Brownwall

Before the brownwall came down -- not that I’ll be around to experience its dismantling -- it was next to impossible to communicate, to make yourself heard. The wall extended about 5 - 7,000 miles on each side, practically stretching from one end of the planet to the other in its entirety. The brownwall took in Russia and China but didn’t stop there. It didn’t cede to the soft freckly dimpledness of western culture, to our apparent friendliness and perceived openness, it continued regardless all the way into Germany and Britain stopping at the shoreline for a few hundred kilometres before carrying on across the other side of the pond.

The brownwall was made of a semi-permeable material that made you think that at least something could get through, perhaps not people themselves, but something semi-tangible; you could wilfully conceive that if someone managed to whisper very persistently and determinedly right at the very heart of the night, that that whisper would be laden with enough power to pass by. This wasn’t the case. I never knew of an instance where any sort of unadulterated message got transmitted even though I’ve been trying for years, even though I’ve expended tons of energy over the wall and its peculiarities.

The semi-permeable organic material from which the wall was made was an unlikely soil and hemp mix piled in on itself and then dried into a fairly strong but wiry mass. It was not concrete or cement or any crass and harsh or terribly cold material. Even the colour of the wall was not unpleasant. It was tropical, Amazonian, it was temperate earth and dirt, African mud huts, so the wall was not something that conjured up great fear or intimidated. The brownwall is not the Berlin Wall or the great wall of China. It is not brick. The brownwall is a compromise, a great toning-down, a token of softening at least in relation to those vast soviet structures. The brownwall is not ungainly in any way.

There was no circumventing the brownwall. You could very well, if you wanted, go from one side of the wall to the other, ostensibly at least. There were crossing points and gates. But these gates were hard to negotiate and find. Plus they were difficult to pass through, requiring all sorts of abstruse and detailed paperwork, inefficient bureaucratic bundles of paper, inelegant mounds, so that in the end it wasn’t easy to know what document you needed, which person to contact in the initial phases, who you needed to pay, if anything, and the crossing points were much more trouble than they were worth.  

The crossing points were numbered A1, A2, A3 then at some point moving up to B and the next letter of the alphabet, never  lending any clarity to what the numbers meant and how high they went. They were never consecutive for example. A crossing point J exists in Battersea Wharf and a ZZ where Belsize Park segues into Kentish Town West for example. There are A-D crossing points dotted across Sub-Saharan Africa. There is no rhyme or reason and no way of finding out how the system was conceived.

The wall is not uniform. It is more of a network of walls  with intersecting sub-walls, sections running perpendicular and askance to what was originally the main wall. The main wall is contested though; no one knows exactly what constitutes it but several people claim to. Since the wall started out, there are and have been numerous tributaries of the wall which, in the manner of the starting points and the offshoots of rivers, are difficult to put your finger on, difficult to know and say that they are more than just the inchoate trickles, that they are indeed part of the wall. It is easy to talk up a simple garden wall or determined arrangement of flower beds into nascent part-of-the-wall status and it is often done. There can therefore be these minute sections of the wall, barely visible to the naked eye, and it takes one of the several appointed wall inspectors to specify and determine that such and such point is in fact part of the wall and so it will be marked off in one of the records for the benefit of no one just that it can be erroneously said that the wall can be adequately codified.

The upshot of all this is that you never really know which side of the wall you are on. The crossing points and gates are moot, otiose, they are defunct and barely used, just a bit of lip-service to the idea of non-opacity and clarity, a shot in the dark by those who still have their bright eyes for the future and their kindlings of hope.

I do not remember when the brownwall was built. It was there as long as I can remember. It must have been there from birth. It seemed to have been there as long as my parents and grandparents had lived or can remember. I never referred directly to the wall to them. I wonder what proportion of our interactions was conditioned by our vestigial awareness of the wall. I took it for granted that their reluctance to speak about it meant that not much had changed, in addition to the obvious corollary that there was never any way of bringing the wall down.

The part of my town that the wall runs through is not a spot you need to steer clear of. Where the brownwall bisects and penetrates is just where all the regular other places you’d find in a town seem to collect, all the coffee shops and supermarkets and brasseries and wine bars. The brownwall runs round the corner of the main street and past some of the cottages and country roads but despite its adaptability, its ability to camouflage, your message and the intention behind it will never get through. If someone lives on the other side of the brownwall, which they inevitably always do, you can shout all you like, you can telegraph with extreme intent, you can maniacally gesticulate, but despite the unobtrusive quality of the brownwall, despite the fact that you might not even see it, it exerts a massive effect and you feel your words are far too frequently wasted.

Almost everyone at one point in the life of my town has lived on the other side of the brownwall, meaning on a different side to the one they live now. The brownwall has a way of winding its way round all sorts of improbable places. It is malleable and moveable but the point is that you cannot take for granted that the wall will not push itself straight through any building; it is made of organic material, it has plant-like qualities and can push through if need be. It can slowly and subtly grow in places you might not think it possible for it to grow, places where that growth is so minute and so impossible to track, that the wall cannot be said to be confined to straight lines or known locations on a map, it cannot be so neatly tracked and the only time you can say that the brown wall is in a certain place is if you can see it or better yet touch.

But the brownwall was built by men for men and is mostly ineffective for women, said to stem from a time when women didn’t yet exist. The brownwall is like a remnant of manhood’s singular maleness, his brusque, rough, aggressive, domineering confrontational character, his brazen want of femininity and of anything remotely pliable, his one-pointed lack of imagination, inveterately brittle and hard, unfeeling, defensive, striking out to be  perennially invulnerable, teeth-bearing, in any case the brownwall hardly affects women or if it does they manage to penetrate or ignore it. 

Equally, and I have ever never asked my mother about this, the brownwall is fairly transparent when it comes to communications between women and men, between men and women, in one-on-one interactions. It is somehow neutered. Words get through. But more importantly the sentiments behind the words get through because they start off so unfiltered, their purity unaffected, untarnished, and this field of energy, of which the words are a small part, moves ever so beautifully through our brownwall as if the brownwall is not  there, not to the detriment of the wall, not to undermine or pretend it’s not there, but somehow still to honour it and acknowledge its presence. In the communication between the woman and the man, over under or through any segment of the brownwall, the wall elevates the feeling and works with whatever needs to be said and has been said, pushes it up and out into the air and anywhere close, vectors of words and feeling, spikes, energy drifts and shimmers, what is felt by the man is so truly felt soon enough by the woman in spite of, through, by dint of, and because of the brownwall.

What the brownwall does to the feelings of man against man though is shameful, destructive, it is a travesty. It twists them and converts simplicity into tripe. What starts as  breath becomes bastardised. A melody to a woman is struck down by the brownwall, deadened at best, made always pointless and ridiculous. The brownwall has made male interaction pathetic, exclusively false, showy; it pushes the message to some extreme part of the wall thousands and thousands and miles from its source, culminating in the arbitrary reception of some babble or blurb in a small outcrop near Adelaide; what started off in Highgate or Montreal is suddenly devoid of sense and weight, so out of context, so off-beat and out of time, it is like shouting nonsense into a loudhailer in a stadium full of people.

And I have never asked my friends. I have never asked my parents why or how. I have taken its existence for granted. I rarely even point to it, not even the parts that come very close to my house. This is the closest I think I’ve ever got. They will never talk about it not even indirectly. What is said is always elliptical, arcane, once taken in and spat out by the wall. What is said and felt continues to be said in all its emptiness, all its hollowness, all its terrible arbitrariness. What you can hope for at best is some refractory echo of something, you can be grateful then that our woman now exists but the brownwall, in principle, is insurmountable.