Walls : Travels Along the Barricades by Marcello Di Cintio – review | Books | The Observer
▻http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/10/walls-barricades-marcello-cintio-review
Entendu pendant le colloque « Frontières, murs et sécurité », très beaux, très émouvants récits...
o wall is human and, if the story of the Garden of Eden is true, to exclude is divine. Since the beginning of civilisation, people have built walls to keep things in, or out.
The ancient Egyptians constructed massive mudbrick walls around their temples, wavy ones that represented the primeval waters of chaos and served to ensure the purity of their sacred enclaves by keeping out everyone but the priests. The Roman emperor Hadrian, with his usual efficiency, commissioned a wall, backed by a series of defensive forts, to protect his empire’s northernmost frontier from a troublesome neighbour. Walls, it would seem, are part of the human story. But there are exceptions: the most unwalled country in our own time, enclosed by water on three sides and the world’s longest fenceless border on the fourth, is Canada. What better subject for a Canadian writer, then, than to try to understand what it means to live alongside a wall?
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