Wall Disease

This is a book that I just sort of stumbled on--I hadn’t heard anything about it--and I’m so glad that I picked it up. As the subtitle suggests, it explores the psychological impact of living close to a border wall. She has interviewed people living at different border walls around the world, and in each chapter, she uses these real-world examples of individuals while exploring more abstract ideas.

The term “wall disease” is the English translation of a coin termed in Germany about the Berlin wall, and how the people living close to it were affected. Since then, it hasn’t really been used, but this book looks as border walls as a whole: what do they have in common, and what strain do they put on people living near them, regardless of the context?

This is a very short book--it’s 128 pages, but it’s 97 pages before the endnotes--but it is packed full of “hey, did you know” facts, and gave me so much to think about: I read this on my laptop, and every chapter, I’d end up reading parts aloud to my partner, because they were just so fascinating.

Wapner argues that borders don't accomplish what they seek to: they don’t make us safer, and they don’t keep out undocumented immigrants. Instead, she argues that they are inherently violent, separating families, ethnic groups, even property or homes--there are multiple examples of families who found themselves on opposite sides of a border wall after they’ve lived in that spot for many generations.

Wall Disease also says that border walls have negative effects on people’s mental health around the world: that people near borders have higher rates of depression, and view the people on the other side of the wall as alien and dangerous. They stir up animosity. Unsurprisingly, one of the borders looked is between the US and Mexico, and Wapner points out that the militarization of this border is recent, beginning in 1990s--before that it was mostly unmanned. Border Patrol started in 2003.
By looking at the history of these borders and border walls, you begin to think about how artificial and arbitrary these divisions are that feel so entrenched and even inevitable. She argues that borders are not lines, they're gradients: there's a large swath of land where cultures and countries mix.

Wapner introduces a lot of ideas from different scientific fields that relate to border walls. Some of these feel like a bit of a stretch, but they’re all very thought provoking. For example, there are actually "border cells" in animals' brains: cells that recognize walls and barriers, the edges of our movement, and Wapner argues that by living against a wall, our brains are essentially always firing these cells, and making us feel like we’re trapped.

She also looks at places (like Berlin) where walls have been removed, and how long the impact remains. In Berlin, it’s called the "mental wall": the effect the wall still has on people 15 years after unification--including driving routes as if the wall is still these.

Some more fascinating facts I learned:
- People who have positive associations with a place will estimate that it's closer to them than people with negative associations.
- In Lima, Peru, a concrete wall separates the wealthy and poor neighborhoods. The poor residents call it the Wall of Shame: poor workers have to travel long distances around the wall to go to work, some kids have never been on the other side.

<em>Wall Disease</em> troubles the idea of borders and countries, pointing out that this is an idea rooted in a specific place (Europe) and time (17th centwaury onwards)--as opposed to empires, dynasties, nomadic regions, city states, etc that are allied by allegiance to a leader, or family bonds, or trade relationships. It was only after 1914 that travel required a passport (though the Chinese Exclusion Act was an exception to free movement)--that only changed after WWI.

I think this is a really important book because it makes the reader question the existence of borders and walls, which have become so normalized, as if borders are natural. Wapner asks us to question how we hold the “artificial construction of national borders in our minds and how they shape the way we think about the world and our place within it”

(As an aside, it was very weird to read a book that mentions COVID-19. I’m not ready for that yet.)

This was an excellent thought experiment of a book that I will be thinking about for a long time.

[This book will be discussed on Book Riot's All the Books podcast on Oct 6th]