Continuous Frieze Bordering Red documents the migratory patterns of an
Other, as she travels between countries, languages, seasons, and
shifting identities. A narrative on hybridity, the text explores
[dis]location as a cultural swerve while it interrogates Rothko's red:
his bricked-in, water-damaged windows [floating borders], which
reflect unstable cultural borders to the hybrid. A person of mixed race
[hybrid, mongrel, mutt] traverses these "invisible" cultural borders
repeatedly. Border identity comes with flux, instability, and
vibrational pulls. An Other is marked as someone who does not belong.
She is always a foreigner: when traveling and when at "home." She is
cast aside, bracketed from the dominant culture. She is
[neither][nor][both]. She exists in a liminal space: in place and
displaced simultaneously. That is, her identity and body are
peripatetic, which is reflected in the continuous horizontal frieze. The
reader must literally cross the borders of each page in order to
navigate each line of text, leaving the reader in constant motion as
well. The poem also functions as an ekphrasis of Rothko's Seagram
murals: Rothko writes that the paintings make the observers "feel that
they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked
up." The hybrid is confined and isolated. Even though the Other is
estranged from herself and desires a sense of cultural belonging, she
ultimately wants to "acknowledge this scar tissue and proceed" so that
she is not held to false measures of "purity." Continuous Frieze
Bordering Red attempts to move away from pejorative definitions of
"hybrid" and embrace the monstrous self.
