Kapka Kassabova: Writing Borders

Kapka Kassabova’s 2017 travel book Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe brings new life to the travel genre by drawing on its most enduring and pervasive anxiety: the border between one country and another, between one language and another, between one story and another.

In an earlier travel book, Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story, Kassabova told this story through the intimacy and intricacy of Tango, a dance of partners that playfully explores the border between bodies, a dance that itself originated in a borderland, the shoreland communities of the Río De Plata, which links Uruguay and Argentina. But in this earlier book, the border wasn’t so imposing. Seemingly, all that she needed to get from one place to another was a pair of dancing shoes that she carried with her as she Tangoed from Edinburgh, to Berlin, to Buenos Aries, to Auckland New Zealand, where her family moved after fleeing Bulgaria the country where she was born.

Artist and filmmaker Em Cooper, who explores the boundaries between oil painting and film, created this beautiful and brief trailer for Twelve Minutes

Dancing is certainly a more pleasurable motion than fleeing. And returning home, as Kassabova does in Borders, is perhaps as close as one can get to making of emigration a dance. When Kassabova decides to return to that strange borderland between the East and the West — that place where she grew up and that time that was behind the Iron Curtain — she seeks out people who stayed and elicits from them what stories she can. What she finds is that the border lingers differently for different people. The psychological impact of the “hard” border between Bulgaria and Turkey is not something that was suddenly swept away in the delirium of 1989. Kassabova writes:

An actively policed border is always aggressive: it is where power suddenly acquires a body, if not a human face, and an ideology. One obvious ideology that concerns borders is nationalist: the border is there to divide one nation-state from another. But a more insidious ideology is centralist in practice: the belief that the centre of power can issue orders from a distance with impunity, and sacrifice the periphery; that what is out of mainstream sight is out of memory. And border zones are always the periphery, always out of mainstream sight. (xvi)

We’ll be talking and writing a lot about borders this semester, borders between places and borders within identities, linguistic borders and the borders and boundaries that make up the self. I’ll end with Kassabova doing some work for us and attempting to define what a border is:

What is a border, when dictionary definitions fail? It is something you carry inside you without knowing, until you come to a place like this. You call into the chasm where one side is sunny, the other in darkness, and the echo multiplies your wish, distorts your voice, takes it away to a distant land where you might have been once. (4)