Borderliner by Hannah Lowe

Hannah Lowe is a British poet born in Essex in 1976. She was a teacher of literature for many years before she started writing her own poetry. Today, she is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Brunel University in London.

Hannah Lowe has a white English mother and a half Jamaican, half Chinese father. She uses her mixed-race heritage in her writing, and her work is to a large extent concerned with migration histories, multicultural London, and the complex legacies of the British Empire. This is again blended with her deeply personal commemoration of her father, who was a member of the Windrush generation.

In this poem, Hanna Lowe has experimented with using typography and double narration to explore ideas of multi-heritage experiences. Two separate poems have been placed side-by-side so they can be read either individually or as one poem. If you read the left and the right side carefully, you will see that they express different things. When put together, you get yet another poem, which is a bit more complex. But perhaps you'll be able to find a new meaning when reading the entire poem as well.

This poem should be read in three rounds: First read the poem on the left side, which is not in bold print. Then read the poem on the right in bold print. Make sure you read both poems several times. Finally, after you have understood the meaning of the two separate poems, read the entire text together: read each line through - both the regular and the bold print.

If you want to, you can listen to Hannah Lowe reading the poem. In this video, she reads two of her poems. Start the video at 4:40 to listen to 'Borderliner'.

Link to Hannah Lowe reading 'Boderliner' (Vimeo)

I’m skirting the bold lines of the map border-liner, might mean white girl
neither here nor there, but home in the border places with corkscrew hair
Tijuana, where rich American boys slam tequila or brown girl with flat hair
or controlled drugs, or down the fence slipping from one side to the other
where a veiled woman clutches her baby always looking for the right light
in the thin shadows Passing, hoping the old world wouldn’t catch her up
always waiting to cross a good day or hey girl in the wrong hotel or store
I’ve always loved sea-swimming some fool too loud, not seeing the signs
but sometimes these waves carry That kind of stuff could put you back in
make-shift rafts bobbing empty of their cargo chains or end with the blade
below my feet, the sea-bed but ever notice how green eyes in yellow skin
cross-hatched with bones look so good, how some faces have no borders
There were times when these borders had no fixed abode? You can sketch
no barbed wire, and even now not all borders are a pretty rainbow diagram
so hard. There are places nobody cares to pass or use faux scientific words
Think of that frozen mountain trail where only a tin sign to classify, or slang
tells one snowy Nordic edge from another, or miles relating to nation states
of rough green march-lands chocolate bars or animals – mongrel or mule
where I have wandered for days But I say it’s only when you are standing
That I’m home on the border doesn’t mean on the border that you are free
I don’t think about who took the world and carved it up to look both ways

Copyright © Hannah Lowe.
Bloodaxe Books