Question

How does Dilip Chitre in the poem, Father Returning Home, highlight man's estrangement from a man-made world?

Answer 1

In Robert Frost's poem “Mending Wall” two rural neighbors make repairs on a common wall dividing their properties (Fig. 1). The narrator appears at first glance to be decisive about the subject of walls and fences. Use of the poem in academic border studies is largely premised on this assumption and treats its first line “something there is that doesn't love a wall” as though it were an essential truth. The neighbor meanwhile is portrayed as resolute and a man of few wordsdonly uttering a single phrase twice: “good fences make good neighbors.” Advocates of contemporary border barriers (Fig. 2) adopt the second refrain with its no-nonsense logic as a kind of rallying cry, a deeply pragmatic position often accompanied by incredulity that anyone could fail to recognize the simple truths it contains. Whether because of the concision and apparent wisdom of the statements, or because political identification seems to require believing one set of propositions at the expense of another, the two parts of the poem tend to be taken in isolation. We argue that what is useful and generative in “Mending Wall” is precisely its ambivalence about borders and boundaries and believe that an integrated, contextual, and holistic reading of the poem can offer political geographers a way to think about the nature of the relationship between the two perspectives presented. Such a reading of “Mending Wall” allows us to reflect on how the constant negotiation of internal and external boundaries might be motivated by something beyond mere political positionea productive and necessary ambivalence. The history we sketch of the poem's two sayings reminds us how easily aphoristic thinking can rob us of the richness of our political and personal experience. We argue that Frost's insistence on narrative complexity and struggle, what we term his “ambivalence,” is not reducible to a compromise or middle path, but instead offers a radical awareness of and responsiveness to the ways our political ideas and commitments are being constantly formed and reformed. Parker et al. (2009) write that a binary opposition has come to dominate Western understandings of borders, obscuring dynamics of “undecidability, indistinction and indeterminacy” (p. 584). This call to look beyond the dualisms that borders represent is a starting point for border studies and the discipline of political geography more broadly. Perhaps not surprisingly, discussions of ambivalence do appear to be emerging in studies that consider borders in detente, as opposed to active forti
fication (Till et al., 2013). Yet there is value to ambivalence in both of these contexts and perhaps especially so in the latter case where it is not easily practiced. Just as geographers have broadened their scope in terms of where borders and bordering processes are found (i.e. Johnson et al., 2011; Lamb, 2014; Mountz, 2013), the discipline should also open itself up to internal conceptualizations of ambivalence Political borders and boundaries play a fundamental role in our lives and society even if, as individuals with distinct positionalities, we have dramatically different feelings concerning the appropriate extent of their barrier function. In our reading of Frost's poem “Mending Wall” we want to shift the focus away from an opposition between conservative (keep them out) and progressive (let them in) positions towards a deeper, dialectical, and more ideological crux, namely that ambivalence itself might be a powerful position, politically and inter-subjectively. The ethos of the poem, inseparable from its structure and shifting rhythms, helps us to see the complexity of both positions vis-a-vis border barriers as well as to recognize the mutually-constituted relationship between these divergent perspectives. Acknowledging and addressing ambivalence as dramatized in Frost's poem allows geographers and border scholars to better understand our inner positionality in a theoretical as well as empirical sense and to better grasp the many facets of the places and people we study. We also present this particular reading hoping to shift the use of “Mending Wall” within border studies from a poem with a clear and concise message to that of an unfinished and conflicting whole. In generic terms, we read the poem as a lyric rather than an allegory. And whereas ambivalence within Frost's poetics has been recognized by some scholars of literature, its value as a political strategy has gone largely un-theorized. To attempt this theorization, we embrace multiple interpretative perspectives: the text and the circumstances of its composition, Frost's role as author, and the poem's popular and academic reception. Our critical method is informed by Jameson's (1981) three interpretive horizons. As such we read the text as a social object (what are its contexts and where are we situated within them?), as a symbolic act (what has it come to mean?), and its “ideology of form” (what does its production tell us about who we were, are, and might become) (p. 76). In what follows we situate Frost's poem in historical context and relate it to the discipline of geography. We then highlight specific ways that scholars interested in borders have made reference to lines from Frost's poem. A closer analysis of the poem in its entirety then suggests new understandings of its structure and reception, specifically its tenacious refusal to take a side even though the poem itself is about the importance and inevitability of taking sides. In the last two sections we consider what we can learn from this ambivalence in a political sense. In so doing we draw on psychoanalytic theory in order to consider the role borders play in our lives and the inherent tensions between bordering and debordering processes, or put another way between closure and openness or isolation and interconnectedness (Bergson, 1988, p. 111). Consideration of these phenomena provides insight to our lived experience vis-a-vis borders and a renewed perspective on our understandings of the political role of borders between contemporary nation-states as well as in our daily lives. In the final section we delve deeper into Frost's own thoughts on “Mending Wall” and bordering processes to better understand this particular poem and outline an ethics of ambivalence. Throughout the paper we treat the poetic and the political as inseparable elements of the geographicereciprocally informing each other and open to the ongoing work of ambivalence.