Good Neighbors

I saw a great decription of the domino effect of the Mumbai attacks on Rachel Maddow's show. It's frightening to see what is at stake here and to see just how precarious these international balancing acts can be.

I've been thinking a lot about Pakistan and India today because of one of my students who is doing her thesis symposium on Robert's Frost's "Mending Wall."
Here's the poem:

"Mending Wall" by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Robert Frost's poems are incredibly nuanced and therefore subject to myriad interpretation but let me offer one here:

In 1947, the newly independent India partitioned itself into India and Pakistan in order to give its Muslim minority a country of their own. Perhaps you remember the scene in Gandhi of droves of Hindus and Muslims passing each other along the Pakistani border as they leave their respective homes.

Since then we have seen various wars and a continuing tension between Pakistan and India, now two nuclear powers.

Although these countries have differing religious majorities who had a past of violent conflict when part of the same country, this separation has not done anything to ameliorate that conflict. And now, instead of individuals not liking neighbors they know, you have entire nations distrusting "those people" across the border. Good fences make good neighbors?

When we look at many of the international conflicts around the world, we see so many examples of once coexisting ethnicities or religious groups now living on the other side of fencelines.

Jews and Muslims used to live together throughout Palestine and now we have neverending paranoia and violence.

Greeks used to live in Turkey and Turks lived in Greece. However, in 1923 two million of these people exchanged places. Now, instead of a healthy ethnic population in each country contributing to increaing cultural empathy, Turkey considers Greece one of its greatest enemies.

Probably the most obvious example of a wall dividing people is the Berlin Wall. For decades we witnessed hair trigger distrust between people speaking the same language and sharing the same religion. Then, when the wall came down, we saw an immediate warm embrace between once-curtained neighbors.

Frost in his poem is arguing that these walls and divisions we build only increase our distrust of others. In the middle of the poem, he writes:

"Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence."

Frost is arguing that when we put up these walls or increase national "defense" spending or talk disdainfully of "those people" we need to take a second and look at ourselves. Are we putting up this wall to protect ourselves from the violence and distrust coming from across the fenceline or are we putting up the wall because we know our own tendency toward violence and distrust and are projecting it onto our neighbor? If we mean no harm towards them, why are we so quick to believe that they mean great harm to us?

It's worthy of note that in Antakya, Turkey (also referred to as the Hatay region) Muslims, Jews and Christians live and have lived for centuries peacefully in the same community and many of them claim this peaceful coexistence as a point of pride.

Although building walls is often a quick fix for stopping or abating violence as recently evidenced in Sadr City, Iraq, the long result is a creation of unfamiliarity and foreignness among people who once knew each other. This leads to abstract nationalism and the willingness to watch bombs killing "those people" on green screens on CNN.

What are we walling in and to whom next are we like to give offence?


Now for that Rachel Maddow video. Wait through the Robert Gates news. The Pakistan analysis follows: