Writing the tri-border: An intersectional history of border violence

Each border is unique to the person experiencing it because each person exists with their own intersectional mobility: ‘Freedom of mobility may be considered a universal human right, yet in practice it exists in relation to class, race, sexuality, gender and ability, exclusions from public space, from national citizenship, from access to resources, and from the means of mobility at all scales’ (Sheller 2018: 20). Novels can allow the writer to explore this intersectionality of experience. The tri-border area which links Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey contains multiple histories which play out contemporaneously while at the same time being supplanted by a violent present. In my new novel, The Things We Do to Forget, these different perspectives and experiences interact and inform each other. This novel takes us from the streets of Berlin in 1961 when the wall was constructed to the chaos of contemporary migration along the ‘Balkan route’.