Borders

Barriers are a part of everyday life. They can serve to keep things in or out, or to hold people back. Consequently, people have devised ways to deal with or overcome limitations and barriers. Doors are put in walls, gates are put in fences, roads are built around large parks, and imagination is used to overcome the limits of reality. The effects of barriers and the actions taken to overcome them are important parts of a person’s life. They can show a great deal about one’s character. In “The Mending Wall”, “Slam, Dunk, & Hook”, “The Game”, and Death and Life of Great American Cities, readers can see the different ways that barriers and limitations can be dealt with, whether through conquering those barriers by opening them up, overcoming them through the use of imagination, or simply accepting and strengthening them.
“Mending Wall”, by Robert Frost, provides the most narrow-minded way of dealing with a barrier- to strengthen it, year after year, even when it is unneeded and even when it begins to come down on its own. Some men will hold on to barriers because it is what they are comfortable with; they “will not go behind (their) father’s saying… (that) ‘Good fences make good neighbors’” (Frost, 43-45). Thus, sometimes men are blind to changes and remain unwilling to tear down unneeded barriers because they remain prejudiced in their thinking and are scared to see what lies on the other side of a fence.
In Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs explains that large single uses in cities, such as parks, railroads, and civic centers, create borders that keep the area relatively closed to traffic and serve to create stagnation around them. Jacobs offers a solution to this stagnation. Cities should create “spots of intense and magnetic border activity” (Jacobs, 266) in order to create a crossover of traffic and liveliness between “single uses” and the surrounding city. Thus, Jacobs proposes that borders should not be seen as absolute, but rather, they should overlap with the surroundings. The borders and the surrounding areas should be molded together so that people still visit the park, for example, but they can also walk just outside the park into a café (Jacobs, 266). In her essay, Jacobs provides one way to overcome barriers.
Another way to overcome barriers is to make believe that they do not exist. This can be seen in “The Game”, by Judith Ortiz Cofer, and “Slam, Dunk, & Hook”, by Yusef Komunyakaa. “Slam, Dunk, & Hook” describes boys playing basketball- a game that allows the player to lose himself in it, to only think about what he is doing on the court. The narrator describes the perfect jump shot, a moment in time when everything feels right, when he says “we could almost/Last forever, poised in midair/Like storybook sea monsters” (Komunyakaa, 8-10). At that moment, all life is forgotten, and existence is like a “storybook”. The narrator describes a boy whose mother has died. What does he do to deal with this tragedy, this pain? He plays basketball- all day. “Our bodies spun on swivels of bone & faith” (Komunyakaa, 36-37). Basketball gives them respite from the obstructions of reality, it gives them hope and faith. “The Game” describes a similar situation. Cruz is a small, humpbacked girl who is regarded as a “symbol of the family’s shame” (Cofer, 6). Cruz uses her imagination to escape her limitation. She would be “lost in the game,/until it started getting too late/to play pretend” (Cofer, 40-43); then it would be time to go back home to reality, to her disdainful and unappreciative family, until it was time, again, to escape from her affliction, her barrier.
A barrier holds someone back or limits their movement forward. One can see, in both literature and in life, that there are many ways to deal with the myriad barriers thrown into people’s lives.