English professor’s essay about swimming and borders published in Open Rivers

On Nov. 2, 2019, Furman University’s Melinda Menzer crossed the Amistad Reservoir on the Rio Grande from the U.S. side to the Mexico border in a 10-mile roundtrip swim. In the journal Open Rivers, Menzer, professor and chair of the English Department, wrote about her experience and why she made the watery trek.

Originally, Menzer set out to raise funds and awareness for HIAS, a Jewish-American refugee relief agency that has morphed into an advocacy group for asylum seekers from all over the world and from disparate religious backgrounds.

Menzer later reflected on the “arbitrary,” “imaginary” and often “irrelevant” dividing lines that bodies of water impose, lacing her story with historical vignettes in which water and other borders created division as opposed to unity. “But when you are in a river, when you are swimming in it, you recognize that a river is not a line that divides but a body that connects,” she wrote. “It is the opposite of a border: it is a path across.”