Border Walls and Detention Islands in the Viral Age
by Su Fang Ng
Fall 2019 was an age ago. Then, writing this piece on border walls and detention islands, I was concerned about US border control shutting out migrants and asylum seekers and separating families. Particularly symbolic was the expansion of the current US-Mexico barrier, mandated by the January 2017 Executive Order 13767. “The wall,” as it is popularly known, inevitably recalls other walls, in fact and fiction. One recurring comparison was to Alexander’s wall, and I had just published a book on Alexander legends.
In legend, Alexander the Great was supposed to have confined the barbaric tribes of Gog and Magog, who would only be set loose in the end days. Alexander’s wall, I thought, spoke to our times. Walls separated those with the right passports and economic heft from those without. While he confines Gog and Magog, Alexander himself acknowledges no boundaries: a conqueror of sea and sky, he takes flight in a chariot powered by griffins and explores the undersea world in a diving bell. My original piece meditated on that division. But now it seems utterly outdated. What do borders mean in the (corona)viral age? What can we learn from Alexander’s wall for the pandemic we now face?
In mid-January 2020, when I flew back from visiting my parents in Malaysia, nothing much seemed amiss. Soon after, on January 20, the United States got its first coronavirus case. I started worrying when the United States prevented a cruise ship, the Grand Princess, from docking, despite the horrific precedent of the Japanese quarantine of the Diamond Princess. Initially, my worries were practical career ones. Could I still travel to academic conferences scheduled for mid-March and early April? Do I even want to travel? I contemplated writing off my airfares as losses. When canceling my reservation, the staff at the Boston Sheraton was curt and unhappy, asking if the whole conference was called off; I could only say I was acting for myself as an individual.
As the Covid-19 caseload followed an inexorable exponential curve, remarkably, one of the earliest responses by the United States federal government was an attempt at walling off Gog and Magog. In an unprecedented turn of events — more and more unprecedented events would come to pass — the United States, having previously instituted a travel ban on China and Iran, on March 11 proclaimed on a travel ban on Europe, effective March 13, which was later extended to the UK and Ireland. Other countries did the same. By March 16, among others, Germany had closed its borders, Malaysia had imposed movement restrictions, and even Canada closed its borders to all foreigners except Americans.
But on March 18, Canada and the United States mutually agreed to close their shared border. On March 19 the State Department issued a global Level 4 “do not travel” advisory. Rewriting this piece at the end of March 2020, I am hunkered down at home. My university, like others, had shifted to remote teaching and meetings conducted through Zoom. 2020 is now a social-distancing world of closed schools and businesses, grounded planes and stranded cruise ships (the New York Times’ Timeline of the Coronavirus continues to be updated). I’m sure there will be more shocks to come.
While the virus is an invisible enemy, our national strategy of closing borders remains dismayingly xenophobic. Americans rushing back from Europe who potentially carried the virus faced very little screening at the airports, but rather were kept in crowded conditions for hours. The thinking differed not much from that of Alexander’s wall. One version of the story is found in the Middle English travel account, The Book of John Mandeville, ostensibly written by an English knight and traveler extraordinaire, John Mandeville, of his thirty years’ travel to Jerusalem and beyond, as far as Persia, China, and further east.
Although the authorship is doubtful, this much-translated fourteenth-century work was tremendously popular. It locates Alexander’s barrier in the little-known lands of the far east, in the kingdom of Caldee, near the kingdom of Catay (perhaps Mongolia or China):
In that same lond, Jewes ben enclosed in the hilles of Caspyze, that men callen Uber. And thilke Jewes ben of the kynde of Gog Magog, and they may noght com out at no syde. . . . For the king Alisaundre chased hem thider among thilke hilles, . . .
[In that same land, Jews were enclosed in the hills of Caspian, that men call Uber. And these Jews were of the race of Gog Magog, and they may not come out at any side. . . . For King Alexander chased them thither among these hills, . . .] (The Book of John Mandeville, ed. Tamarah Kohanski and C. David Benson, TEAMS [Kalamazoo, MI, 2007], 2352–56, pp. 82–83, my translation).
By walling in Gog and Magog, the conqueror Alexander became the defender of civilization. In an anti-Semitic turn, Mandeville transforms Gog and Magog into Jews (Westrem 1998), just as in our times conspiracy theorists blame Covid-19 on the Jews or the United States president tweets about the “Chinese virus” to fan anti-Asian flames here and abroad. The situation has got so bad that New York Attorney General, Letitia James, set up a hotline for people to report hate crimes against Asian Americans due to the pandemic. Even when the enemy is unseen, the fear of strangers gives it racist form.
Although Alexander’s wall stands out, there is another curious detail in Mandeville. Gog and Magog are not in fact completely walled in. Rather, the hills are open on one side, bordering the Caspian Sea. Medieval maps — such as the Anglo-Saxon Mappa Mundi Cotton MS Tiberius BV or Islamic geographer al-Idrisi’s world map, Bodleian MS Pocock 375, for Roger of Sicily — place Gog and Magog in a corner, wall on one side, sea on the other, turned into their own island.
Today’s governments too use sea-bound islands as places of confinement. In 2012 Australia closed its doors, sending asylum-seekers to offshore detention centers on remote islands like Manus in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. On these open-air island prisons, asylum-seekers spend years in limbo, under inhumane conditions (the Refugee Council of Australia keeps statistics on offshore processing).
Detention islands acquire new meaning in the age of the coronavirus: cruise ships of well-to-do passengers stranded at sea, the containment zone in the city of New Rochelle patrolled by the National Guard, or even, the presidential proposal to quarantine the New York region, downgraded to a “travel advisory.” In response to this last, New York governor Andrew Cuomo called it a “walling off” that is “anti-American, anti-social,” and “a federal declaration of war on states.” Border restrictions aimed at foreigners and outsiders cannot stop a virus with frightening mobility.
For now, it looks like instead of containing strangers, we must to contain ourselves, staying home to flatten the curve of the epidemic, for fear we end up the Gog and Magog to our vulnerable loved ones. The dream of global trade, symbolized too by the legendary Alexander who enables an interconnected world, is undone by the virus. I worry about my sisters, who are doctors in Malaysian public hospitals, and for my elderly parents across an oceanic divide. But, sheltering at home and reading too much news, I am one of the lucky ones.
The pandemic is exposing even more starkly the world’s inequities. Refugees in confined camps face greater dangers with the virus, including migrant children in ICE detention. While the mobile wealthy, whether New Yorkers or Europeans, relocate to second homes — just as early modern Londoners fled the city for the country during plague outbreaks — others are exposed in frontline jobs, not just at hospitals and in fire and emergency services, but also in janitorial work, grocery stores, and Amazon warehouses, in making deliveries, driving taxis, and the like. Or they are laid off: an astounding 3.3 million filed for unemployment in one week. One of those laid off — or furloughed — may even have been the Sheraton staff I spoke with a month ago. In asserting my individual choice in canceling, I was truthfully not privy to the society’s decision-making process — but in hindsight, I had turned troublingly quickly to an American vocabulary of individualism.
Individualism is not only American, of course. Alexander the Great’s feats were celebrated in literatures from Europe to the Middle East to Asia as acts of individual greatness or, alternatively, castigated as acts of individual depravity. But what have become clear are individualism’s weaknesses: isolated, disconnected acts and patchwork responses, in the United States and in the European Union, and even differences in governmental relief aid. Border disputes too rear their ugly heads even in the approach taken by the World Health Organization, which refuses to acknowledge Taiwan, one of the countries that had responded quickly to keep their Covid-19 caseload down. We cannot afford border-centered responses to cross-border challenges. On Manus island, the detainees can only stare at the wide expanses of sea and sky, domains denied them. Now we risk isolation on our own Manus islands.
Su Fang Ng is Clifford A. Cutchins III Professor and Associate Professor at Virginia Tech. She is the author of two books, Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge UP 2007) and the recently-published Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia: Peripheral Empires in the Global Renaissance (Oxford UP 2019), which won the Renaissance Society of America’s 2020 Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize for best book in Renaissance studies. She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe at Harvard, the National Humanities Center, Texas at Austin, All Souls College, Wisconsin at Madison, and elsewhere.
