Passports of the Soul: Crossing Borders and Remembering the Self in Post-Communist Europe

This article explores how Herta Müller and Paul Bailey transform the apparatus of state bordering, i.e., passports, permits and catechisms, into metaphors for an interior struggle between flight and belonging. In The Passport, The Land of Green Plums and Bailey’s Kitty & Virgil, emigration is portrayed not as departure alone but as a prolonged contest between the body that moves and the spirit that lingers. Those who cross borders geographically remain anchored, often painfully, in the mental and moral landscapes of the home they leave behind. The paper examines how documents, bodies, and languages become shifting frontier zones where identity is repeatedly issued and withdrawn, shaped by the pressures of memory, exile, and biopolitical control. Müller’s vision, written from within Romania’s history, and Bailey’s, refracted through an English consciousness yet partly set in Romania, converge in a poetics of witness that treats exile as both wound and testimony. Ultimately, these works suggest that identity survives in the liminal space between motion and remembrance where thought halts at its own threshold, memory traces its faint watermark, and the self bears its unspoken credential.