Borders and Citizenship

This episode is the first time we’ve asked each other “how are you?” Yes, we’ve checked. 

Here are two “rankings” for passports: the Henley Passport Index, which describes itself as “the only one of its kind based on exclusive data from the International Air Transport Authority (IATA)” and the Global Passport Power Rank, which at the time of recording, ranked as “equal” passports issued by Canada, the UK, and Cyprus. Eagle-eyed listeners will note this has changed. 

Thinking about the nationality/citizenship distinction, here’s an example of that slippage in the British context.

Gillian refers to C. Lynn Smith’s chapter “Is Citizenship a Gendered Concept?” in Citizenship, Diversity, and Pluralism: Canadian and Comparative Perspectives (eds Cairns et al.), 1999; and to Chelva Kanaganayakam’s chapter “Cool Dots and a Hybrid Scarborough: Multiculturalism as Canadian Myth” in Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian Literature(ed Moss), 2003. 

“White civility” is an important analytical tool developed by Daniel Coleman in his book of the same title, published in 2006.

We discuss “Borders” by Canadian writer of Greek and Cherokee descent Thomas King, published in 1993 in the collection One Good Story, That One and more recently republished as a comic book with illustrations by the Métis artist Natasha Donovan.

For more on the Haudenosaunee Nationals’ travelling difficulties, please see this CBC article by Ka’nhehsí:io Deer.

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester for the use of recording equipment, and to the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

Transcript

Zalfa Feghali: Welcome to Borders Talk: Dots, Dashes and the Stories They Tell. We are Zalfa Feghali

Gillian Roberts: and Gillian Roberts, two border studies academics in England's East Midlands from different countries with multiple passports.

Zalfa Feghali: Hi, Gillian. 

Gillian Roberts: Hi, Zalfa. 

Zalfa Feghali: How are you? We never ask how each other is, by the way, you know, because we never really care. Talk about hospitality.

Gillian Roberts: No. 

Zalfa Feghali: Welcome, everybody.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. Well, I'm severely jet lagged having got back from the West Coast of Canada not too many days ago. So yeah, this is going to be an experimental kind of vibe that we're going to roll with.

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, I find this mildly concerning for many reasons. You are usually the person talking sense. And I lean on you. I just blurt out things and then Gillian makes them make sense. So today we are talking about another keyword, and that keyword is citizenship. One of the reasons that we thought we'd talk about citizenship is because we both think about it a lot because we work on it a lot in our work, but also it is a natural follow on from our last episode, which was very exciting, our first and only live episode.

Gilian Roberts: So far. 

Zalfa Feghali: And so thinking about citizenship feels like a natural progression there. How does citizenship feature in your work or your scholarship or your thinking?

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. So, during my PhD I was thinking about citizenship because I was looking at immigrant writers to Canada and you know how their identities had been sort of recalibrated through their literary success, which I referenced in our last episode. And actually while I was thinking about these things, I was a Canadian student in the UK thinking about these things and very aware at different points in my career, very aware of my own status in the place where I was working. Incidentally, after I finished my PhD, I went back to Canada in order to get a two-year work permit to come back to the UK in order to keep doing my part-time teaching and part-time library jobs. And then I got, so actually this is becoming a narrative of my CV in a weird way. Then I went back to Canada to do my postdoc, and then I came back to the UK again to take up a job at what was then at Leeds Metropolitan University, now Leeds Beckett University. And then I was in the UK under another kind of visa. And when I changed jobs to move to the University of Nottingham, I had to go through more kind of visa bureaucracy, because my initial visa had been tied to that institution, etc, etc. So when I finally got what is called indefinite leave to remain in this country, I was like, oh, that's great. You know, now I can, I could stay here even if I lost my job, I would still be able to stay here. 

Zalfa Feghali: Lucky duck.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, lucky duck. But that was the first thing I thought of, actually, was this like, oh, I have some rights now. And then when I became a citizen, it was like, oh, I have even more rights. So while I've been thinking about citizenship in terms of my work, I was also going through various processes like these incremental moves towards actually being able to be here. Of course, you can have your citizenship stripped of you as well. So it's never an absolute thing, right? The protection of citizenship. But obviously thinking about borders so often entails thinking about citizenship and the ways in which citizenship and borders operate in relation to each other, thinking about how borders are kind of sites where citizenship is declared and performed in many ways. How about you? How has citizenship featured in your work?

Zalfa Feghali: I'm really interested in thinking about, this is maybe not in my work, but just an interest, I guess, in the way that we conflate citizenship and nationality, which is a distinction that both matters and doesn't matter. But in my work, I like to consider how citizenship is connected to belonging or a lack of belonging and who makes that determination. Citizenship is also just, again, in my past work, but in the work that I'm doing now, it's this tension between having the right paperwork and documentation. So I'm sort of brandishing imaginary documentation.

Gillian Roberts: She's brandishing, people, she’s brandishing!

Zalfa Feghali: Watch out. But also the activity of citizenship. So the status or the habitus. And lots of brilliant scholars have theorized and discussed what it means to act like a citizen and what acts of citizenship are. And so I think that's where I'm interested in the gaps between or the overlaps between having the paperwork and behaving like a citizen, whatever that means, or not having the paperwork and yet still behaving like a citizen and how you are then welcomed or not welcomed, how you are belonging or not belonging, whether you feel a sense of belonging or whether you are told that you do not belong. So I will not go through my kind of narrative CV in this, but when I came to the UK to do my PhD, in spite of the fact that I have the quote unquote “right” citizenship, I was still an overseas student because I wasn't a resident. So I was paying overseas fees. And that issue being as it may, it made me pay attention in a whole different way, because I've been thinking about citizenship for a very long time, in a whole different way, what the material consequences of having the right passport, but being in the wrong place. It makes me think a lot about passports, and we between us have a lot of passports. So this morning, one of the things I did was look up quote unquote “good” passports versus “not so good” passports and what that means. And there are various ways of ranking passports, and there are different indexes by which you might rank nationalities or citizenship documents. 

Gillian Roberts: So who's doing this ranking? 

Zalfa Feghali: Different corporate entities, you might say. But some of the, I guess, factors or criteria that are considered include how many countries you can get into on this passport without needing a visa, how many you can get into by arriving at a border and purchasing or obtaining a visa on arrival and how many you need to have pre-applied and secured a visa before travel. So a lot of the time, those are the three main factors going in. And of course, there are, and that leads us, if we're thinking about the US, which I always end up going back to, which really quite depresses me, it links back to ideas of travel bans and banned countries and citizenships that are totally valid in one place, but are then rendered invalid by another place. So if you are from wherever, then you cannot visit the US. And that's not just about belonging, although you are very clearly being told, you do not belong here. So we don't want you. So yeah, that was a very roundabout answer. And unfortunately, since you're jet lagged, you may not be able to make sense of it, but you can have a good go.

Gillian Roberts: I have so many things to say. But the first question I had was, was there any consensus amongst the corporate entities about like, what's the top passport these days?

Zalfa Feghali: I'll be honest, I scrolled down to look at the quote, unquote, “worst” passports. 

Gillian Roberts: OK, you want to say what those are? 

Zalfa Feghali: They tended to be Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq. And I thought, that's so interesting. Oh, my tiny girl brain went, huh. 

Gillian Roberts: Oh, what do they have in common?

Zalfa Feghali: I wonder what those three places have in common. I do not know. And then I just shrugged and gave up and navigated over to… 

Gillian Roberts: A corporate man can probably tell us the answer. 

Zalfa Feghali: Well, I hope he writes in and lets us know. 

Gillian Roberts: Do we have any corporate man listeners? 

Zalfa Feghali: Hardcore or otherwise.

Gillian Roberts: I would be amazed. I do remember when I was an MA student in Ottawa, a fellow student who'd spent some time on exchange in Germany had her passport stolen. Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. 

Gillian Roberts: And she just kind of said this in a very matter of fact way about how, oh, at the time there was like this spate of Canadian passport thefts because that had been, you know, it was at the time anyway seen as a really valuable passport. So I'm sure somewhere on the dark web is a like black market version of the corporate man's list.

Zalfa Feghali: It will be there, if anyone has access to it, don't send it to us. It's from the dark web. We don't want it.

Gillian Roberts: Again with the contagion. I did want to come back to something you said about behaving like a citizen. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah.

Gillian Roberts: Can you give us some examples of what that would look like?

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. And I suppose this starts to deviate from kind of official, that status of having citizenship. So how do you define a good citizen, and what do they do with their time? That is a really nebulous concept. So we might think about good citizenship as being, you know, a person or an individual who participates in civic life, whether that's voting or in a very granular way, like paying their council tax and following the law. Lots of people who aren't citizens do that, too. Well, maybe not the voting. 

Gillian Roberts: Well, we'll come back to that. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. And so I remember when I've been asked this in the past, I say, well, what makes a good member of society? Forget about the state. And then people come back to me often with being a member of your community. And I go, okay, so how do we define community? Are we literally talking about a neighbourhood? Are we talking about your city or your town? What does it mean to be a good member of the community? Are you going outside and doing litter-picking? Are you not parking in a non-permit zone, you know, what are you doing? 

Gillian Roberts: Are you doing your recycling correctly? 

Zalfa Feghali: Well, I mean, that's a whole different thing for another keyword, perhaps. Both: Recycling! 

Zalfa Feghali: If anything, listeners, surely you should be entertained by the joyousness with which we are approaching this episode. The laughter is contagious, infectious, 

Gillian Roberts: and a little bit hysterical. 

Zalfa Feghali: Ever so slightly unhinged in my case, but that's fine. 

Gillian Roberts: We were talking about recycling, we were talking about community. 

Zalfa Feghali: Yes, we were. So it's about, I actually think that in an important way, being a citizen of a community, and we can start to stretch that definition of citizenship there, being a member of that community, starts to resemble what it means to have a relationship with the Other, what it means to consider yourself relationally as somebody and something that is not static, but always in a dynamic relationship there. And that will mean different things to different people at different times, which is a nice woolly way of saying, I'm not going to give you a straight answer. But in the show notes, we can write out a range of examples of people who have said it far better than I am.

Gillian Roberts: I mean, it's really interesting because what you're saying is, on the one hand, we've got this very, you know, the legal definition of citizenship, which is just about your relationship to the state, frankly, as you know, there are no standards for that, really. Except, I suppose, yeah, how the state would feel if you refuse to go to war on its behalf, which is, of course, one of the “responsibilities”, quote unquote, of citizenship. 

Zalfa Feghali: Well, we can have that conversation as well. 

Gillian Roberts: But then also, you know, we talk about citizenship in, it's not quite metaphorical terms, but, you know, when we talk about somebody being a good citizen, it is about relationality. It is usually about community. And it's often about the smaller scales of relation as well, which is really interesting. And then, of course, you have things like, I don't know, university workload planners, where citizenship is the category that is kind of like, are you turning up to meetings? Are you not shouting at colleagues? Et cetera. So it's a word that does a lot of different kinds of work. I did want to come back to this point about voting, because I was astonished to discover as a PhD student in the UK that I was entitled to vote here. I was entitled to vote here, because I was a Commonwealth citizen.

Zalfa Feghali: So were you entitled to vote in all elections or just some elections? Because there are a range of, I guess, categories of election that… So were you able to vote in parliamentary elections?

Gillian Roberts: I was able to vote in general elections.

Zalfa Feghali: Wow. As well as the just as important things like council elections and police commissioner elections.

Gillian Roberts: We didn't have police commissioner elections in my day, in PhD days. I don't remember if I did vote in local elections. And I don't know if that – I mean this is a long time ago. Like this is over 20 years ago now. But so yeah it also took me time to realize that I could vote. So there was definitely an election that I missed, because I just assumed that I couldn't. And then I think I didn't vote in the next one because I had moved house too recently. And so that kind of, at least I was told by somebody that I couldn't then vote because of the change in address. 

Zalfa Feghali: Well, that was before it was all online. 

Gillian Roberts: So and then I felt like deeply aggrieved and disenfranchised, etc. But at the same time, during the Harper years, former Prime Minister, Conservative Stephen Harper in Canada, I was disenfranchised. He removed the vote from any of us living outside of Canada. And then Justin Trudeau gave it back to us. So that was a really weird situation where I was like, I could vote in UK elections. And then, you know, I have since voted in UK elections as a citizen, but I couldn't vote in Canadian elections as a citizen.

Zalfa Feghali: And Canada is a really interesting one as well, because the whole bunch of communities are differently disenfranchised. And so it's a great track record.

Gillian Roberts: Great track record. Yeah, great track record. And I think one of the other things that you were mentioning about citizenship and nationality, and I think it's put really nicely by the scholar, Chelva Kanaganayakam, “the dichotomy or hiatus,” he calls it, “between citizenship and national belonging.” And one thing I have in the past asked my students is, well, what's the difference between citizenship and nationality? And actually the ideas they come up with, and I completely understand where they're coming from, but I'm like, oh, but no, there's that exception. No, oh, no, but that doesn't quite work. I thought it was hilarious when I got my first UK passport and it says nationality, and then it says British. I'm like,” No, but that's not really right, is it?” That doesn't really work. Citizenship, fine, you know, but… Zalfa Feghali: See, that slippage is just really, it's so conflated that I don't know how to go about explaining it. It's not as straightforward to me as the incorrect slippage between gender and sex, which drives me mad on forms. But nationality has now just become another byword for citizenship, which is… in an important way a nonsense.

Gillian Roberts: Absolutely. And there's all kinds of stuff we could say about nationality and how it works with different citizenship systems, right? Like, you know, are the criteria based on where you were born? Are the criteria based on your family's bloodline? The fact that countries have these very different systems as well means that citizenship is never just one thing. There's lots of different complications surrounding it and kind of like semi-citizenship statuses, like how easily can you get a visa? How easily can you get something like an ancestry visa to come to the UK? In terms of your grandparents, where they were born and are you from a Commonwealth country, for instance, that gives you this sort of I don't know, bit of a shortcut into indefinite leave to remain. So it is really complicated and I think kind of endlessly fascinating.

Zalfa Feghali: That's a great turn of phrase, because I see what you mean and I don't disagree with this idea of a shortcut to indefinite leave to remain. But it's a shortcut via empire. 

Gillian Roberts: Oh, a hundred percent.

Zalfa Feghali: Which is a kind of shortcut that ignores. And again, I'm not disagreeing with you. There's the invisible time that has already passed. 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. 

Zalfa Feghali: That's how long you have waited. And then in the present, you get that shortcut, but that sort of doesn't count.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: The time that's elapsed that is in there.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, and I think obviously, if we think about those imperial antecedents, British subjecthood was this kind of empire-wide citizenship, where presumably, you would have equal status as a British subject in different parts of the empire. But we also know that that was a farce.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, it’s a nonsense. And I mean, there continues to be that quite sort of the different categories or I hesitate to use the word class, but I can't think of a better word right now, but the different statuses of British citizenship. So you can be a British citizen or you can be a British overseas citizen.

Gillian Roberts Yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: And I recall many occasions where people would say to me, so at various passport checking situations, you know, oh, so you must be a British overseas citizen. And I would, in those younger, much younger, I should say, periods of my life, I would very smugly, because it would annoy them, say, no, no, I'm a British citizen. And they'd go, oh, how did you manage that? Yeah. But building in that hierarchy that gets internalized by people on every step of that ladder. 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah.

Zalfa Feghali: And that is really interesting, I think. Interesting is a very generic word for that experience, perhaps.

Gillian Roberts: I remember years ago now, I think I was still a student, I was visiting home and my great aunt, I think I was speaking to my great aunt, it was at a family gathering, and she was saying how appalling it was that British people couldn't just automatically immigrate to Canada. 

Zalfa Feghali: Could or couldn't? 

Gillian Roberts: They couldn't just rock up. And I said, well, you know that we can't just rock up there either, right?

Zalfa Feghali: Did she know that it didn't go the other way?

Gillian Roberts: No, I don't think she did. I mean, yes. Insofar as I did, as I have spoken about before, I did rock up as a PhD student to do my PhD in the UK. And you can't do that anymore. But like, I couldn't have just stuck around. I couldn't have just immigrated to the UK because I was Canadian. And that is not to say that Canadians don't have valuable passports or preferential relations with the UK, because we are very high up on that super dodgy hierarchy. But at the same time, I just thought it was interesting that she felt so aggrieved on the part of all those poor British people who aren't able to just come here, like they did in the 19th century. 

Zalfa Feghali: Sad times. 

Gillian Roberts: Sad times. But yeah, but I think the fact that she didn't think about how that was a reciprocal thing, because we couldn't do that either. But there was a sense that she felt that they were entitled to do that, or they ought to have been entitled to do that.

Zalfa Feghali: Well, by looking at one index here, the Canadian passport is ranked joint eighth with the UK and Cyprus. 

Gillian Roberts: Well, well, well. 

Zalfa Feghali: So there we are. 

Gillian Roberts: Those are some very interesting bedfellows. 

Zalfa Feghali: According to this information, you can get into 121 countries visa-free, 48 countries with a visa on arrival, and 29 countries where you have a visa that's required. Now, I have to look and read a little bit more into this index to be sure about whether places that have an established relationship like Canada and the UK, where you don't need a visa, but you do need the electronic travel authorization before you land, whether that counts as visa free, which–it isn't a visa.

Gillian Roberts: No, it's a visa waiver, but you still have to apply for it and pay for it. 

Zalfa Feghali: Exactly. 

Gillian Roberts: Interestingly, many years later, this segues fairly neatly to an experience that I just had on Vancouver Island, visiting my parents with one of our hardcore listeners and our resident 11-year-old. We were going to the shop and there's a busker. He's been there most of the years that we’ve visited. So he's like a longtime busker outside the shop. And we were just like passing by, and I just heard this snatch of conversation where, I infer because I couldn't hear what she was saying, to an English immigrant to Canada that she wasn't an immigrant because she was English. That the word “immigrant” is reserved for people who are like Russian or Bangladeshi. 

Zalfa Feghali: Oh that's nice and specific. 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah! And so I was like say what now? OK. And then we turned the corner to go to the shop we were going to and then explained to the 11-year-old that that was a racist busker. But, you know, that kind of sense of like, oh, well, again, citizenship versus national identity, like who can be seamlessly Canadian? And if you are a UK immigrant, and I didn't even see this woman, so I don't know what the colour of her skin is, but I'm guessing because of the way in which the busker was welcoming her and he was a white guy, I assume that she she was white. But yeah, just, mind blown.

Zalfa Feghali: Obviously, that's terrible and sucky. That being my very academic evaluation of that encounter. But.. 

Gillian Roberts: Peer reviewers would want to see that. 

Zalfa Feghali: Oh obviously. But it kind of goes back to the way that the word migrant has been weaponised, where it can, in law, most often just literally mean foreign-born. And again, the idea of the “foreign” and the “Other” who is not from quote unquote “here,” whatever that means. It's a whole different podcast, Gillian. 

Gillian Roberts: A whole other podcast. I mean, that reminds me of what C. Lynn Smith says, which is that you have a pairing and the opposite of citizen is alien. 

Zalfa Feghali: Right. Speaking of aliens…

Gillian Roberts: I have no idea where you're going with that. 

Zalfa Feghali: Impositions! Alien impositions! 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. Alien impositions. That's right. Because we've been talking about citizenship like it's a great thing. I mean, it's not such a great thing when you're sent to war by your state. But otherwise, people tend to think of it as like the rights that they get, right? The right to live somewhere, sometimes to live somewhere else. If, say, you were still an EU citizen. But it's not always something that is sought after or welcome, right?

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, absolutely. But in particular, a really useful example or a really relevant example of this is the very famous, very well-known, to some people, I suppose, short story by Thomas King, titled “Borders”.

Gillian Roberts: That's right. Where a Blackfoot mother and her son are traveling from Alberta to Montana, or trying to, but get stuck at the border crossing because when asked for her citizenship, the mother says, “Blackfoot.” You know, this is a story I've taught many times, and this is the context in which I've asked my students to think about the difference between citizenship and nationality. Because I think there's a lot of hostility in that story from the American border guards who have, like, guns, of course. And then when they can't get into the States, they have to try and get back into Canada, and they're still not able to cross because the mother is still giving her answer as Blackfoot. Now in the story, the Canadian border guard, who's female, is younger, I think, than the US border guards. I think she's described as being young. And she's super friendly. And she's like really stereotypically Canadian, like, oh, you guys have a great day, eh? Or, you know, similar to that. That's not an exact quotation, but that's the vibe. That's totally the vibe. And she says, oh I know someone who's Blackfoot. Do you know my friend? And she says in response to the mother declaring her citizenship as Blackfoot, like oh I would be proud to be Blackfoot if I were Blackfoot. But you have to be Canadian or American.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah. Just tell me which one to put down on the form you know.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah I think that's the— 

Zalfa Feghali: That’s the American female border guard. 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah that’s the American border guard who has her name engraved on her gun.

Zalfa Feghali: A bit on the nose.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. 

Zalfa Feghali: Nevertheless memorable. 

Gillian Roberts: I always think that Canadian border guard when she says, I would be proud to be Blackfoot if I were Blackfoot. There's a whole bunch of stuff going on there with Canadianess and white civility and just sort of constructing a benign settler figure. However, I think at that moment we see the distinction between nationality and citizenship, because she is totally cool with Blackfoot as a nationality. What she is not cool with is Blackfoot citizenship. And neither of the settler-colonial nation-states of Canada or the United States, neither of them can afford to recognize Blackfoot citizenship or any other kind of Indigenous citizenship. Because what would that do? That would acknowledge that there is a Blackfoot territory. That would acknowledge 

Zalfa Feghali: Their sovereignty.

Gillian Roberts: that they have stolen it. that would acknowledge all kinds of things. So they have to act as though Blackfoot citizenship doesn't exist, and they work to impose a settler-colonial nation-state citizenship. If you haven't read the story, here's a spoiler: they do manage to get through. They're trying to visit the sister of the narrator, the young boy, who is spending some time in— his sister has like temporarily moved to Salt Lake City. The media gets involved and then with the cameras pointing at the border guards and the mother and son in the car, they wave her through after she says Blackfoot. Again, you know, this is like, they spent a few days, I think, trapped at the border crossing. So it's a happy ending. But there's a lot, obviously, there's a lot going on there. Do they get back? Because that's the end of the story. But also, you know, you shouldn't have to have the media present in order for that resolution to come about. But it's also worth saying that, you know, that is a work of fiction. But in reality, you know, famously, the Iroquois Nationals trying to, maybe called the Haudenosaunee nationals now, trying to cross borders on Haudenosaunee passports to travel the world to play lacrosse, a game, an Indigenous game, right? All over the world. These are not just items of fiction in Thomas King's story, but these are issues that have persisted long past the publication of that story. And Indigenous passports existed, you know, long before that story as well.

Zalfa Feghali: It's a great story to sort of introduce students to these different terms and these different ways of thinking about borders, but also it's a great way to start to reflect on what it means to recognize the difference between nationality and citizenship, but also what it means to recognize a state, and recognition of a state can be weaponized in different ways to bear out ongoing settler-colonial efforts or not. Gillian? 

Gillian Roberts: Yes, Zalfa? 

Zalfa Feghali: You are jetlagged for a reason. Tell me about a border you have known.

Gillian Roberts: I am jet lagged for a reason. I will talk about a border, the one I've just come back from, frankly. Picture it. I was, it was very early on in my PhD, so it was the early 2000s, and potentially it was before 9/11. Not sure it matters in the context of this story, but there you go. I had already started my PhD. I was going home to visit. It might've been Christmas, might've been later than that. I don't know. And I had dutifully filled out the customs declaration. You know, how much are you bringing back? So it might not have been Christmas, actually, thinking about it. Because they ask you or they did. Anyway I'm not quite sure what the current practice is weirdly around this. I certainly haven't filled out that paper form in quite a while. And I should say, sorry for the endless digressions, that as a dual citizen, a holder of two passports, when I travel to Canada, I have to travel in on my Canadian passport. I'm not allowed to travel in on my UK passport.

Zalfa Feghali: Oh, that's interesting.

Gillian Roberts: I have to go in as a Canadian passport.

Zalfa Feghali: This is another digression. What happens if your passport has expired?

Gillian Roberts: I don't actually know, but I know that there was a change a few years ago that said they wouldn't allow you in anymore on your other passport.

Zalfa Feghali: How would they know? Okay. I mean, we're spiraling into speculation.

Gillian Roberts: But it has meant we do have to keep an eye on expiration dates, et cetera. So yes, I have been entering Canada on my Canadian passport. I actually don't think I have ever entered Canada on the other passport anyway. But at this earlier point in the 21st century, I had to fill in this document and declare how much money I had spent or declare the value of the goods that I had purchased outside of Canada. 

Zalfa Feghali: On living there. 

Gillian Roberts: No. Like gifts or something. Because they weren't supposed to exceed a certain amount of money and it depended on how long you've been away. So I declared not very much. And they were like, well what are you bringing back? So this makes me think it wasn't Christmas, because I would have been bringing back some Christmas gifts. And I'm like, well, I bought some, I think I've been away for three months at that point since the last time I'd been to Canada. I'm like I have some new socks, 

Zalfa Feghali: I brought some shortbread!

Gillian Roberts: Like I'm a student, I don't have a lot, and they're like how is it that you are coming back to Canada having spent so little money like they just they couldn't get their heads around that, and I said well I'm a student in the UK, and the border guard said “Okay you are not a resident, you are a visitor," and drew this massive X on my custom declaration form. And I was just like, oh, wow. It was like, well, we declared you non-resident at this moment, you are now a visitor, which was just such a super weird… 

Zalfa Feghali: Well, don't, I mean, ironically, you're all visitors. 

Gillian Roberts: Well, a hundred percent.

Zalfa Feghali: He did not know how right he was.

Gillian Roberts: Exactly. Exactly. Amazing. I didn't come back with that as a rebuttal because I was jetlagged and confused, but also just this like, oh, okay. So, yeah, that all of a sudden my relationship to the state was rearticulated. It's not that I was no longer a citizen, but it's like, OK, well, we now consider you a completely different category. 

Zalfa Feghali: A whole different belonging. That's really interesting. 

Gillian Roberts: And takes us all the way back to hospitality, because as we know, everything is always about hospitality, even when you're talking about a different keyword.

Zalfa Feghali: But I mean, that story actually really reminds me of some of the stories we heard in the last episode. So that is a really nice through line. Well, thank you, Gillian, for sharing your citizenship keyword reflections. 

Gillian Roberts: You're very welcome. 

Zalfa Feghali: And no doubt we will be back before long with our next keyword. Bye.

Zalfa Feghali: What borders have you known? Tell us your stories.

Gillian Roberts: Until next time, we've been Zalfa and Gillian on the line. Thanks for listening.