California dividing Mexico and the US. The photo to the left, taken by Staff Sgt. Manuel J. Martinez of the US Air Force, shows a checkpoint in Amariya, Iraq, east of the American military’s Camp Victory. Our world seems ever more crowded by walls intended to keep people in or keep them out, so perhaps it is unsurprising that references to borders and border guards around the globe crop up again and again in the pages that follow.
Ahmed Ali, an interpreter and journalist who fled Baghdad in 2006, recalls flashing a fake ID at a checkpoint in Iraq so he could report on a village’s response to Saddam Hussein’s arrest. Later Ali’s brother-in-law disappeared after being stopped at another checkpoint. Rabih Alameddine, who grew up in Beirut, tells Aleksandar Hemon, who grew up in Sarajevo, about his cousin who got stopped at a checkpoint and knew she was going to die. She started telling her life story—and they let her pass. “We are both from what I call ‘death on the shoulder’ cultures,” Alameddine says. “Many of my relatives saved themselves by entertaining people with guns.”
Other writers take a more metaphorical approach to barriers and boundaries and the openings that sometimes allow us to get to the other side. Sarah Ruhl’s Orpheus travels from overworld to underworld, riding a note of his music straight to the Door of the Dead. Joshua Furst’s narrator drives frantically through psychological territory, somewhere between denying responsibility and acknowledging disaster. Yousef Al-Mohaimeed’s corpse washer recalls a moment that divided her life in two, while Xiaolu Guo’s call girl seems caught between her present and her past. Young-ha Kim juxtaposes death and its simulation, beginnings and their ends. [More]
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Reunion
Soap and Ambergris
A Little Explosion
From The Butterfly's Burden