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| Borrowed from pbs.org |
In the months leading up to the 2016 United States presidential election, I clicked off the news
and asked myself: what would America look like if Trump’s wall stood for over a
hundred years?
What would you do to challenge that impediment to your
movement? Would you try to flee—even if it was your own people who stood up the wall in the first place? Or would
you welcome it? Is the wall good? Is the wall bad?
I let my imagination roam, and I researched walls of all types and sizes and
histories and cultures and uses (that research to be divulged on a later post),
and I imagined a character, a young person, walking the entire length of this
wall…trying to find a way across.
That was the original
premise for THE VALLEN.
So, what does such a wall-fixated world look like? Well,
let’s start with the wall itself. Any
simple search will reveal all kinds of prototypes and designs and getups of the wall. For instance, some of the most
popular related search queries (from Bing.com)
read as follows:
- what would trump wall look like
- what does trump's wall look like
- what will trumps border wall look like
- what would the wall look like
- how will trumps wall look
- what does trump wall look like currently
- what does trumps border wall look like
- what will wall look like
For my wall, it is
— initially — fifteen-meters high
(or approximately 49.2 feet). Composed of concrete partitions, rebar skeleton, and
supported with fences, cameras, towers and the rest. Think: Israeli West
Bank barrier, known as the wall of
apartheid, in Arabic. Here’s a snippet of that wall’s structure from
Wikipedia.org:
The barrier contains an on-average 60-metre (200 ft) wide exclusion area. The width of some sections is larger (up to 100 metres (330 ft)) due to topographic conditions. The width of some sections (about 6% of the barrier) is 3 metres (9.8 ft) where the barrier is constructed as a concrete wall up to 8 metres (26 ft) high.
So, double that height and you get something truly colossal.
Then multiply its length a dozen times such that it stretches over 1,000
kilometers. Then make parts of it old—even ancient. Have it scale mountains and
deserts and forests—and then—you
start to get just the idea of what my wall truly looks like.
Go big or go home, hooah.
Now, why build such a wall? Who built it? Are there gates or
ports of entry/exit? What about flights or sea lanes? Is it really the movement
of people and goods which the wall impedes? Or is the wall’s eventual effect
divorced from its original purpose?
If people built the wall to protect themselves — to stake a
great big sign saying “Keep out” — does the wall actually effect that intended
purpose? Does it keep outsiders out? Of course not. No wall ultimately does
(articles here
and here
substantiating that claim). So, any wall
must be more symbol than substance, and that wall’s eventual overall effect
becomes—as decade by decade goes by from its original construction—to confine.
To confine the very people who built it in the first place.
To insulate them—culturally, informationally, psychologically.
And one of the hallmark things an insular culture, which
purposefully isolates itself, does is create echo-chambers of communication and
knowledge. New ideas become evil. Law and order prime. The wall becomes — in
order to guarantee of a certain way of life — a form of violence in its own
right. By impeding free movement and travel. Violence underlies what
the wall stands for.
But, within this fictional echo-chamber of a country, who
commits the violence and who is the receiver of the violence?
And that is the culture, the world, of THE VALLEN. With the wall as its seed.