Crossing Over
Rebecca Solnit on transgression—in language, in the landscape, and in the art of Mona Hatoum.
Mona Hatoum, Jardin public (detail), 1993, painted wrought iron, wax, and pubic hair, 32 1/2 x 15 1/2 x 19 1/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist. © Mona Hatoum. Photo: Edward Woodman
To transgress means to break a law or custom, to go beyond the boundaries or limits, says the dictionary, and then it says that the word traveled from Latin through French to reach English, a nomad word whose original meaning was only to step across or carry across. Borders are forever being crossed; to draw a border is to just demarcate the line across which we will carry dreams, wounds, meanings, bundles of goods, ideas, children. Even the threshold of a doorway is a liminal space between public and private, between mine and ours; even liminal means a sensory threshold, often in the sense of hovering between states rather than crossing over from one to another.
Transgression is sometimes spatial, but sometimes an act is carried across rules or ideas or assumptions rather than across literal lines and spaces. We have, after all, pain thresholds and ethical boundaries. Sometimes a chair has a little triangle of pubic hair on it as though some portion of a sitter had been left behind, as a reminder that clothed people are nevertheless transporting their erogenous zones with them as they sip tea or wait for an appointment or draw up a plan, as we all do, as we pretend we don’t, as we carry on as though we did not carry over, as though our lives were not continual transgressions.
Sometimes assumptions become transgressions, of at least the truth and sometimes the complexity; sometimes people walk across a landscape on which the lines we know have not yet been drawn. The Spanish conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca is often described as one of the first white men to reach Texas when he and his companions landed on makeshift barges in the Spanish narrative. That man is remembered as Estevanico, though that was not his original name, which has been lost to history.
