Borders and Water

Haven’t read Delacroix’s Small Boat yet? You know what to do! Head to your local independent bookshop, or borrow a copy from your library.

Lines Drawn upon the Water is the title of a collection edited by Karl S. Hele about First Nations people in the Great Lakes borderlands.

Speaking of the Great Lakes, our favourite line of David W. McFadden’s about Lake Huron is (still) from Great Lakes Suite.

Behold the (UK) cover of Yann Martel’s 2001 novel Life of Pi. 

For more on the UK and France’s “one in, one out” deal, see this piece by Matilde Rosina.

Three-year-old Alan Kurdi and his family died in September 2015.

For information about Australia’s detention policies, see the Refugee Council of Australia’s website.

Read Kent and Syla’s piece on small island nations here. 

For a starting point to thinking about responsibility, see Robert E. Goodin’s Protecting the Vulnerable (1985) or read the UN’s Global Compact on Refugees.

The charity Care4Calais works with refugees in the UK, France, and Belgium.

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 School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester for the use of recording equipment, and to 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.

Zalfa Feghali: Hello, Gillian. 

Gillian Roberts: Hello, Zalfa. How are you? 

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, you asking me today? Very interesting. I love that we now ask each other how the other is. 

Gillian Roberts: It's a new trend. 

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, well. 

Gillian Roberts: We are now interested in each other's well-being. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, before it was a total lack of interest. Borders or nothing, obviously. Yeah. I am fine. How are you?

Gillian Roberts: I am also fine. And you are finding yourself and me at the end of the teaching term. 

Zalfa Feghali: Which means we're kind of not fine, but also fine. 

Gillian Roberts: We have been crawling to the finish line and we've arrived at the finish line. Things are looking up, if only in that particular area.

Zalfa Feghali: Absolutely. Absolutely right. We have a new keyword today and that keyword is water.

Gillian Roberts: And this was Zalfa's suggestion. So my first question is, Zalfa, why did you choose water as a keyword?

Zalfa Feghali: Throw it back to me. Very nice. Very sensible. Why did I choose water? I think water has been something that we've been talking about actually across many episodes of the podcast without talking about it explicitly. So it was something that maybe deserved its own key word. But really, the reason I wanted to think about water is because I read Vincent Delacroix's novel, Small Boat, and made you read it, which historically has gone really well for you. And because it's so centrally concerned with water and borders in a way that is not and should not be subtle, but it's so explicit that I thought, hey, don't we have a podcast on borders or something? Maybe we should have a chat about it. So, yes, I wanted to talk about water because we've been thinking about water indirectly, but this was a chance to really foreground the relationship between water and borders or rather thinking about water and the possibility of boundaries in water or the impossibility of boundaries drawn upon the water as one critic has described them.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, so I guess this does take us back to probably our earliest episodes from the archive when you talked about sort of growing up on an island and sort of feeling the pulse almost of that proximity to water. And I've certainly, well, I've also lived on islands. We are living on an island now, but we are also desperately landlocked.

Zalfa Feghali: I mean, I think there's some debate as to whether we are, currently, in Leicester, as far away from water as you can get.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: I think Warwickshire may well be the more landlocked place.

Gillian Roberts: I see. We can have like an arm wrestle with somebody from Warwickshire perhaps. I've also heard Nottingham be declared.

Zalfa Feghali: I mean, ultimately we all lose. 

Gillian Roberts: We are all losers in the landlocked sweepstakes. But yes, so we don't really necessarily feel our island-ness in the same way where we are now. But I've also written about David W. McFadden who had that line about, you know, a tongue-in-cheek reference to seeing the dots and dashes floating in the waves of Lake Huron, which is not a thing. So anyone who's doing some Great Lakes touristing, please do not expect to find any dots and dashes floating in the waves. So we have, from the very beginning, been thinking or at least gesturing towards water. And I'm just looking at the cover of Small Boat, which I have to say is a little bit reminiscent for me of Life of Pi, the cover of Life of Pi, insofar as it's mostly blue. It's a tiny boat, a dinghy, an empty dinghy.

Zalfa Feghali: The illustration on the cover, I mean, we are literally judging the book by its cover now, but it does matter. The illustration on the cover depicts the blue as actually being composed of human beings and bodies in the water.

Gillian Roberts: Oh my God, I only just noticed that. I'm not wearing my glasses. Zalfa Feghali: Oh, well, you see, so you couldn't have noticed it. 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, you know, because I was thinking it looked a bit like the way a child might draw like a bird's foot, you know?

Zalfa Feghali: It looks like kind of bird footsteps, if that makes any sense. But no, they are people. And this sort of connects really explicitly with the subject matter of Small Boat, which is winner of the International Booker Prize in 2025 and the English PEN Award. There's lots of ways that we can celebrate the accolades that it has received. However, of course, I wish it wasn't so relevant and I wish it hadn't been received so well because it kind of asks really important questions about ordinary citizens. And we've talked about citizenship on this podcast before. And lots of other things that we'll be talking about today. It asks questions about citizenship and water, borders and responsibility. So before we kind of go into analyzing in any way, did you hate me this time as much as you hated me for Prophet Song? No, no.

Gillian Roberts: No, no.

Zafal Feghali: Well, I suppose that's something. 

Gillian Roberts: It's a lot shorter than Prophet Song. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yes. Yeah. 

Gillian Roberts: Which is not to say that I'm incapable of reading long works. I have read Middlemarch three times. I just like that is on my CV. I can definitely read long books. Oh, wow. Yeah. And then my best friend said she would disown me if I read it again. I don't think she thought it was a good use of my time. So yeah, it's not an aversion to long books, although I am more time-poor than I've ever been in my life. But there's something about this book that maybe holds you a bit more at arm's length. I don't know if you found the same. I think what it is, is that you don't spend as much time with the people who are going through the drama. And as you do with Prophet Song, And that is not to say that, Zalfa, I only like it when I'm not faced with people undergoing trauma. That's not what I mean at all. But it did feel a little bit like, and I don't mean this as a criticism in any way, it did feel a bit like an exercise, this book. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, I quite agree. 

Gillian Roberts: You know, the author is a philosopher. 

Zalfa Feghali: I was just going to say this. 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. So I think I sort of encountered it a little bit differently. I should say we were reading, this was originally written in French with the title of Naufrage, which I want to talk about eventually. And this edition was translated by Helen Stevenson. So thank you to Helen Stevenson for translating it into English. One day I'll read it in French and then we can have a postscript.

Zalfa Feghali: Yes, we can be distressed in a whole other language.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, we can. And then we get Alex and Liv back to talk about translation. But Zalfa, would you like to, for our listeners, describe what are the contours of this sort of thought experiment novel?

Zalfa Feghali: I will certainly try to and do feel free to pitch in to make me coherent. So the novel is, as Gillian said, it is very short. So if you have an afternoon, it is well worth reading. It's based on events that, well, happen all the time. But a very kind of more publicized event that took place in November 2021, where 27 people on one of these small boats drowned in the Channel, in part because it wasn't clear which Coast Guard was supposed to rescue them, which nation's Coast Guard. So obviously for people who aren't thinking about geography at the moment, we're talking about the Channel between England and France, which at its shortest is, I believe, 21 miles.

Gillian Roberts: It's a big feat when people swim across it as elite athlete types do.

Zalfa Feghali: Yes. And yeah, it is not as easy as all that. And it's not kind of a happy-go-lucky, let's go on the lake day trip. So there are 21 miles between the two coastlines. And in real life, there are a number of treaties, a number of sort of agreements between the UK and France as to who is responsible for people, whether they're leisure boats or whatever, or commercial boats between these countries. And people might not know that territorial waters extend 12 nautical miles outside the land border. So when you have a space that's 21 miles and the 12 nautical mile boundary therefore overlaps, there is going to be a space where, well, whose responsibility is this small boat? So what happened in November 2021 was there was, shall we say, confusion about whose responsibility it was. The UK Coast Guard thought it wasn't theirs, or the French thought it wasn't theirs. And there was that miscommunication that obviously ended in tragedy. And so this is where a Small Boat sort of picks up. It is largely a conversation between, and a sort of like, as you've described, a thought experiment between the emergency services person in France who took the phone call from the people who were on this boat saying, you know, we're sinking, you know, we're taking on water, help us, help us. And sort of responsibility being batted back and forth between, you know, you're not on our side, you need to call 999 basically. And 999 not being able to help because they were on one side or the other. Because it's water, there's drift, literally. So it became ‘not us, not us.’ And It's a conversation and it's a kind of insight into the thought process of this person who said on tape, in the universe of this novel, the woman says, you know, I didn't realize I'd said this out loud when one of the things she didn't realize she said out loud was, I didn't ask you to leave, so why are you asking me to save you sort of thing. So she finds herself remembering feeling irritated by these people who kept calling 14 times. I think they called going, help us, help us, help us. In the end, she has to say, and you know, it's not a secret and I'm not doing any spoilers, she has to say, you know, help isn't coming: “You will not be saved” [106]. The boat very tragically sinks. So it's divided into three parts. The first is a conversation between her and law enforcement, basically. She's being interviewed and confronted by law enforcement. And a few readings or a few interpretations kind of posit the idea, Lacroix's background, they posit the idea that this may well not even be an interview. It may well just be a self-reflection, you know, which I think is totally reasonable, but also let's not worry about who's talking.

Gillian Roberts:  It doesn't really matter. Yeah, yeah. 

Zalfa Feghali: So in the first part, there's that, you know, she's being interrogated by someone and that someone might be herself. The second part is actually told from the point of view of the people on the boat, which is, you know, it's absolutely fantastic. 

Gillian Roberts: And that bit is really short. 

Zalfa Feghali: Really short and very hard.

Gillian Roberts: Page 77 to 92. 15 pages only of this very slim book. We are actually with the asylum seekers on the dinghy.

Zalfa Feghali: Absolutely. And then it's back to her.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I had that same reading, I think, because she starts to talk about it in the third one, like, oh, that woman, the inspector woman looks a lot like me. And in fact, she could be my reflection. And, and yeah. So then you think, well, maybe she has imagined this very lengthy first part, you know, instead of her actually going through a live experience of it, where her interlocutor, shall we say, is demanding to know why she took certain decisions and also how she could not feel the way we might expect her to feel about the lives of 27 people drowning in the Channel.

Zalfa Feghali: And I mean, it's a fascinating reflection into thinking about responsibility, thinking more deeply, I guess, about what we imagine the person on the other side of that call and the other end of that call to be saying, right? So there are certain moments in her kind of responses or thinking or whatever she is doing where she goes, well, no, but surely you don't want me to distinguish between people, between calls. Surely you want me to try and save everyone. Who am I to distinguish between who is more deserving of being saved and who is less deserving of being saved? And yet, we can sort of appreciate that in that moment, but on the next page or very close by, she describes a situation that we would say, you know, this is a total lack of empathy. So it's really interesting how she oscillates between these, in and of themselves, they're not unreasonable positions, and yet they are totally unreasonable in important ways, right?

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, there's something about the sort of rational way in which she's approaching the questions which she may or may not be asking herself that do seem really monstrous, right? Maybe because of the way that it is entirely rational that she's not engaging on any other level.

Zalfa Feghali: Yea. I mean, she says, and I'll just read this. She says, I'm not running an NGO. I'm not there to defend a cause and I don't send help because it's right. That's what I needed to say to the police inspector to get her to understand. It's not my moral conscience or whatever that throws life belts or survival blanket. Fundamentally, she's saying, I'm just doing my job.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: And we know there's all sorts of problems with that position. I don't have to think I'm just doing my job. This is just a tick-box exercise for me, effectively, which when it comes to human lives is obviously far more complicated and there are tragic consequences here. But at the same time, there are other situations where you can imagine this being a totally justifiable thing to say. So is this justice? Is she a monster? The novel asks if we are monsters and tells us that we are monsters, right? Because we're very happy or very intrigued reading this woman's position because it allows us to project our own guilt and our own responsibility away from us because it wasn't me. It definitely wasn't me, Gillian, right? But here I am not doing anything else, effectively.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, so what I guess one of the interesting things about choosing her as the first-person narrator, and then the second part that's focusing on the people in the dinghy that is all told from the third person, but this kind of deep dive into her experience, we know about her life and the contours of her life and the fact that she's divorced and she has Sunday lunch or whatever with her parents and her dad, always super proud of her. Super proud and always says, oh, that my daughter saved lives, you know, saved people. And that this is a refrain that she sort of really bristles against. But even within her own family, there's this sense that she's this heroic figure and that that is, you know, who she is and she's kind of relieved in a way. Do you get that sense that she, once this tragedy happens, that, oh, he can't say that anymore. So whether that's sort of, I don't know, an unbearable weight of responsibility or—

Zalfa Feghali: I mean, it's really interesting how she is drawn or how she draws herself, I guess, because she wants to position herself quite clearly against her ex-husband or ex-partner, who is very right-wing, I guess is the way of putting it, you know, and so she's very clear that she does not think that way. However, she says things to people who are currently in a dinghy taking on water, saying, well, I didn't ask you to leave. And actually, when I was writing notes for today, I wrote down, you know, this is a very strange hospitality. I didn't ask you to leave, right? But you didn't ask them to leave. That's right. But the political system of which you are a part did not want them to stay either. And where they are going does not want them politically, I guess. So I thought it did something very clever with messing around with hospitality in that line. And that line is the line that opens the novel. So it is it for me, I thought, oh, I want to pick up. I want to ask Gillian about hospitality and catch her off guard. So it's fine if it's fine if you don't want to. 

Gillian Roberts: “I didn't ask you to leave, I said” [19]. Yeah, so I think, I didn't ask you to leave, so now you're on your own. Yeah. It's basic. 

Zalfa Feghali: It's not on me. 

Gillian Roberts: What she's saying. I mean, it's just so defensive, isn't it? And it's kind of childish, too.

Zalfa Feghali: It's very petulant in a very serious situation.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. I didn't ask you to leave here, so why aren't you hanging around Calais? Or are they in Cherbourg? I can't quite remember.

Zalfa Feghali: But equally, I didn't ask you to leave. I didn't ask you to leave here, but I didn't ask you to leave where you're quote unquote from. I didn't ask you to leave in any way. And now that you are in this situation, what do you want me to do about it? It's a total abdication of responsibility.

Gillian Roberts: It's very similar to like, well, if you don't like this country, why don't you just leave? Which is, I mean, literally, I suppose it's the opposite. I didn't ask you to leave. But there's the kind of sense that there's no nuanced position that's available. Or like, oh, I'm so hospitable that I didn't ask you to leave, and yet you left anyway. Why?

Zalfa Feghali: How dare you? Yeah. 

Gillian Roberts: How very dare you? Absolutely. Isn't it brilliant here? 

Zalfa Feghali: And I think there's that paradox of why we don't want you here, but it's not a responsibility if you go. And sort of sitting with that paradox, in this novel, means that ultimately nothing happens to the askers of that question. It's just the people who are being asked who are stripped of the support that they are entitled to, in real ways. What I took from this, and we can talk about the middle section, the section on the boat, if you want, but what I took from this was around how we are all monsters and how we choose not to look in this situation. I mean, it's made really clear towards the end, or almost at the very end, where Delacroix writes, “There is no shipwreck without spectators, even when there's no one, when it's far out at sea, at night, without witnesses, even when there's no living soul in sight for thousands of nautical miles, only waves and the viscous night, covering everything, swallowing everything, when there are no more eyes to see than there are arms to reach out, there are still spectators and the shore from which they are watching is never far away, even if, at the same time, it is infinitely distant. Even with their eyes shut, people are still watching, and I can't think of a single one who could say: I wasn't there. From inside their own homes, they're all watching the drama and the drama is never-ending; it plays out every day, every night, on high days and holidays, even when they're doing other things, they're still spectators of the ‘drama at sea’” [119]. And so I guess this for me really crystallizes how the border or the boundary on the water is really just as much about borders and boundaries that people who are migrating, who are asylum seekers, who are refugees, the number of other borders that they have to navigate and cross are ones that many of us will never have had to interact with borders in that way. And maybe we can think about borders in the world in a moment. We are watching this happen daily and we've been watching it happen for years and every year and decade and political system has had this sort of, oh, crisis about borders and this defensive posture that must be adopted because our democracies, quote, our democracies are at risk. But when it comes down to it, nobody was watching, and yet we were all watching.

Gillian Roberts: One of the things I was thinking about that phrase, quote, “they’re still spectators of the ‘drama at sea,’” unquote, the phrase drama at sea is in quotation marks, which I think is really important. Because you get that sense of this is being endlessly repeated in the media. But also, I was thinking about The border, this border, this water border is almost a kind of stage or a screen, right? That everyone is a spectator. And then those other borders you mentioned that have led to this moment, those are backstage, right? Like, we haven't seen those bits. Those aren't the bits that concern us. They concern other spectators, other viewers, depending on their positionality. But then they come into our view at this point, right? And certainly in the UK, god, it's never out of view, right? So, you know, the one in one out policy that has been agreed by France and the UK and is absolute bullshit. It's just partly because of the frenzy that's been whipped up by the right wing, which has now been adopted by what almost is like a consensus. Well, let's just say the Labour government has swallowed that whole... And then but also, you know, the desperate circumstances that lead people to move like they haven't gone anywhere. They're still there.

Zalfa Feghali: This is entertainment, right? This is almost thinking about that “drama at sea.” This is like watching a TV show about pirates. That's what a drama at sea suggests, right? And we are entertained by it. We can be horrified by it. Oh, well, can you believe that happened? But we're not pirates. And we're not pirates. I did not answer the phone. I wasn't mean. Again, I'm inhabiting a kind of figure here. I wasn't mean to the person who rang me and said, we're drowning. And so we can be scandalized. But we continue to spectate, and there is responsibility and there's lots of work done that maybe we can pop in the show notes. Lots of academic and other work done around what it means to look straight at injustice, at wrongs, at damage. and what that looking entails and what that looking means in terms of responsibility.

Gillian Roberts: This makes me think about the structure of this book and how, you know, we have that lengthy first section from the point of view of the operator, and then that third-person section, we're in the dinghy, and then back to a very lopsided bookended sort of structure, back to the operator. I certainly wasn't expecting that middle section. That was a surprise to have that shift in perspective and that shift in focus as well. What do you think that shift does to the book?

Zalfa Feghali: I don't know that the book works without it. But it does also feel strange for it to be there in the sense that we are confronted with what has happened and what our operator has participated indirectly or directly and been a part of and what we're a part of. How I read it, I think, was, I was focusing on the things that people might criticize in terms of if this was a reasonably accurate representation of folks trying to cross in a dinghy. So why do they have phones? And why aren't they wearing life jackets? And the awful thoughtless dehumanizing things that people will say, oh, well, if you can afford a phone or if you can afford to smoke, then things can't be that bad. But they are, aren't they, fakie life jackets?

Gillian Roberts: Oh, I'm sure they're not—good-quality life jackets. But yeah, there is a reference to them wearing life jackets. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. And I mean, I guess what I also took from this was I was reading it alongside rereading coverage of small boat sinkings in the Mediterranean and thinking specifically about like Alan Kurdi and his mother and his brother who also drowned on the crossing and how much of this, the depiction in the novel, actually is continuing to happen. I was reading it as something that had happened and that was happening in the novel, but I was also reading it as something that was happening as I was reading it. Who is crossing now? It made it very immediate. So I think that was the effect that it had for me. Is this happening as I am reading right now? I'm more likely than not, it was. I mean, it's also worth saying, if one is so minded to, that there is a deeply distressing kind of tracker on gov.uk, where you can track how many boats have arrived in the last seven days. I can't imagine that being anything but pandering to the worst kind of statistic gathering, rather than political posturing, rather than just having the data. I suppose it's better to have more data than less data. But when gathering data becomes the task rather than supporting people, that's where I sort of start to lose interest. So yeah, I mean, how did you feel about the middle part? Did you also take that immediacy from it? Or was it something else?

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, I think it really took me by surprise. But then I think there's something about the way in which it's positioned, like, this is what really happened, because we don't have the filter of the operator, right. So it's very much like a gut punch, I think, because we do read about the people dying one by one, basically, and losing their grip on phones.

Zalfa Feghali: I mean, that image of him trying to keep his phone dry. Yeah. You know, keeping his hand above.

Gillian Roberts: Well, he can't even stay above the water and nobody is coming. No. And like you can imagine a version of this book where that is the whole book, like those 15 pages get extended out to like and hearing more about where people have come from. And that would be another version of this book. But I think there's something about, again, to go back to the thought experiment, there's something about that just being a brief insert into what is otherwise about this French operator that is particularly effective. So our keyword is water, and I was really interested in how water itself is described in this book. Did you feel like this, you know, it was being characterized in particular ways, either in ways that were familiar or unfamiliar?

Zalfa Feghali: I think it's really interesting how our operator is now really intimidated by water and is quite frightened by it. I did read that several times because it is something that is totally foreign to me as a feeling. She doesn't like to look at it. She turns herself away from it, even while she's running up and down the beach, right? Gillian Roberts: So she forces herself into that proximity. 

Zalfa Feghali: Absolutely. She likes to shut her door to the water. She likes to not look out of the window at the water. I thought, oh, well, I have never done that. So is it functioning to her as a reminder? Is it threatening because of her job? And her job is to organize so people can be saved, right? She is not physically going out and saving them herself, contrary to what her dad sort of positions her as. And for the sea, to her, to be sort of almost a workplace, and then it becomes a sort of hated feature of her life, I think is fascinating. But we do, you know, we learn that, I think I said this earlier, that this is not a body of water that is calm, that is... 

Gillian Roberts: pleasure cruise. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yes, exactly. It's not easy to navigate. Like all water, it's hostile. It's somewhere where we are foreign to. Yeah. And in and of itself, it has a dimension that we are not capable. I mean, we can, quite literally, we can navigate it, but it's about surviving that navigation. It's not, we're not in control, ever, right, with water. And I think that's an important, or maybe, I mean, I do think it's important, but it's a relevant thing to be considering in relation to borders. What is a water border? Are we crossing the border or are we just surviving that crossing?

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, which I guess could be said about many borders, right. And I think like at the end in her final section, this is where she is talking about how she's become afraid of the sea. She actually names the sea, quote, seeing it for what it really is, evil, unquote. And that comes up again in subsequent paragraphs as well. This idea of the sea being evil, in fact, she refers to it in the following paragraph as “the evil” [100]. And then she's kind of imagining the inspector perhaps projecting an objection to that as, quote, “the ultimate and most pathetic kind of buck passing the most desperate” [101], unquote. But there is a sense that, oh, it's the sea's fault because it's malevolent. But equally, it's like, and she didn't ask them to leave. But also, you know, the nation, well, Fortress Europe hasn't welcomed people in ways that would make them feel like staying was viable. And not to just displace that onto continental Europe, because god knows the UK is hardly rolling out the red carpet. And I think what's interesting is because she comes to that articulation very near the end of the book after we've read the experiences of the people in the dinghy. And we are not literally watching, because it's a book. So we are imagining as we're reading about the water that's filling up the dinghy, you know, and the way in which it is murdering them, basically.

Zalfa Feghali: And yet it's framed, as you say, as this malevolent force, this entity where no one else is. It's a malevolent entity. The asylum seekers are basically ungrateful and not paying attention to safety. There's never any structural or social reason that this is happening. It is completely projected, which is exactly what we would expect and making a really important point, I think, but also comes back round to, well, we're reading a book. Aren't we righteously scandalized?

Gillian Roberts: Yes, in our cozy indoor safe spaces. Yeah, absolutely. My last question. 

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, yes. 

Gillian Roberts: So the French title is Naufrage. Yes. Which means drowning. So what do you make of the fact that that is not the English title? It is not Drowning. It is Small Boat.

Zalfa Feghali: Well, I think it's certainly appropriately provocative. And I think we could have a conversation with many of our very clever translation studies friends about the sort of marketability, I suppose, of “Small Boat.” Drowning is far more confronting, I suppose. It's a spoiler, right? Yeah, well, what it does is it centers the victims, 

Gillian Roberts: those 15 pages, 

Zalfa Feghali: right, rather than centering, in this case, a vehicle.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. Or indeed the discourse. Yes. Right. Because it's really become a metonym, hasn't it, in small boat. And yeah, I suppose the topicality of it, the timeliness of it is very much in your face.

Zalfa Feghali: Absolutely. I mean, and it matters also that it's not small boats, you know, it's singular small boat. 

Gillian Roberts:Yeah. What if we looked at and thought about one small boat and he's in there? What are the implications of that? 

Zalfa Feghali: And I think that's why it's a very powerful and yet very short, just over 100 pages.

Gillian Roberts: A novella, if you will. I actually don't know. Is there like a minimum maximum page count for a novella? I'm not sure.

Zalfa Feghali: I don't know that there is, but it describes itself as a novel.

Gillian Roberts: OK. We will abide by itself. 

Zalfa Feghali: Self-identification. Yeah.

Gillian Roberts: Who are we to tell a novel that it's not a novel?

Zalfa Feghali: It's all about self-expression, man.

Gillian Roberts: It is. It is. In conversations around borders, small boats appear, well, they might even be overrepresented, you might say, in the right-wing media in the UK. But we did want to talk about another border issue in the world that relates to water, which has come up in recent months. And that is to do with vulnerable island nations.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, absolutely. So as we know, there are small island nations that are vulnerable to the water. Again, that's also rather a misrepresentation. 

Gillian Roberts: Buck-passing, right? The water's fault. 

Zalfa Feghali: It's the water's fault that it's rising.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. It's nothing to do with human generated climate change. And by human, we mean industrialized nations.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. I think you have a really interesting example about islands that currently, at the time of recording, are still in existence, but are not just vulnerable to, but extremely at risk of no longer existing and therefore having significant implications for displacement and preservation of heritage and culture and political entities, right?

Gillian Roberts: This came to my attention reading an article in The Conversation by Avidan Kent and Zana Syla at UEA, about the legal status of quote unquote, sinking nations. And oh my god, that's a heartbreaking phrase, “sinking nation.”

Zalfa Feghali: Nation that is sinking, that I mean, that, again, that's putting the blame on the nations.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. When their land is gone. And so, yeah, this piece is about what is kind of legally going to happen to these nation-states. They talk about what's going to happen if they sink below sea level. And what about their future as states? They talk about people losing their homes, losing their jobs, losing their culture. They also say, quote, “the loss of statehood could strip these nations of control over valuable natural resources and even cost them their place in international organizations such as the UN.” And they give the example of Tuvalu kind of signing a treaty with Australia that ensures that Tuvalu will continue to be recognized as a state and that Australia would commit to accepting citizens of Tuvalu in the event that their country disappears. which is really interesting in relation to previous Australian policies about asylum seeking, etc. But also things about Tuvalu digitizing itself, as they put it, moving things online, this sense that we have to think beyond a physical presence.

Zalfa Feghali: Yes, that's what I meant by sort of cultural preservation, if that's what I said earlier. Yeah. Yeah. What an interesting (interesting isn't the right word), but it really makes you think about different forms of statelessness, right? Because we think about statelessness in very... We think about people being stateless. Yes. Not a state being stateless.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, so they talk about the four elements that are required for a state to exist. So these are, quote, “the existence of population, territory, effective and independent government, and the capacity to engage in international relations.” That criterion of territory versus the water, again, the water being the evil at work here is pretty interesting. Again, “interesting” is not the word for it. That's like such a euphemism. It's just so urgent, which is similar to the asylum crisis, right? The climate change crisis. And those two things are sometimes overlapping, of course, that we're all watching as if in slow motion, projecting onto screens somewhere else. Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, a drama elsewhere. 

Gillian Roberts: So I guess, although I think it's fair to say lots of us will have been aware of the physical threat to vulnerable island nations, thinking about what happens in a legal capacity to them is a whole other dimension that I hadn't considered previously. So that's another aspect of what water can do to borders and to statehood.

Zalfa Feghali: Even while that same water, if we think about the state as having, in this case, Tuvalu having a specific latitude and longitude, right? It has a position in the world. Since this is our segment, “Borders in the World,” or that's what we're calling it today. If it has that latitude, longitude, or in a future where it may no longer be there as it is now, do those territorial waters, those 12 nautical miles—

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, what happens to them? 

Zalfa Feghali: I think it's a really fascinating question that I'm sure other people have thought of and discussed at length.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: But in relation to our conversation about water and borders, I think really useful here.

Gillian Roberts: Well, and the Conversation piece finishes with the fact that vulnerable island nations, they are waiting for a legal statement that will be more effective at safeguarding them. Quote, “there has been a decision that points to flexibility, but it avoids the definitive statement that many vulnerable nations had hoped for. The legal future of sinking islands remains uncertain,” unquote. Very foreboding conclusion to that piece, but, one hopes that eventually something more reassuring will emerge.

Zalfa Feghali: A lot of them are called small island developing states. SIDS are often in a position of waiting.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, not in the position of priority. Yeah. The large, non-sinking nations.

Zalfa Feghali: And again, this idea of waiting and not being prioritized goes back to having to call an operator who will hopefully send a rescue boat in your direction.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

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.