Halloween in Derry is no small affair and is considered by some to be the best in the world. What started as a local tradition—free punch for getting dressed up—was commodified into a carnivalesque crowd-pleaser. Inside the city center, cat faces and zombies flash by. A ragtag cover band of costumed misfits belts out “Boys of Summer.” A South Asian tour group, some thirty strong, are scattered outside the church bell tower taking selfies. Children dart and drift about with excitement, tripping and bumping into people and things.

In a near-empty hotel restaurant in Dublin’s city center, two men sit in midday quiet, alternately looking at their mobile phones and breaking news unfolding on a large flat screen. The disheveled yellow mop bobs up and down, spewing vitriol about communism and Castro. A garish caricature; the developmentally stunted younger brother of the current freak show “across the pond.” This hideous theater has no shortage of red-faced ghouls, pointing and howling, grappling for power.

Just two days shy of the impending October 31st Brexit deadline, an extension to January 31, 2020 now promises to draw contentious debate into the new year. The primary issue in passing the EU withdrawal agreement into law has been the “Ireland backstop”—a measure that would preclude the re-establishing of a hard border between UK-controlled Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The implications could be disastrous to the tenuous peace established just a little over 20 years ago.

Unlike the annual haunting of Derry, the lead-up to the pending Brexit decision was wrought with fear. It was common knowledge that the overnight imposition of a hard border could drive a hard wedge, cracking and deepening the fault lines of the sectarian stalemate that is Northern Ireland. Signs on the side of Derry streets bear anti-Brexit messages: “Hard Border. Soft Border. No Border,” warning passersby of impending unemployment and food shortages that are likely to result. These are new additions to Derry’s extensive portfolio of political tags, graffiti and street murals, monuments, plaques, and museums commemorating 

Declan McLaughlin, a musician and activist who has lived and worked in the Bogside neighborhood for most of his life, sees Brexit as “a catalyst for artists to engage more deeply in political issues.” Like the armed conflict of his youth, the looming specter of Brexit now threatens a decades-long, hard-won peace. “This is the first time in the history of Ireland that there hasn’t been conflict. We don’t want conflict, it’s a small window of time…to resolve it.”

Driving on single lane country roads, winding through neighboring Donegal county, it is nearly impossible to know exactly when or where you cross back and forth between the colony and the republic. Atop a hill with a broad view of six neighboring counties sits an ancient Celtic ring fort, Grainan of Aileach, one of thousands of Bronze-age dwellings scattered across the island. This Halloween, the BBC Foyle (UK) is broadcasting a concert from Donegal County (Ireland), with technicians from Derry (UK) and Ireland.

A hard border would disrupt families, communities and businesses that have long co-existed across an imaginary line enforced by a colonial power. It would compromise the fluidity of relations and ease of mobility cultivated and normalized since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Socio-cultural connectivity would suffer, likely further imperilled by sectarian violence. In different parts of the North and South, the tags of the IRA and the UVF have begun to resurface, and there is talk in hushed tones of paramilitary activity on the rise—the details of which are not shared openly.

But against this rising tide of sectarian unrest is a movement of creative minds and ideas promoting peaceful co-existence, away from conflict and its physical manifestations, towards a unified Ireland. The window of opportunity for resolution to this smoldering conflict is one that is being embodied and projected by artists employing humanist tactics in public engagement. This is a moment for the full trajectory of human conflict and resolution to be realized, giving the world an example of how possible it is to transform peace, from the tenuous to the lasting.

Tenuous Peace

It waits in the line in which you are standing. Is it silent? Is it slow? Are you thinking hard about what you are going to say? How many questions will you need to answer correctly to gain entrance?

Where I grew up, the bottom of my street ran down to the River Foyle. On the other side was the Republic of Ireland. I could see it, just across the water. I have been crossing borders all my life. I’m not sure how old I was when I first realised that the practice of drawing lines on maps is not only used to cause confusion, wage war, and exert control, but also to divide communities, homes, farms, families, and cultures. Drawing lines has long been part of the British imperial arsenal. We see the outworking of a number of these borders in Sri Lanka, India, the Middle East, and here on the island of Ireland.

, I see myself again at the river’s edge, looking across from my home to my aspirations of what Ireland will be like when that line has been removed. Derry City in the North of Ireland sits on the British-controlled side of that line, a border which runs for a couple of hundred miles through and around six counties.

I cross that manmade border a number of times each week. Sometimes for work, sometimes to see family, who live on both sides. We are now at the point where the city of Derry overlaps this line, you can walk between both without knowing, only the traffic signs notify you that something has changed. And even that was hard won. That’s where I live, at the edge of the British Empire. My eyes fixed on a future free of this 800-year nightmare that has consistently delivered misery and suffering to most of the people on this island.

As a child and young adult, I would drive into this large military facility at the border crossing were my father would routinely be questioned. Always the same questions. The same questions I would face as an adult crossing borders around the world years later: 

What is your name? Address? Where are you coming from? Where are you going? What were you doing there? Who were you with?

 This is part of the daily ritual that people living within the empire—and for the millions of people who live along these lines—must deal with day in and day out in their own homeland.

My father never said much when we would be pulled in to be searched by the police and army. He would hand over his ID, answer their questions with a simple yes or no. My father was an Irish Republican. He never said much about it, but later when I became more familiar with the coded language that people here use, I realised it was all there. His disdain for the empire, its police, and its army. I’m not sure how he felt about armed Republicanism, but that’s another story.

After the formulation of the Good Friday agreement in the late '90s and the ending of a decades-long military campaign by the Irish Republican Army, the normalisation of peace here in the northeastern corner of this little island meant that crossing the border became something that was only noticeable by someone saying, 

 Through great struggle, people here now see a clearer, peaceful path to ending the hold that Great Britain has exerted upon us. I wonder how today's young adults would have coped with the hassle of life here in the '70s, '80s, and '90s.

Brexit has been the red flag of late, with the consequence being that UK’s only contested land border with the European Union is now once again across the island of Ireland. No one wants a return to the old days of armed men in uniforms asking invasive questions, well maybe not everyone. It seems there are more than a few who remain loyal to overlords, and who would love nothing more a return to the dark days of our past. So, the conclusion has been to put the border in the Irish sea, where many feel it belongs, but this is not good enough for the small group of unionists who see it as another step towards the unification of the island, and so refuse to take part in the shared government (it’s funny that this is also the first time that they are no longer the majority).

Throughout my life I have stood on and crossed those lines. I’ve walked, bused, driven, and flown over many borders and even been arrested at a couple. I will never forget the checkpoints between Derry and Donegal or Tyrone and Monaghan. I pass the spot just outside Aughnacloy, where young Aidan McAnespie was shot in the back and murdered by a British solider in 1988 just for being on the border. I see the same people working along that thin line, stopping people, interrogating their business, their movements, their intentions—stationed there to maintain the divisive stranglehold of Empire.

I have always felt the importance of that line on the map, as palpably as you could feel the release after crossing.

We are being watched. I don’t know from where, but eyes are on us. Maybe that’s just the feeling I get whenever I come into contact with the "authorities." The feeling that you are not part of the state or country where you live. Crossing a line, any line between counties, between communities, class, the line that they believe they must defend.

The sun couldn’t have gotten any hotter. We'd been driving off the main road for about five miles away and kept going until we could go no further. At the end of the road, I stepped out of the air-conditioned car to face the largest wall I’d ever seen. It stretched on forever, its massive metal rods casting an enormous shadow in the dust and sand. Everything else was baked white in the desert sun.

Two faces appeared between the bars, children living a stone’s throw away in Ciudad Juarez. We had been speaking with them for a little over ten minutes, when a border patrol truck pulled up a few meters away. How they knew we were there was beyond me, I hadn’t seen any cameras on the road. But there ye go…

They asked me the same questions I’ve been answering all my life: 

 And as always, I played dumb and nice. I stood so they could see my hands, I answered their questions. I could see the confusion in their eyes: 

What’s this Irish fella doing in the middle of the desert looking at a fence? 

I explained where I’m from, that I have family nearby, and I wanted to see the wall that President Trump built. Just saying his name politely reassured the border cops that I’m one of the Good Guys.

They hung about for a while and then cleared off. Like a scene from an old western, I watched the dust rise and fall as they disappeared on the horizon, wondering if my skin was darker would the result have been different.

Later that day, we crossed the border and drove back out into the Chihuahua desert, miles and miles across the sun-bleached sand. Walking along the Mexican side of the border wall, we came upon a graveyard of empty water bottles, tattered clothes, and children’s toys scattered in the desert. That close to the Rio Grande and El Paso, they must have seen the lights of a new life. I find it hard to keep my shit together, the tattered clothes and toys slowly being eaten by the sand, slowly disappearing like the people who carried them. I walk away from the group and cry; my tears won’t help anyone.

As I walked with the others (Mike Ryan, Michael Marinez, Sidd Joag, and the our local hosts, Monica Lozano, Iris Morales, Mabel Weber, Adriana Alvarez) back across the border crossing at El Paso in the blistering heat, I couldn’t help but notice the look of faces struggling to get by, fighting for the right to be seen and heard, not left at the border to die. As I walked with them I saw firsthand the inhumane way they are treated at the borders, at shopping malls, in stores, by good God-fearing Christians, by well-armed White people, by the police, by the State. I’ve seen that look before on the faces that surround me every day in Derry.

The next day we made pilgrimage to a Walmart in El Paso where 23 people were gunned down by a White supremacist who espoused Great Replacement theory and was emboldened by the vitriol of hate-mongers like Mr Dump.

About a mile outside of San Antonio, we walked along the Wall of Crosses, 53 people left to die in a shipping container abandoned on a service road just south of this beautiful city on the 27th of June 2022. I wonder where the Civil Rights Movement went: Did it die on a deserted road in the blistering sun or is it with the Christians, hiding with thoughts and prayers in air-conditioned churches?

As the plane took off from El Paso International Airport, I looked out the window to see where I’d been from the air, and even from the sky it’s clear where the border is.

It’s hard to keep moving forward in a world that seems to be falling apart. Throughout my life I have witnessed horrific acts of brutality. I’ve lost family and friends in the conflict that surrounded me growing up. I’ve seen the people who are there to protect, kill.

Some of the things I’ve begun to understand during a lifetime of border crossings have saddened me to the core. I have felt helpless, powerless, and worse. I have tried to close my eyes to many of the injustices I have seen. I have turned my back and walked away on people who are 

. Maybe to protect myself because I knew there was nothing I could do. And it’s more than simple altruism, pretending that people are fundamentally good or things will always get better. It’s the "doing" that makes a difference. The tending of a garden, supporting a friend, making art, singing, dancing, acknowledging the value of life in all its forms. Enjoying the life you have, sharing that enjoyment with the people around you. The very act of living has become an act of defiance. But I remember: Some people stand up, fight back. They are the people often discredited as in the news as “terrorists, rapists, and drug dealers.”

Standing in the sun, I was reminded of the stories of the coffin ships and the thousands and thousands of poor Irish who almost made it across the ocean. Like these poor souls, they paid for the chance of a better life with their lives. My people have wilted in the shadow of the Empire. While in the U.S., if you are a person of colour—any colour but White—you are rendered invisible.

It’s the same road that runs across every border, but the traffic is not always going in the direction you want it to. And you are not always travelling in the direction you want. Whether standing on a shore, a bus stop, an airport or a train station….

That’s how we find out who has privilege. If you have never noticed, you are that privilege.

The Unwelcome

When I was first invited to Derry City in 2011, I knew little to nothing about British colonial rule in Northern Ireland, the Troubles, or Bloody Sunday. For much of the 1990s, I had sung along to a namesake, never truly understanding what Bono was crooning about. I had never been taught this history in school. No international history, ever was. Although I was well-enough versed in the Indian colonial past of my own heritage, I had never made the now-obvious connection between the histories of these partitioned lands.

As I walk the hill from the town square down into the Bogside, I am again subsumed by the extraordinary volume and intensity of history, culture, and activism here—by its weathered defiance. In so seemingly provincial a place, residing within the confines of neighbourhoods no larger than a single city block in New York, I see a bubbling cauldron of righteous indignation, much like that teenage boy mimicking The Edge on a knock-off Stratocaster.

When locals describe the now diorama-sized war zone that once consumed the city, all the bombs, the bullets, the blood and betrayal, the gravity of what was lost and what has been gained comes clearly into focus. Generations of Protestants and Catholics alike, hardened by the fermenting brutality of a half-century of conflict, no longer armed with sectarian purpose and the legitimate use of violence, are left with the options of shared peace or implosion.

In January 2022, several thousand people gathered in the Bogside to commemorate the 14 people murdered and the decades of violent repression that preceded and would follow that fateful day in 1972—to commemorate a people routinely punished out of their basic decency. Fifty years later, those grave vibrations, the impending sense of dread, the slivers of humanity drowned in the privilege of the living, all of that somehow finds a breath of solace—if not, resolution—here on the banks of the Foyle.

While Brexit has undoubtedly stirred sectarian tensions and stoked fears that the Troubles “maybe, weren’t quite over yet,” there’s an assured commitment to civility and progress here for which I can’t yet fully articulate my appreciation, but that elicits an emotional response. At age 39, in the year 2022, having traveled to some far reaches, basic peace often seems the furthest of possibilities. But here, looking past the stadium over the town out towards the sea, with the cemetery to my back, a beautifully scarred version somehow comes to form in the fog and grey.