Linked Security: Expanding Networks and Opening Cracks of Identification in the Narrative Fissures of Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes’s Breach

In current Western discourse, especially in Europe and the United States, security has taken center stage as the fundamental topic broached. Questions posed are: How can we secure borders? How can both current citizens of and refugees fleeing to Europe feel safe and less threatened/feared by one another? This begs the penultimate question: what if “security” is breached? Olumide Popoola and Annie Holmes’s breach (2016) is a commissioned text written to report on the situation of refugees in Calias, France. A polyphonic fictional text that incorporates eight short stories, it takes up these questions in an attempt to articulate the ambiguity of a “border fence,” an image presented already on the book’s cover. The narratives in breach interlace the stories of diverse subjects contained within Europe’s borders from refugees to “natives,” but none of their networks are confined solely to this space. Indeed, most reach across geographically constructed borderlines. Drawing on Nita Schechet’s Narrative Fissures: Reading and Rhetoric and Clara Joseph and Janet Wilson’s Global Fissures: Postcolonial Fusions, this paper demonstrates the positive effect of expanding networks and connections through open cracks, rendering it a powerful tool to recognize and acknowledge the need for “sites of textual entry” (Schechet) in narrating and understanding trans/national subjects and spaces. breach articulates that without such gaps a holistic approach to security and human precarity (Butler) would not even be perceptible.