The Go-Between

The Go-Between – Essay

“Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.”

“Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”

Human rights. Something everyone has, yet something most of us don’t think about daily because we don’t live in a third world country where our rights gets violated on an average basis. The quotes above are words from the article of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Everyone has the right to travel exactly where whey wants, whenever they want. This is written as a law, and is valid for everyone even those who live in poor countries.

“The Go-Between” is Ali Smith way of celebrate The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Smith found inspiration to the story in article 13, which is quoted above.

The story follows a 33-year-old African man, who was a microbiologist. “I’m thirty-three years old” “I was a microbiologist, before”, now he is a ‘border crosser’ which job is to help other refugees cross the border between Spain and Morocco. He himself is a middleman between the people on need and the French doctors, he is the ‘Go-Between’ at the title of the story implies. His job has not been taken easily on him, as he says himself, he lost some of his ear and a finger “I lost the top part of my ear on the fence (…) my third finger of this hand”. Even when his job has worn him out, he keeps working and helping people get over the fences, this has a lot to say about his character -  it shows that even when he gets injured he remain a positive mindset, and is very determined.

The story starts in Medias res, with the question “You know what Spain is?”. The reader is immediately drawn to the story, and we as a reader want to know what happens next so we keep on reading. Smith has a humorous way to introduce us to the plot of the story, “I lost the top part of my ear on the fence. The top part of my ear is in Europe” here we get a glimpse of the plot and the reader get a feeling of something is wrong, why would he try to climb a fence with barbed wire on the top if everything was perfect. This theory is later confirmed. The man in the story starts by sharing the story of the second time he climbed the fence where he lost the upper part of his ear. It’s described how they usually gets over the fence and what a big accomplishment it is to cross “I was all blood from my ear but I was happy”. You can feel their happiness and enthusiasm, even though he lost a part of his ear he is still happy just by being there, in Europe. All of this only to get caught, and thrown out of Europe. “We were in Europe” the narrator says, and we can feel the disappointment that came with being thrown out of Europe. The writer has been building this huge enthusiasm for them to make it to Europe and to escape poverty and bad conditions, only to shoot it down, by writing the heartbreaking moment when the got betrayed at the border. “They were meant to process us (…) what they did, instead, was they chased us with dogs, sticks, electric shock sticks and guns” the fact that they were meant to help them and process them, but instead ended up chasing them and abusing them, this leaves the reader with a strong feeling of corruption and abuse of the law. The narrator mentions an incident that happened near him when they got chased “a boy near me fell down, he had a bullet in the leg, and then a guard was beating the boy on the same leg with a stick”. This makes the reader imagine this horrible scenario where a defenseless boy who was shoot gets beat up by the people who were supposed to help, this also refer straight to The Universal Declaration of Human Rights which obviously gets strongly violated.  Everything the writer writes has the purpose to make the reader sympathize with these unprivileged people. The narrator tells that he helped the French doctors by helping all the wounded people; there is a man whose legs had been broken under a train, a woman who had been raped and a little boy who was dying – all of this is mentioned so the reader gets an even stronger feeling of sympathy for these people.