Zalfa Feghali: Welcome to Borders Talk, dots, dashes, and the stories they tell. We are Zalfa Feghali…
Gillian Roberts: … and Gillian Roberts, two border studies academics in England's East Midlands from different countries with multiple passports. Today, it's just Zalfa and me having a chat for this episode.
Zalfa Feghali: It does feel like a bit of a doomy day, which we can talk about.
Gillian Roberts: But first, we're going to talk about the film Arrival. And this, I maintain, was Zalfa's idea. Zalfa, why did you want to talk about Arrival?
Zalfa Feghali: I do not at all remember this being my idea. I'm not against this idea. And I'm sure that I wholeheartedly agreed when you suggested it.
[both laugh]
Zalfa Feghali: But I love that you think I suggested it and I think you suggested it. And nonetheless, we both very much want to talk about the film Arrival and the novella “Story of Your Life”. Well, do you want to talk about [Ted Chiang’s] “Story of Your Life”?
Gillian Roberts: Yeah. Yeah, because it's all about the adaptation for me. Yeah, this is obviously a study in reciprocity because we both secretly wanted to do this.
Zalfa Feghali: Well, it is therefore fitting that we want to talk about Arrival and reciprocity in the spirit of reciprocity. Well, I have opinions and I teach… on our sci-fi module I teach Arrival and “Story of Your Life” from a sort of sci-fi perspective, I guess. But I know that you are thinking about it in ever so slightly different terms, and I think they are all very complementary. Although I do have a huge bugbear about the film, which is possibly one of my favourite films in the entire world. I have one major complaint about it, which we can get to if you'd like at some point.
Gillian Roberts: Oh yeah, I always want to hear about the bugbears. I teach this film and Chiang's story also, but I teach them on a module on film adaptation. So I think a lot about the relationship between the text and the film, as I'm sure you do as well. So, gosh, where do we start? Where do we arrive with Arrival?
Zalfa Feghali: How do we arrive at Arrival? I think when I've taught it, we have started with whether the novella can be adapted as it is, or whether Arrival was actually the only possible adaptation of “Story of Your Life” in the way that [Denis] Villeneuve has conceptualized it. How do you tackle that in the teaching?
Gillian Roberts: I would never say there's only one way to adapt a literary text because we've seen throughout cinematic history, multiple adaptations of the same text, usually of a 19th-century novel. So I think there's always different ways of doing it. One of the things that I'm always very keen to impart to students especially those who are Film Studies students working primarily with Hollywood cinemas, is what kind of filmmaking are we talking about when we're talking about films, to riff on Raymond Carver.
[both laugh]
But, and this is really, so much tangential thinking, and I promise we will get around to borders at some point, but I always loved, and I've written about this, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. At one point there was a consortium of people in Canada who wanted the rights to adapt that novel, and they wanted the Armenian-Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan to make that film. And so I used to teach on that same module I teach Arrival on. I used to teach The English Patient adaptation after teaching The Sweet Hereafter adaptation. And I'd say, okay, so if Atom Egoyan had adapted this novel, what do you think would have been different? And then kind of suddenly it's like, oh yeah, it would have been different in all of these ways. That's a really long-winded way of saying there's never a single way of adapting a literary text to my mind. I'm going to bring it back around to borders. Zalfa, for you, what makes you think of Arrival and “Story of Your Life” in relation to borders?
Zalfa Feghali: I think it's a manner of arrival of the visitors. I suppose my question to myself when I watch it is about, at what point are they deemed to have arrived? Is it when we see them or when in the fictive universe everybody can actually see them and they are visible? Or did they arrive a long time ago by our linear sense of chronology when they understood in their sense of time that they would be coming to Earth? I know I mangled that, but it does kind of exercise my mind in a pleasant way. So I think the arrival at the border, where is the border of Earth and how do we know that they have arrived at it? I guess the other subsidiary questions, or maybe they're bigger questions, is who has arrived, who is assessing the arrival, and the different subject positions that every character takes when thinking about the “they” of the heptapods and their arrival. In the short story [novella?], there's a lot about arrivals and departures of different characters as well. So whose arrival is it? I guess. But in terms of thinking about borders, it's when has the border of Earth been breached? Who has arrived and when have they arrived and when have we decided they arrived? And when have we decided they left?
Gillian Roberts: Do you have answers to those questions?
Zalfa Feghali: I have only more questions.
Gillian Roberts: I'm just thinking though, with the visual of what they refer to as shells in the film, and the fact that they're always hovering above Earth, right? Which kind of suggests they never arrive. on Earth anyway. And then there's that moment, of course, when Louise and Ian in the film, for the first time, they go into the ship. And then one of them, I can't remember if it's Louise now or Ian, says, what happens now? And Weber says, they arrive.
Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. And it is very much a sort of dramatic, and only Forest Whitaker could deliver that line in that way. But it's very much a dramatic, “they arrive” and we just… I do sort of groan at that because it's pleasantly corny.
Gillian Roberts: Yeah, yeah. As one of the few sort of title checks of the film. Yeah. I hadn't thought about the, what do we do about the location of the border? I guess because I've always thought about the border as what is referred to as the barrier in the film.
Zalfa Feghali: Yes. The screen, you mean? And I guess, yeah, it kind of throws up further questions about the role of screens and lenses in the film and sight and recognition.
Gillian Roberts: Yeah, yeah. When did you see the film for the first time?
Zalfa Feghali: Oh, when it came out in the cinema. And I was extremely annoying. I am that kind of person in the cinema when I go with particular people who have to put up with me. I was going to say “our hardcore listeners”. When I worked it out, which was about a minute and a half before the sort of big reveal, I turned to my partner and shook him. You know, not a very big cinema. And I said, “this is what it all means. This is how it happened.” And he just looked at me with a combination of incredulity and, you know, “are you seriously doing this in public right now?” And of course I was. So I am one of those very annoying cinema goers, but yeah, I loved it. I was also very excited by the prospect of a film where, you know, I don't necessarily identify with Louise, in terms of her expertise or her specialism, but I was very excited by the prospect of a humanities academic saving the world and our skills being useful in that way.
Gillian Roberts: Woohoo! Big flourish. Yeah. Yeah. Scholarship saves the day. I also saw the film a little bit after its release because it was early 2017 and I went with a friend who had seen it before and who wanted to see it again, my friend Susan. Hi Susan! And I mean, it's obvious why someone would want to see it again, kind of having realized what you revealed to the whole cinema.
Zalfa Feghali: Wonderful stage whisper that probably was audible to everyone around us.
Gillian Roberts: Absolutely. And I spent a lot of time after seeing the film thinking about it and thinking about the political context in which the film was released, which Bran Nicol has written about, you know, he reflects on the election of Donald Trump in the autumn of 2016 with, of course, a lot of discourse around walls, around who is welcome and who is not, a lot of fear mongering. So it seemed like such an important film for our time. And this notion of language being so key as well, which leads me to another observation of mine. Actually, it's not an observation of mine. It's more a delayed realization.
Zalfa Feghali: It's an observation you made.
Gillian Roberts: Yeah, a delayed realization of who directed this film, because I don't think Arrival announces who has directed the film until the very end, as some films do. And It was interesting because as the final credits were rolling, my friend Susan whispered something to me about how beautiful the landscape was in Montana. I was looking at all these names of crew members, were clearly Québécois names. And the fact that Denis Villeneuve had directed it. And then I said, “I don't think that was filmed in Montana.” And I'm a bit of an obsessive about cross-border film adaptation. So that was a big reveal moment for me. It's like, aha, this is like secretly Canadian. And part of, you know, what sometimes gets referred to as a runaway film production, but you know, where Hollywood films are made in usually, well, outside Hollywood, outside California, but sometimes outside the United States altogether, to take advantage of subsidies. Except that in this case, the director is Québécois and he's made some interesting comments about it as well, sort of like bringing home American money to make this film. So all kinds of border stuff going on for me watching this film.
Zalfa Feghali: It does seem like something that you would very much pick up on. And one of the things we have talked about in the past is that you are one of the people who sit in a cinema and stay there until the credits have rolled at the end of the film, whereas I don't.
Gillian Roberts: Well, especially if I have an inkling that it might be a secretly Canadian production, or if it's a film from anywhere really that has some Indigenous representation or Indigenous content, and I want to see like, okay, are they going to thank and acknowledge the Indigenous people and the Indigenous territory. So I will sit there until the bitter end. After the ushers like trying to clean up all the popcorn and get people out of there.
Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, I'm responsible for that popcorn, I should say.
Gillian Roberts: It's your popcorn, Zalfa, damn it. But there's a lot of information in film credits. I mean, obviously there's just like hundreds and hundreds of names, but yeah, I'm still, if I'm watching something at home and I'm still like just typing away on the laptop, trying to see what secrets are being divulged.
Zalfa Feghali: I think it's incredibly important. I have a side question about the credits of this film and whether they do put any acknowledgments at the end, given that we now know where it is.
Gillian Roberts: Do they? I don't think they do. I'll have to rewatch the end. But there will be some acknowledgement, no doubt, of funding agencies north of the border that have contributed to the financial viability of the production. But no, I don't think any reference to Indigeneity is made in the credits themselves. But that wouldn't surprise me because this isn't a film that addresses Indigeneity.
Zalfa Feghali: Well, not overtly?
Gillian Roberts: Not overtly, no, no. And this is why it doesn't surprise me that it's not there. But I think so many of the issues, of course, in terms of the encounter of the humans and the heptapods, we can definitely read from that allegories of contact.
Zalfa Feghali: Absolutely, and the appeals to Indigeneity as well that different characters who represent different elements of society make through violent means. Do you see the film as, well, you've already said that you see the film as very of its time in an important way, sort of a product of, or a reflection or an engagement. And reflection I think is interesting, thinking about the screen again and the mirror.
Gillian Roberts: And the looking glasses as they're referred to in Chiang's story, yeah.
Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, falling through the looking glass and what that means. I think I referred to, one of my bugbears about the film, which I'm very happy to talk about in a minute.
Gillian Roberts: I mean, I'm waiting for the big reveal.
Zalfa Feghali: Well, it's hardly a big reveal. I don't know if I've ranted at you about it, but I've certainly ranted to many people about it. But do you think it's a film that works? As a Film Studies person, do you think it's a film that works?
Gillian Roberts: I mean, I wouldn't say I'm representative of Film Studies generally. But do I think it works? I would throw that question back at you, Zafa. What do you mean by works?
Zalfa Feghali: I suppose there are different ways of thinking about it. Do you think it works effectively as an adaptation? Could be one way of thinking about it. Do we think it works effectively as a way of making us reflect on Otherness, whatever we take that to mean? Do we think it effectively uses the vehicle of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in a way that viewers are really going to understand beyond the theory as a useful plot device?
Gillian Roberts: That is a lot of questions and I think I would answer yes, yes, no. But I'm not a linguist, so if we just take this hypothesis, which to my mind is quite outdated as a concept amongst linguists.
Zalfa Feghali:
Yeah. And it's not in the novella.
Gillian Roberts:
No, although I suppose what Chiang's doing kind of suggests something in line with that. But yeah, I would definitely not claim to be a linguistics expert on that score. Do I think it's a successful adaptation? I try not to use words like “successful” unless I'm looking at like box office receipts…
Zalfa Feghali: Well, let's go with effective.
Gillian Roberts: Effective, yeah. I think it is because I think a weirder film could have been made for sure. Because a weirder film can always be made, and I will put that on a t-shirt. A weirder film can always be made, but probably not with big studio money, right? So it depends on who you want to see the film. But I think that the flash-forwards are confusing enough. It's interesting when I teach this story, some students immediately get something is going on because of the changes in tense that occur at the level of the sentence. And some don't really notice it until the end and then have to revisit it. But I think for the audience watching the film, not knowing that the flash forwards are flash forwards, and then the reveal, I think that is effective, or it was certainly effective with me. In terms of the human and the non-human, what I think is interesting, and I've reread the story many, many times as one does when one teaches something, There's sort of these toss-away, throw-away lines that Louise makes where she kind of compares herself to something alien, but it's like a… she says something like when her daughter doesn't want to be seen with her shopping when she's a teenager. She said, “I'm not a mutant relative”, right? Or things like that, where it's just a figure of speech. But then later on, she is talking about how she sort of absorbed some heptapod thinking. And obviously, she has a different relationship to time in chronology. And in the film, I think sometimes that is visually shown, the point where she puts her hand, I think it's the, “now that's a proper introduction” moment at the barrier. And there's a closeup of her hand on the barrier. And I think the immediate response is the heptapod, or I don't know actually who does it first, but the heptapod sort of puts their appendage against the, well, I'm going to say glass, but it's probably not glass, you know, some alien technology that looks like glass. But there's also kind of the limbs of a heptapod that you see. It's a little bit blurry. It's kind of like an inverted graphic match. So her hand is upright, and then it almost looks like the heptapod limbs behind are
Zalfa Feghali: knuckles.
Gillian Roberts: Yeah, like limbs going down. And I think that's a really nice visual graphic representation of this alignment of at least Louise and the heptapods. Although, of course, any human character could have put their hand there, but they don't. And I think that that is important. But what would you say to those questions that you have? Is it effective for you? And what would you think about the way that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is there?
Zalfa Feghali: I mean, my major complaint, which I'm building up to be-
Gillian Roberts: Is this the bugbear?
Zalfa Feghali: It's about the bugbear, but my major complaint aside, I think it's a great film. I, last night, thought about and then forgot to check my Netflix usage statistics because I'm pretty sure that it's the film that I've watched the most on Netflix since it came onto the platform. I have probably watched it in the thirties of times.
Gillian Roberts: Wow.
Zalfa Feghali: So it is very much one of my favourite films. And the reason that is, is because yes, I do think it's an effective adaptation and I think it's creative enough to become accessible where you have a science fiction text in “Story of Your Life” that is really interesting, but it isn't something that people read necessarily and go, oh, wow, that has completely changed the way that I think about language and time. Because those elements of it aren't foregrounded and it is as a kind of epistolary text, really interesting in those ways, but you don't necessarily see that in the beautiful visuals that Villeneuve has created. So yes, I think it's wonderful and super successful. I think Sapir-Whorf is, as you say, I'm not a linguist either, is outdated in important ways, although I think we all have an experiential moment that we can draw and that we can say, “Okay, I can see how knowing this word in another language” – as a multilingual person myself, and as a person who lives between and across multiple cultures and languages – I can see how that works because I speak different languages when I need to express a different version of myself or a different feeling.
My big bugbear about the film that is about linguistic sensitivity, cultural kind of awareness and self-awareness. And I would expect just so much better from a blockbuster. There are moments in the film where we see kind of what the rest of the world is seeing. So you get footage of what's going on on television, news flashes and so on. And there is one taken from an Arabic news channel. And the Arabic news channel has what we would recognize, even if you do not speak Arabic, you know that this is the breaking news kind of ticker ribbon on the side, and then there's a little banner on the top. And it, in theory, says “breaking news” (خبر عاجل). But the thing with Arabic is that it's a language that is written in cursive. Letters all have to link together in a very specific configuration, but what they have done is sort of AI or machine or non-thinking way of rendering these letters and they all stand individually. So it is largely gibberish nonsense that I would yeah, I don't know what the equivalent is in English, but it would be writing a word backwards and horizontally. It makes absolutely no sense. All it shows to me is not that... I thought to myself, “well, I'm really glad that Arabic is being represented.” However, it's being represented in such a careless [way].
Gillian Roberts:
How hard would it have been?
Zalfa Feghali:
How hard would it have been to have literally anyone have a look at this and say, does this match? Now there are other, which I have not paid close attention to, I will admit that, there are other examples of newscasts in the film that I'm sure have errors in them. But you just think, I mean, it should be done anyway. It's a matter of basic respect and accuracy. And you want people who speak that language to be watching the film. You've made a film because you want people to watch it. You haven't made the film to put it under your office chair. So it does not take a huge amount of effort. I feel like it would have taken upwards of 45 seconds for somebody who speaks any language. Did they have a linguistics consultant? I should ask the person who watched the credits!
[both laugh]
But these are important questions and that matters. And every time I get to that, over the years, over my many, many tens of watching it, it bothers me less and less, but it is something that I always think, aha, just because it's there, just because the representation is there, I and people who speak that language are still being othered within this film about othering. And so it is incredibly successful in that sense, because… just not in the way that it expects to be.
Gillian Roberts: Yeah, absolutely. And the irony, as you say, because it's all about language, but also, and I suppose this goes into, the story goes into more detail about the Chiang story, the nature of Heptapod B, the written language, and there's so much made of how important it is that it's all connected and that everything has the sort of not character exactly but you know the symbol for a heptapod that has these fluid lines going out from it and this it's so important so it just makes it all the more frustrating. I thought you were gonna say the whole revisiting of the Cold War in the with Russia and China as the bad guys. Although, of course, since the invasion of Ukraine... It's taken a different resonance. Yeah, it's taken a bit of a different resonance, but that's certainly something that's come up in classroom, especially before the invasion of Ukraine, where students would be like, “do they need to do that exactly?” You know, that's a little bit stereotypical and it's certainly not in, not in the story by Ted Chiang, Asian American writer. So that's another, a bugbear of mine for sure.
Zalfa Feghali: It does feel a little, I guess the word I look for is opportunistic and, and lazy so, where it, you know, it works as a narrative, but, you know, let's just lean on our traditional Others from this very specific subject position that potentially, I don't know, and I'm not going to speak for him, but potentially Villeneuve and lots of other people don't necessarily occupy or necessarily identify with. It's not Anglophone.
Gillian Roberts: Yeah. Again, it's representing what's meant to be a global experience, but we're only really seeing a US experience of it. That's not to say that there aren't things to say about Canada and the Cold War and complicity, etc. No, no, no. But still, there are some cross-border differences there. So yeah, I think it sits very oddly, that bit. But it does highlight Louise's ability to save the day with her linguistic prowess. Because she's lecturing about Portuguese at the beginning of the film, and then she's speaking Mandarin, and she knows no bounds.
Zalfa Feghali: And I would very much like to hear from anyone who is more expert than I about how her Mandarin is. And how kind of the other examples where we see her speaking or speaking about other languages, how accurate they are in light of my massive complaint.
Gillian Roberts: Well, maybe we should move from talking about the fictional world to talking about borders in the (real) world.
Zalfa Feghali: So borders in the real world, and regrettably and with sadness and rage, I am going to talk a little bit about the so-called Rwanda Bill, which has finally been passed after just about two years of the UK government trying to make it happen. So in our very first episode, which we recorded some time ago, what we did was record a little segment on what we described as a success. We tried to give a little bit of a primer on what the Rwanda Bill was, and our primer was set up against this backdrop of a judicial decision that confirmed that the Bill, which I'll talk about in a minute, was ultimately unlawful.
There is a difference I have learned through reading about this and other things between illegal and unlawful. It was determined to be unlawful when the UK Supreme Court ruled the program unlawful and a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. This was really good for people like us who were against the Bill. The Bill itself sets up a situation in which refugees and asylum seekers arriving in the UK can be deported to a “safe third country”, and that safe third country is Rwanda. Now this is not a scenario in which we are especially complaining about Rwanda. It's very much a complaint about the UK. Unfortunately, we returned to a scenario where the program was ruled unlawful, but then basically what the UK parliament [correction: government] has decided to do is just redefine what unlawful means and wriggle out of the ways that the UK is aligned to international human rights conventions, which is troubling for a number of reasons. The Rwanda Bill is this awful thing that has now been passed and now will q “come into force”, although there are kind of legal routes and channels through which it can hopefully be overturned or undermined. But we're talking about a situation in which this Bill is bound up in intersecting national discourses around the rights of asylum seekers and refugees, controversy about how they get treated when they arrive, controversy around how they arrive, about their being put up in hotels, about how much they cost to, “cost” to UK society, being detained on barges. We hear stories about authorities essentially abandoning refugees and asylum seeking people who arrive here, but we never talk, well, we do, but the government perhaps never talks about the failings of this government and previous governments to do anything except come up with dog whistle policies that appeal to the worst and most populist and nationalistic corners of British society and their sentiments. Those same national feelings, of course, that brought us Brexit.
Gillian Roberts: “taking back our borders”.
Zalfa Feghali: Well, quite. So this final parliamentary decision that was passed just a couple of days ago orders the judicial court or the Supreme Court to ignore any legislation that would block deportation. So they have been instructed to ignore the Human Rights Act and ignore the Refugee Convention. So we're very angry, or I am very angry,
Gillian Roberts: We, we!
Zalfa Feghali: I didn’t want to take your name in vain, Gillian. We're very angry to record this segment then that the Bill has passed and that the Conservative government has also announced that the UK Home Office will now be taking measures to, and I put this in quotation marks, round up and detain asylum seekers in rooms that remind us of ICE raids in the United States and all of this we've said is linked up to Brexit. Very, very importantly, I think something we don't talk about enough, it's linked up to for-profit detention as well, which is another commonality with the US context. Of course, this is all in the context of appealing to right-wing voters in the UK, and I will very much stand by it. So yes, this is a segment called Borders Around the World. We could stop there. We're telling a story about the dehumanization and vilification of refugees and asylum seekers risking their lives to get to the UK. I'm not going to say they are all traumatized and they are all this, but I'm pretty sure that nobody for no good reason decides to change their life in that very specific way. This is also a story about an island that has adopted this defensive posture of vulnerability against a fictional enemy. And it is, in truth, a fiction. The narrative exposition I think that we can offer is a history of decades of crumbling and unmaintained or under-maintained state infrastructure, reckless economic policies, the active erosion and I just think the dismantling of human rights, and the institutionalization of hostile environment policy, which we agree is a fancy way of saying it's okay to be racist.
Gillian Roberts: Yeah, and it's okay to be unlawful, because unlawful is not as bad as being illegal.
Zalfa Feghali: Well, unlawful is only unlawful if we decide to keep it unlawful because we can just change the law so that unlawful doesn't mean unlawful anymore...
Gillian Roberts: ...because Brussels doesn't decide our laws anymore.
Zalfa Feghali: Indeed. So, of course, it's obvious that the Rwanda Bill has cross-border ramifications. We haven't said anything about what it means to leverage a legacy of British imperial and colonial past and present, I suppose. We haven't said anything about how Irish politicians now are making noises about how Ireland has had to deal with far more refugees and asylum seekers.
Gillian Roberts: It's not a competition.
Zalfa Feghali: They say they had to deal with more than before because the UK's Rwanda plan is working. So this is another fictional explanation. So now Ireland, again, this is not a statement from the Irish government. This is just sentiments expressed. Ireland hoping to return refugees and asylum seekers to the UK so that they can go to Rwanda. So really, it's a mind boggling situation. So I guess I wanted to end this bit by aiming for something positive that we can do. So the charity Refugee Action confirms that the UK is no longer a safe haven. [On its website, linked in the Show Notes] It says that everyone needs to know the following:
● that the Rwanda Bill is a one-way ticket to an unsafe place,
● that what we need is safe routes,
● that we cannot stop people coming to the UK so we can do that safely. [We can let them come along safely at least.]
● There is now no right to claim asylum in the UK. Tens of thousands of people will be trapped in the UK but outside the asylum system.
● As importantly as everything else, this is an attack on everyone's human rights.
So I guess for those of us privileged enough to be safe from deportation and from the immediate ramifications of this bill passing, there are things that we can do, and we'll put a list of things that we can all do in the show notes. I guess it's better to be constructively angry and productively angry rather than just angry, I suppose.
Gillian Roberts: One of the many phases, I suppose, of anger.
Zalfa Feghali: Yes, absolutely.
Gillian Roberts: But yeah, constructive anger. It's what those of us in those privileged positions ought to be doing.
Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, we absolutely have a duty. Especially when we don't have the same sort of fear of deportation. Thank you. Gillian, would you like to tell us a story about a border that you have known?
Gillian Roberts: This is quite the juxtaposition to the Rwanda Bill and deliberately so. I want to talk about a border I have known...
Zalfa Feghali: forever.
Gillian Roberts: Forever. Yeah, it's sort of like serial monogamy, me and this border, maybe.
[both laugh]
Anyway, actually, no, is it? Oh, this brings us back to the conversation about arrival. Where is the border? This is the United States border. This is my arrival at the United States border. I didn't even mean to do that, but I did it, didn't I?
Zalfa Feghali: I'm pleased.
Gillian Roberts: Arrival at the United States border, but not from Canada, from the UK. in October 2001.
Zalfa Feghali: Oh, what was what was happening?
Gillian Roberts: What was happening when? Why was I traveling at that time? Is that what you're asking?
Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. Well, why were you traveling at that time, which would have been extremely difficult anyway, but also at the risk of just being nosy about your life? What were you doing in the U.S. in October 2001?
Gillian Roberts: So a couple of things were happening. One, my friend Anna — my dear, dear friend Anna was getting married in Banff in October 2001. And my dear, dear friends, Charles and Lee were moving from Ottawa to Chicago to start their PhDs. So I always had the plan that I would go to Alberta via Chicago so I could see Charles and Lee and then go to Anna's wedding. Okay.
Zalfa Feghali: That makes sense. Yeah, I can, I can see that.
Gillian Roberts: I'm not even sure if I'd bought the plane ticket when the 11th of September occurred because I was waiting to hear from Charles and Lee in terms of dates to go because they had just moved. And they moved shortly before the event of 9/11, which was not a great introduction to life in the U.S. for them. My mom was really concerned. She was like, I've thought about this, and I'm pretty sure Chicago's next. So you shouldn't go to Chicago.
Zalfa Feghali: I mean, we both, we both put a lot of stock in the things that your mom says, but I'm glad she was wrong.
Gillian Roberts: Yeah, so I think she's glad she was wrong as well. I blithely ignored her as one does in their mid-twenties. But I was thinking, like, how is this travel going to go? I'm going to the U.S. very shortly after, like within weeks of a major terrorist attack. So I don't know how this is going to be, right? And I'm a Canadian, traveling on a Canadian passport from the UK. This is a very privileged position to be in, but obviously these were very strange times, and I just didn't really know what to expect. But in the midst of having white Anglo privilege, so, you know, I was obviously going to be in one of the best positions I could have been in as a traveler at that time, and that needs to be emphasized. So I got off the plane and I made my way to immigration. And this is how I was greeted in October 2001.
Zalfa Feghali: Leaning forward with anticipation.
Gillian Roberts: He basically said, “How you doing?”
Zalfa Feghali: Nooooo!
Gillian Roberts: I kid you not. I was like, “Oh, my God. Joey from Friends is now working in Immigration.” Wow. Wow. It was the most casual border crossing of my life, apart from the very brief moment where I had a UK passport that actually meant something in an EU context, and then I just didn't even have to show it. But this was, “how you doing?” And then he asked me what I was doing. And I said, “Oh, I'm here to visit from some friends.” He's like, “Oh, yeah, right, ok!” It was the weirdest, weirdest thing.
Zalfa Feghali: Do you think the person didn't know about 9/11?
Gillian Roberts: Possibly he missed the email because I've never experienced anything like that before or since, even at that border.
Zalfa Feghali: Absolutely bizarre.
Gillian Roberts: So that turned out to have been quite a good day to travel. If anyone does like a heptapod have some time bending capability and want to travel on that day, maybe choose that one, but oh my goodness.
Zalfa Feghali: Well, only if you've got a Canadian passport and you look like Gillian.
Gillian Roberts: But so weird, and just obviously, apart from the totally punctured expectation that this was going to be a difficult thing, sometimes people with privilege are just ever so welcome, even in a time of national crisis. Ludicrously so, I think it's fair to say.
Zalfa Feghali: Wow. I mean, I know that you have a series of stories of your crossings back and forth, some of which you may share in the future with us, but I feel like that is probably the most surprising.
Gillian Roberts: Yes, definitely. And for me too, it still catches me off guard. Did that really happen?
Zalfa Feghali: Two decades later, how actually bizarre. It really did.
Zalfa Feghali: Well, thank you, Gillian, for surprising us.
Gillian Roberts: That's the reveal. That's my reveal.
Zalfa Feghali: That is the big reveal. We had two big reveals this episode, folks. The big bugbear and the border reveal.
Gillian Roberts: And we hope you enjoyed.
Zalfa Feghali: What borders have you known? Tell us your stories.
Gillian Roberts: Until next time, we've been Zalfa and Gillian on the line. Thanks for listening.