Walls

In this ambitious blend of travel and reportage, Marcello Di Cintio travels to the world’s most disputed edges to meet the people who live alongside the razor wire and answer the question: What does it mean to live against the walls? Di Cintio shares tea with Saharan refugees on the wrong side of Morocco’s desert wall. He meets with illegal Punjabi migrants who have circumvented the fencing around the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. He visits fenced-in villages in northeast India, walks Arizona’s migrant trails, and travels to Palestinian villages to witness the protests against Israel’s security barrier. From Native American reservations on the US-Mexico border and the “Great Wall of Montreal” to Cyprus’s divided capital and the Peace Lines of Belfast, Di Cintio seeks to understand what these structures say about those who build them and how they influence the cultures that they surround. Some walls define “us” from “them” with medieval clarity. Some walls encourage fear or feed hate. Others kill. And every wall inspires its own subversion, whether by the infiltrators who dare to go over, under or around them, or by the artists who transform them.

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“Walls is mostly a litany of tears, anger and woe, leavened by bitterly absurdist irony.” — National Post

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“Walls: Travels Along the Barricades offers unique perspectives on some of the most divided regions of the planet while forcing readers to ask the essential question, what side of the wall would they want to be on.” — Lauren Rushton, Scene

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“Most people, on both sides, now ignore the fence. But not Di Cintio. And that’s his strength as a writer: he observes and reports tirelessly, then makes powerful and poetic connections between all that he has seen and heard. Walls is a moving and extremely engaging book, a reminder of “the constant thrum of hope” amid so many man-made obstacles.” — Dan Rubinstein, Canadian Geographic

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“Honest, compassionate, and expertly written . . . Walls is the kind of non-fiction you might call eye-opening, since it features Di Cintio travelling to all kinds of barricades around the world and interviewing the disparate people who live in their shadows. But he actually engages many more parts of the body than that — the brain and the heart both come to mind.” — Michael Hinston, “Five Favourite Reads of 2012”, Edmonton Journal

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“This is a remarkable book, and Di Cintio is a thoroughly engaged — and engaging — traveller and wordsmith. . . . The walls Di Cintio visits show no signs of coming down, but the underlying human spirit — the small, defiant hopes and everyday heroism of the people faced with these barriers, and the communities along them that refuse to be cleaved — is, in its own strange way, uplifting.” — Will Ferguson, The Globe and Mail

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“At the heart of Di Cintio’s book lies the practice of journalism, of finding people on both sides of the barriers, be they the nomadic Saharawi, African and Punjabi refugees in Ceuti or the gun-toting but surprisingly anti-fence redneck in Arizona, willing and often eager to share their experiences and lives. . . . Di Cintio’s willingness to go beyond mere reportage, to ponder his role in the story lifts it to an even higher level.” — Andy Ogle, Coastal Spectator

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“A collection of interrelated vignettes full of dense descriptions and fascinating characters that give the reader a true sense of place. . . . Di Cintio&146s ethnographic method is the perfect approach to his subject. He is at the centre of his story, but this is far from gonzo journalism; instead, it is a deeply humane, honest, and even cautious account by an outsider who seeks as much as possible to understand local contexts. It is a story told from below that shows how everyday lives are affected by big-picture politics, and a challenge to our historical urge to construct order out of steel and stone rather than through dialogue.” — Jan Dutkiewicz, Quill & Quire

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