Welcome: Connecting (Some) Dots

Gillian would like to state for the record that Zalfa is also the real deal.

In other matters:

What is the plural of “impetus”?
The answer, improbably, is impetuses!
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780199661350.001.0001/acref-9780199661350-e-2776 (We note that this tracks, given one acceptable plural for “ignoramus” is “ignoramuses” – a word we use Very Often Indeed these days)

Find out more about David W. McFadden’s border-crossing travels in Great Lakes Suite: https://talonbooks.com/books/?great-lakes-suite

Here’s a very basic primer on British colonialism (in Ireland and Canada, but also elsewhere): https://daily.jstor.org/britains-blueprint-for-colonialism-made-in-ireland/

What is a Safe Third Country?
https://www.unhcr.org/uk/media/safe-third-country-concept-international-agreements-refugee-protection-assessing-state

What is the “Rwanda Bill” or “Rwanda Plan”?
https://www.unhcr.org/uk/what-we-do/uk-asylum-policy-and-illegal-migration-act/uk-rwanda-asylum-partnership

Here’s the full text of the High Court Judgement:
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/AAA-v-SSHD-judgment-290623.pdf 

We will be revisiting the “Rwanda Bill” in light of more recent updates in Episode 3. Stay tuned!

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the University of Leicester's School of Arts, Media and Communication for use of recording equipment; to India Downton for her invaluable expertise; and to the Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK and the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

Transcript

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.

Gillian Roberts: Zalfa is Associate Professor in American Literature at the University of Leicester, where she has worked since 2016. She's a specialist in U.S. and Canadian literature and culture with expertise in border studies, citizenship studies, and vulnerability studies. She's published one monograph, Crossing Borders and Queering Citizenship: Civic Reading Practice in Contemporary American and Canadian Writing, which came out with Manchester University Press in 2019. And she is co-editor with Deborah Toner of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands She's the convener of the British Academy-funded Vulnerability Studies Network, and she is currently AHRC Research Development and Engagement Fellow and PI on a project entitled Vulnerability: a Research Method for Literary and Cultural Studies, which runs from January 2022 for two years. Out of this project will emerge her second monograph provisionally entitled, Alone, Missing, Murdered, Reading for Vulnerability Across North American Borders, which looks at US, Canadian, and Mexican cultural responses to intersecting and ongoing hemispheric cross-border crises of race and gendered vulnerability. Zalfa is also a big fan of future naps.

Zalfa Feghali: Gillian is a settler Canadian scholar who grew up on Algonquin and W̱SÁNEĆ territories. She's been at the University of Nottingham since 2008, where she is now Professor of Contemporary Literature and Culture, where she teaches Canadian literature and culture, Canada-US border studies, and film adaptation. Gillian is, in my view, incredibly accomplished and has experience in higher education across borders in both the UK and Canada. She studied at the University of Victoria and Carleton University and received her PhD from the University of Leeds in the UK. She's worked at the University of Western Ontario, which is now Western University. Leeds Met, now Leeds Beckett University, and the University of Nottingham. Gillian is the author of three books, including her second monograph, Discrepant Parallels, Cultural Implications of the Canada-US Border, and she's editor and co-editor of two others, all inquiring after different but intersecting implications of Canadianness. And just a few months ago in April 2023, she published Race, Nation and Cultural Power in Film Adaptation, that was with Edinburgh University Press. Everything I've read of Gillian's is animated by this carefully articulated and ethically considered preoccupation with the concepts and practices of citizenship, belonging, hospitality, and of course, borders. This care in her research extends beyond her own writing. Gillian was the co-investigator on the Culture and the Canada-US Border International Research Network with David Stirrup at the University of York. I can say with confidence that through the network and beyond, she and David, who's going to join us on a future episode, have mentored and supported a huge number of scholars, including me, and developed a border studies community in the UK, including this podcast. Gillian is the real deal. Her next project is with Wilfrid Laurier University Press and is on writing settlement after Idle No More. Finally, and probably most importantly, Gillian is the haver of many excellent things that are blue.

Gillian Roberts: So Zalfa, what made you interested in border studies?

Zalfa Feghali: So I have some notes here that are now incomprehensible. and I sort of don't know the answer. I've written down “vocabulary, interdisciplinarity, and intellectual home,” and obviously I know why I wrote those down, but it's probably because border studies is a way to give or provide a vocabulary for the experiences that I have had over the course of my intellectual and, I guess, actual life, as we'll probably talk about later. I grew up in places where borders were both architecturally visible, but also socially embedded and invisible. It became very commonplace to exist within and around and across these borders, but I didn't know that it was probably not necessarily everybody's lived experience. This is the autobiographical version. Border studies has given sense to a lot of my personal experiences, if that makes sense at all.

Gillian Roberts: A hundred percent. Do you want to say more about those places that you're referring to?

Zalfa Feghali: I grew up in the Middle East on the Mediterranean across Cyprus, which is, for me as a child, a great place to grow up. So it's an island. Then from 11, 12 years old, I lived in Lebanon, which has a whole bunch of actual and again imagined borders. I'm half-Cypriot, so I spent those first formative years of my life with everywhere huge maps of the island with a black line. Imagine a line drawn in Sharpie across the northern third of the island, delineating where the island was, as they would say in the South, occupied by Turkey. My family is from the North, so there was this really personal, you know, we can never go to where we're from. I don't know who I am because I've never been to the place where I'm from or the places where I'm from. One of them doesn't even exist anymore. I think it's an airport. So it was very much sort of embedded in everyday life, everyday thinking. Even as a child, watching the news in Cyprus, right before the equivalent of the six o'clock news, they have stills of old postcards of these old cities, or I suppose they are current cities, with the words running across them that say, we will never forget. We will never forget these places. So place and borders really played an important role, I think, in that intellectual genesis. But I think enough about me now, Gillian. Why border studies for you?

Gillian Roberts: Well, I think similarly to you, although radically different in so many ways, but a lot of it is really about my life experiences, but not with those Sharpie drawn versions of borders, but those very faint dots and dashes on maps. So I was born, as you mentioned, in Algonquin territory in what is now referred to as Canada, in the city of Ottawa, which is right on the border with the province of Quebec. Ottawa, as I suppose befits a capital city of an officially bilingual nation, is basically a bilingual city. I went to a very strange school, a Catholic school run by nuns, all for girls, and it was a bilingual school. So, although French immersion programs are reasonably common in urban Canada, this was a bilingual school, so half of our education was in English and the other half in French. And half the class was from the Quebec side of the border. And they all came just speaking French. And then there was us from Ontario, and we only spoke English, and then, you know, sort of knew each other's languages by the time we finished at that school. And also it was a Catholic school, but so many different religions represented amongst the girls who went there. So I always joke that we were like this like Trudeauvian poster children, you know, in the early ‘80s.

Zalfa Feghali: I've always thought of you as a poster child.

Gillian Roberts: Oh, well, thank you. Thank you very much. So yeah, the differences of like, you cross the river, you cross the Ottawa River, La Rivière des Outaouais, the Kiji Sibi for the Algonquin, and then those bilingual signs disappear, right? Because then you get into the language issues in Quebec. Incidentally, at that point, across the river, it used to be called Hull, which is of course the name of an English town as well. But it now is referred to as Gatineau. So anyway, we lived in, this is the story of my life! We lived in Ottawa until I was nearly 11, but my parents were both from British Columbia, and then we moved to BC. So we still hadn't crossed a national border, but crossing all those provincial borders, it was just so interesting how things were already different. I left Ottawa a few weeks, I think, into the school year. Education is provincial in Canada, so they're all out of sync with each other. I learned French differently depending on, you know, whether I was being educated by French Canadian nuns. I say that term because I'm not sure if they were actually Québécois or not. They might've been Franco-Ontarian. I didn't think to ask them when I was that small. But for anyone learning French in Quebec or Quebec adjacently, I suppose, the meals of the day are déjeuner, dîner, souper, and then always being corrected in BC because I should have been saying instead the much more French version of petit déjeuner, déjeuner, dîner, right? And there were all kinds of differences in education as soon as I crossed those borders. So what happened when we moved to W̱SÁNEĆ territory in and around Victoria, BC is that invisible line on the map, which is mostly the 49th parallel, which is the Canada-US border, once you get west of Ontario. It then dips below Vancouver Island. So there was always this awareness that actually Victoria was south of the 49th parallel, as is lots of other bits of Canada, you know, much further to the east. And when I was at the University of Victoria, one of my friends, hello, Aubri Keleman, if you're listening, is from Bellingham. And sometimes I'd visit her and her family and her little sister (she's not little anymore, she's an adult!). Her younger sister would ask me to say things and would make fun of my accent. And like regionally, there's a lot that connects British Columbia with Washington state, especially Southern British Columbia and Northern Washington state. But we could hear these differences in our accents and the way I said “tomorrow” and “sorry” and things like that. So I've always been interested in these differences that invisible lines make. And I started to think about this more in some of my work when I was doing a PhD on prize-winning authors, including Carol Shields, who was from the U.S. and then moved to Canada and wrote in interesting ways, I thought, about that border. And I kept up that interest into my postdoc, which eventually would become my second monograph on cultural implications of the Canada-U.S. border. And one day before I finished my PhD, I was sitting in a supervision with my supervisor, Lynette Hunter, and I had terrible hay fever. I never had hay fever in Canada. And then I have terrible hay fever in this country that I've ended up in because I suppose it's not my pollen, is it? And she grabbed these books off her shelf by David McFadden, an Anglo-Canadian poet, A Trip Around Lake Erie and A Trip Around Lake Huron and said, “Here, this will cure your hay fever.” Spoiler alert, it didn't. It doesn't cure hay fever. But I just loved the way in which he treated this bizarre effect that borders can have. And I especially love this bit from A Trip Around Lake Huron, when he says, “We walked around a village known as Sailor's Encampment. The channel between us and Nebbish Island was only about a hundred feet wide. You could almost pick out the dots and dashes of the international boundary glistening in the waves.” So hence one of the impetuses. Impetuses? Impeti? I don't know. What is the plural of impetus?

Zalfa Feghali: We're going to have to Google it.

Gillian Roberts: We're going to have to Google it! Anyway, but that's what we're referring to with these dots and dashes. And I just love this idea of natural elements like, you know, the waters of a Great Lake, just really sticking two fingers up to these human artificial boundaries.

Zalfa Feghali: We're now at a point where we can introduce our segment called Borders in the World, which is a segment that we'll be revisiting regularly, we imagine, because it's about borders, how they are manifesting in texts, how they're manifesting in the news, border issues as they present themselves to us in different ways. In short, when borders talk to us. Gillian, Do you have a border in the world today?

Gillian Roberts: I think we, all of us, have many borders every day, especially those of us who, you know, live far away from where they grew up, but sometimes borders crossing them, which is something that we will revisit many, many times over the course of this podcast. Yes. I recently went to Toronto for a conference. And the great thing about air travel, which is almost nothing, but one of the great things, if you study and teach Canadian cinema, and you don't live in Canada.

Zalfa Feghali: Which you qualify as

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, one of the great things if you're me, to be specific, is that you fly back to Canada on a Canadian airline, and suddenly there are some Canadian films that you've never heard about because they're not being advertised where you live, and you can watch them on the plane. So I've stumbled on many excellent films in this way, although I have to say in this era of streaming, I then find it very difficult to revisit some of these films. So what happened to the DVD, asked this Generation X scholar. Anyway, either on the way to Toronto or on the way back, I'm not sure, but they were both Air Transat flights. I saw a Quebec film called Au Nord d'Albany or North of Albany, I imagine, in English. I was watching it with subtitles, though, so don't be too impressed. It was directed by Marianne Farley, came out in 2022, and it tells a story of a single mom, Annie, in Montreal, and she's got two kids by different dads. This is relevant. It's not judgy. Her daughter, Sarah, and her son, Felix. And Sarah is Black. And her son is white. Annie's also white. And Sarah has been bullied at school, really viciously. And I think implicitly because of her racialized identity, although that's not what the bullies explicitly refer to. They refer to her sexuality instead, because she's a queer character. This bullying escalates in terms of violence. By the way, I should have said spoiler alert, because this is all stuff that unfolds over the course of the film.

Zalfa Feghali: We’ll put it in the tag of the episode.

Gillian Roberts: She has a physical altercation with her bully outside of school and pushes the bully away and she dies. The bully, that is. And so Annie, you know, when you first encounter them, she's like rushing to get her kids out of the house in the middle of the night because that's her panicked response is like to get her daughter's safety across the US border. Her daughter's father lives in Florida. Her son has no idea why they're leaving in the middle of the night. I think she says that they're going to like Disneyland. I think it's called now. It was Disney World when I went as a kid.

Zalfa Feghali: I think it's still Disney World in Florida. Another thing to Google. The list lengthens.

Gillian Roberts: The list lengthens. Anyway, so they cross into the States. They're in the Adirondacks, apparently, and their car breaks down, and they can't get it fixed very easily. They're dealing with a very surly mechanic who's played by Rick Roberts. I mention that, because Rick Roberts, as certainly people of my generation know, is a Canadian actor. So of course I'm watching this film thinking, a) you're probably not in Canada, and no, indeed they were filming this in Quebec. I mean, not surprising in many ways. This very morose, taciturn American mechanic is just Rick Roberts (I just can't remember his character’s name), the guy from Traders. Anyway, he's got a daughter as well who has some interesting scenes with Sarah later on. And he is a tortured soul. And again, more spoilers, it turns out that the reason he's such a tortured soul is that his wife was killed in a school shooting. She's a teacher. Right? And spoiler alert, it kind of ends all okay in many ways. They decide to go back to Montreal and own up to what happened, etc. But I thought it was really interesting because on the one hand, this version of Canada that Canada itself likes to peddle of being a multicultural society and everyone lives in mosaic harmony, which is not the case. It elides all kinds of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity and anti-Asian racism, etc. So I think that that is being punctured, especially in relation to the States, the position of Canada as being far more queer-friendly and the introduction of same-sex marriage much earlier in Canada before it was in the US. So there's a sense in which that kind of version of Canada is being pushed back against. And I say Canada, but it's happening within Quebec, and it is problematic to conflate the two in many ways, although not necessarily in settler terms, but that's not somewhere that the film goes particularly. But at the same time, it's really underscoring what Canadians might think about the US, which is this association with gun violence, right? And the trauma of the school shooting. And that's not to say that those school shootings don't happen: they do. And obviously that is a horrific ongoing crisis in the United States. But I just thought it was a really interesting way of pulling out some of those more common associations with each of these countries. And I have to say that I'm not nearly as well versed in Canada-U.S. border representations from Quebec as I am from the rest of Canada.

Zalfa Feghali: Is that something that you think would work well as a teachable film?

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, I think it could be a really interesting contrast with a film like Frozen River, actually, from the other side of the border, right? And it's exploring different things. Obviously, there's the whole element of going through Mohawk territory in Frozen River, but it's directed by a white American woman. But the sense of these desperate crossings and what makes them desperate for what reasons and the kind of gendering of that border crossing: I think really interesting dialogues could be had around a comparison.

Zalfa Feghali: It sounds like you have more to say. I mean, certainly you got off the plane and got on the train to Nottingham and texted me immediately to say, “I watched this amazing film. I don't know how I will see it again. We need to talk about it on the podcast.” I'm pretty sure that that is verbatim.

Gillian Roberts: That's probably what happened. It's a good thing we have because now I have a closer record of what I thought of it than I will in a few months' time when maybe I'm not taking another Air Transat flight and I’ve just forgotten.

Zalfa Feghali: Well, if anybody does have access to the DVD in any way, please let us know so Gillian can get a copy.

Gillian Roberts: It's for a good cause, I promise.

So now we come to our segment, Borders I Have Known, in which we will talk about an experience that we have had or that we have witnessed about border crossing. So Zalfa, what is a border that you have known?

Zalfa Feghali: This probably requires a little bit of context, which I will hopefully provide coherently. I mentioned that I grew up as a young child in Cyprus, and so the border there, of course, other than the physical man-made border in the middle of the island, because it's an island nation, the border is all of the island. The border is the sea. We know that sea borders can make a place more hostile to outsiders, because they can give an impression of being constantly under threat, as we see in recent populist political posturing in the UK, for example. which we might want to cut out of the final version of the podcast, but we might not.

Gillian Roberts: Leave it in!

Zalfa Feghali: Leave it in. Growing up, I always felt that the sea was a pulse, because you can pretty much see it from everywhere on the island, if you're high up enough, I guess. It did feel like the sea, which was constantly in motion, you know, a nod to those dots and dashes from earlier, constantly in motion. This border was always moving; this border was always in flux. It felt like where we were was the whole world. We lived in the whole world at the same time as we lived in this tiny, tiny place where pretty much nobody can find on a map, and where lots of people just describe as Greece, which by the way, it ain't. But I think the border that I wanted to talk about, the kind of lived experience of border that speaks more to the invisible borders that you were describing earlier, Gillian, was in Beirut. When we moved to Beirut just after the formal end of the civil war, the city was split. It was split among many lines, but it was split very starkly along what was called the Green Line, dividing the city between East and West. East was where majority, I might say, Christian people lived or people who would perhaps identify or be identified as Christian people, and the West was where Muslim people lived. It was very controversial to move regularly across. I'm talking in 1994, ‘95, ‘96. It was very controversial to move across the border very regularly. It wasn't a physical border, but it was very much you would get in a taxi. So I would get in a taxi to go to school, say, and they would say, oh, you want to go over there and describe that side of the border. Again, on the other side, when I was wanting to get home, I would be asked, oh, why do you want to go over to the other side?

Gillian Roberts: Sorry, you had to do this every day? You had to have this conversation twice a day, every day.

Zalfa Feghali: If we weren't being picked up and dropped by my parents, yeah. And anyone who has grown up in the Middle East or in Beirut will be able to testify to this and probably not be very happy with the simplistic way that I've put it here, but there was very much that you're from the East or you're from the West. Now that has, for all intents and purposes, fallen apart, and it is far more nuanced than an East or West identity. I really clearly remember these older guys, taxi drivers, saying, why would you want to go there? With sort of part-fear, part-disdain, part-trauma because civil wars are extremely traumatic events, as it turns out, and even more traumatic when you, across generations, decide not to address it in any way. But I'm moving away from borders now and onto a different rant, which I could probably have for far too long. So yes, that border, in case it wasn't obvious, we went to school on one side and we lived on the other. We went to school in a really amazingly multicultural international school that had its place in this amazingly multicultural international city that was quietly split along this border for this boundary, I guess, for a good long while. So that's my border that I have known. What border have you known?

Gillian Roberts: That's a border that you knew very, very well and in such a, yeah, just the quotidian-ness of it, I think, is what makes it so, so, you know, verklempt making. You know, there's just this sense of how that had to be baked into your day. I thought of all the borders I have known, and I should say that I have been a very privileged border crosser throughout my life. And I wanted to tell a story where that was really stark, and it's the story of coming to this country, not for the first time, because I had previously been to the UK on holiday, which is another mark of privilege, but this is the story of when I came to be a student in the UK. And it was the year 2000, so one year before a pretty large event that had a big geopolitical impact. As a Canadian who was arriving to be a PhD student in the UK, I did not need a visa. I literally rocked up to the border control at Heathrow airport. My course was officially a three-year course, as is sort of par for the course in the UK, a three-year PhD. But my funding, which is another mark of privilege, my funding was from SSHRC in Canada. I had some funding to cover my fees in the UK and then what we would call “maintenance” in the UK was going to be covered by my SSHRC doctoral fellowship, and that was for four years. Now, as pretty much everyone knows in the UK, nobody does a PhD in three years. Everyone does a PhD in four years, and you have your writing up or thesis pending or whatever.

Zalfa Feghali: And that's totally reasonable, if you're listening.

Gillian Roberts: It's totally reasonable. We completely applaud the four-year PhD. But anyway, I had these documents that said I was accepted onto this three-year PhD program. I had this funding for four years. And the person at border control said, why is your funding for more years? And I said, oh, just in case it takes me longer. And they said, OK. And they probably gave me a four-year stamp in my passport, and I had friends who, people I hadn't met yet, but I had friends who were in a very similar situation who didn't get that, you know, they just kind of had the three-year, it was just a fluke of that conversation. So as I'm being waved through fairly, well, completely painlessly, I turn and I see, I think, another student, not from Canada. I don't know what flight they'd come in on. I don't know where they were from. I know that they were struggling to understand the English of the border control, who was essentially barking at this person that they needed to go get an X-ray in case they were sick.

Zalfa Feghali: Oh my gosh.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. And I don't know how long they traveled. It was clearly a disorienting and confusing situation to be in. And for a person who would go on to write about hospitality, although I did not know yet that that's what I wanted to do. This has always been a really powerful reminder of who is the welcome guest and who is not. So this is a border I cross frequently. I now have a passport that lets me go through those gates very easily, but I'm always reminded that most people don't get to cross quite so easily. 

Zalfa, what's your Borders in the News?

Zalfa Feghali: Listeners familiar with the UK context, and I'm not sure how many that will be, so I will go into a little bit of detail, will be aware that the country has been, for the last few years, embracing a quote-unquote “hostile environment” policy to try to deter people from “illegally” coming and staying in the UK. And again, the scare quotes are everywhere. And so if you're not sure what that entails, and I know you are, Gillian, it means that people who don't have, again, quote unquote, “leave to remain” in the UK have their lives increasingly structured by difficulty and a lack of access to processes and policies and the benefits of living in society. So there have been many developments in the UK that we can read as part of the same broad hostility to foreigners and appeals to indigeneity and nativism that I'll talk about in a minute. But my Borders in the World story is actually for once a good news story. It's a good news border story wrapped up in centuries worth of terrible borders news stories. So...

Gillian Roberts: A small bit of good news

Zalfa Feghali: A very small bit of good news, but it is nonetheless good. But in order to tell you the good news story, I've got to tell you some bad.

Gillian Roberts: So much bad news.

Zalfa Feghali: But I won't go too far back, so you won't get centuries worth. In 2022, the Conservative government in the UK at the time announced that a new immigration policy would see asylum seekers and so-called “illegal” immigrants, and I should just say nobody is illegal. This policy would see these folks being quote-unquote “relocated” to Rwanda. So you risk your life and have a terrible traumatic journey and arrive in the UK and you are quote-unquote “relocated” to Rwanda. There, when they get to Rwanda, they can apply for asylum and be quote-unquote “resettled” in Rwanda, I should say. They've tried to move to the UK. Re-moved to Rwanda. So it's worth stopping here, I guess, for a moment. And I've written this out in my notes, in capitals, to say that there is not enough time in the world, past and present, to explain how deeply wrong and awful this is. But I'll try a little bit. So without trying to entirely derail the episode, what I want to say is that the hostile environment principle is made even more complex by the fact of the UK being an island. And I've talked a little bit about sort of my position on islands, which tends to be positive. I don't want to reduce this whole problem to this single geographical factor, because it overlooks the whole history of UK settler colonization in Ireland and Many, capital M, Other, capital O, Countries, capital C. So I think listeners should go ahead and read widely about this and we'll put some starting points maybe in the show notes. But the island state element has been exploited by several elements of the UK political arena to spin a complex and paradoxical and contradictory narrative around borders. They draw on weird claims of indigeneity, you know, “we are from here,” quote unquote, we are from here, and sovereignty. These claims suggest that the state is both extremely vulnerable at all times, but also stronger because of its sea borders and islandness. So it's kind of a discourse that if you think about it in any deep way, makes no sense. But it is pushing all of these buttons. So this context has allowed these same elements of the UK political spectrum to criminalize and demonize anyone who wants to live in the UK, who does not enter the country legally. And so I should say it's very difficult to “legally,” quote unquote, enter an island. To make things more complicated for folks who aren't always paying attention, recently, the story that's being told is that the many people crossing the channel between mainland Europe and the UK are themselves victims of criminal smugglers who are bringing them across. So it is a deferral of any kind of thinking or responsibility or accountability. And in response then to this broader national sentiment of xenophobia, which we have seen building over the last decades, the government has announced this raft of legislation to curb illegal immigration, contributing to that hostile environment, and the Rwanda plan is part of that. So the good news is that the UK Court of Appeal has ruled, as of the 29th of June [2023], that the Rwanda plan is unlawful.

Gillian Roberts: Hooray!

Zalfa Feghali: Because Rwanda does not constitute a safe third country. And I think maybe we can talk in a minute about what we mean by safe third countries. We'll leave a link to the ruling in the show notes, because it's actually a really interesting read. And the bottom line is that this is a good thing, and we need to be happy about this good thing. But the ruling that the Court of Appeal has published, or has made and published, dismissed a lot of the other elements of that appeal. So those bodies who lodged the appeal had a series of arguments that they made, and they were all dismissed except for this safe third country argument. And even in that dismissal of the safe third country argument, the dismissal wasn't because this is inhuman and nobody should ever experience this. It looked like it hinged on a technicality. So this is obviously not the end of the story, and we know the current government seems compelled to use every dog whistle at its disposal in this single-minded mission to quote-unquote, I guess, “take back control of its borders.” And there are probably a few things to draw out here. But yeah, that's my good news story for once. I don't tend to think about good news.

Gillian Roberts: You never think about good news and Suella Braverman in the same sentence or brain activity, do you?

Zalfa Feghali: Not personally. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure her friends like her. Oh, well. Yes, Suella Braverman, again, for those who don't follow UK politics very closely, is the woman who said that she had this dream of an airplane full of asylum seekers taking off and going to Iraq.

Gillian Roberts: Was that her joyous Christmas gift to herself? There was some weird Christmas-y thing where she had this look of...

Zalfa Feghali: Wonder! It was a miracle!

Gillian Roberts: It was like the saints’ kind of experience when they've...

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, the rapture!

Gillian Roberts: The rapture. She was rapturous around some, you know, Christmas-y thing about this vision that she had. Really, really ghoulish. So if you're not in the UK, be glad that you aren't exposed to...

Zalfa Feghali: ...thinking about these images and these sorts of opinions. I mean, it's worth saying that Braverman is the face and figurehead of this policy, and it's not merely one person spearheading this campaign, although it's very difficult to separate that, I guess is what I'm trying to say. I've heard a lot of comments about Braverman and before her Priti Patel that were extremely gendered in the sort of criticisms of their border policy. And we don't want to contribute to that, but they're not helping.

Gillian Roberts: They're not helping. And I've just realized that the term I was thinking of was the “ecstasy,” you know, the ecstasy. Yeah, yeah. The ecstasy of Suella Braverman is this vision of planes full of asylum seekers being returned.

Zalfa Feghali: There has to be a Banksy stencil in there somewhere.

Gillian Roberts: Banksy, are you listening?

Zalfa Feghali: Tell us your border story!

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.