As humans, we have a tendency and an instinctive need to create barriers and build boundaries—separating ourselves from what scares us and what is different, or just providing us with a break from reality. From the beginning of history, we have learned that people have dwelled in the mountains as protection from the unknown, countries built walls to exclude those who are different, and that we build fences to separate that which is ours and that which belongs to our neighbor. Truthfully, the structural and initial purposes of a boundary do serve as a method of protection and maintenance of order within a society, however, as we have seen in the works of several authors and poets, our eagerness to build limits and borders have a tendency to make communication and the expression of the things that make us unique more difficult.

Within the framework of the novel The Whale Rider, written by Witi Ihimaera, he progresses the idea that we may miss the obvious answer to our eternal questions because of the borders that we institute as a society. Specifically, when Koro Apirana assumes that his great-granddaughter Kahu is incapable of being a leader because she is a girl, his assumption places a barrier between himself and someone great. Furthermore, the lens that he maintains throughout the story actually harms his attempts at being a great leader and finding the one who will succeed him. His actions place a certain barrier between men and women and nature and humans in general. As the story continues, he finally sees that Kahu is indeed capable of being the leader that she has proven herself to be and in doing this she has recreated the balance between men and women, nature and humans—reconnecting and unifying everything.

Robert Frost develops a similar focus within his poem, “Mending Wall.” Essentially, the speaker of the poem reveals a story of him and his neighbor who are separated by a wall in both a literal and metaphorical sense. Each year, as he explains, “we meet to walk the line and set the wall between us once again” (13-14). The speaker notices that this wall that they build begins a lack of communication between the neighbors. He starts to question the actual reason for the wall when he says “before I build a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out” (32-33). The speaker knows that the purpose of the wall is to maintain each person’s sense of self intact; however, he realizes that they have lost their sense of community. He realizes that re-connecting the community is more important than rebuilding the fence that divides it.

The poem “The Game” by Judith Oritz Cofer evolves this theme of the creation of borders to both hide us from the judgments of our peers and to separate ourselves from those who have a different appearance. The speaker presents both of these reasons for the creation of borders. Initially, the young girl who is born with a handicap was kept home by her mother—protecting her from the vicious and critical views of others. By putting up this border, rather than allowing her to be a “normal” child, she unknowingly makes her child a victim to others. Her friend, the speaker, who reveals a past experience with the child, initially plays with her and is a friend to her as if she had no physical differences. In reality, however, their time spent playing “family” is only a game and that the speakers tradition of breaking the boundary between he and his handicapped friend will work only “until it started getting too late to play pretend” (40).

The piece by Jane Jacobs, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” also focuses on the effects of our tendency to build borders but on a scale that encompasses the workings and futures of American cities. She notes that the building of “borders in cities usually make destructive neighbors… [they] exert an active influence” (257) on city life. Essentially, the formation of borders, whether by train tracks, high ways, waterfronts, and even college campuses, inhibits the social and economic growth of a city. Life near the border is actually lifeless, however, “street by street by street, as you move away from the border, a little more life is found” (160). Jacob’s solution to this problem is in agreement with the other authors and poets mentioned. She calls for “a seam rather than a barrier, a line of exchange along which two areas are sewn together” (267) and a situation where we do not need to be afraid, but rather one where we can share our insecurities, along with our hopes, through seams threaded by communication and understanding.