Boundary Omissions: Flouting the Official at the Manitoba Border

David Stirrup has noted that borders can be a kind of “carnival in the wilderness” that enter the discourse because of their “quirkiness” and “performative” potential. Such performativity in border-crossing manifests in the back and forth between the scholarly essay and the personal essay, between rhetorical force and bemused puzzling, between the truth of fiction and the possible fiction of tall tales, between comedy and tragedy, between what is visible at the border and what we cannot see. Anchored by Mennonite fiction writer and playwright Armin Wiebe’s The Salvation of Yasch Siemens and Chippewa novelist Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman , this article regards the carnival—fictive and real life—unleashed by the unfenced ditch border that separates Manitoba from North Dakota.