Symptom of Color is an excerpt from Continuous Frieze Bordering [Red], which documents the migratory patterns of an Other: the hybrid as she travels between countries, languages, identities, and shades of red.
Michelle Naka Pierce is the author of Continuous Frieze Bordering Red, awarded the POL Editor's Prize (Fordham, 2012); She, A Blueprint, a text/image document with collage art by Sue Hammond West (2011); Beloved Integer (2007); and co-author of TRI/VIA with Veronica Corpuz (2003). She has lived in Yokohama, Japan; London, UK; and currently teaches writing at Naropa University in Boulder, CO, where she is the director of the Jack Kerouac School.
I love the opening sentence "As you sleep metaphorically, you try to understand the dorsal aspect of this once removed zone, just beyond the city." Which is preceded by a quote from Judith Butler. It's contextually rich exploring language like a boat where you can ontologically find yourself and others in the unexamined syllables and secreted diphthongs etc. It's almost like a post structuralist imagining where vowels are engaged in diaspora and binaries re-appropriate themselves and seem fluid. Some sentences don't read brilliantly like:
"They want to strip you of your clothes [when you are twelve] where no lies violence."
and could probably have done with edits of some kind. The use of space and the textual layout is something I also didn't like but the work itself is rather solid allowing the subaltern to speak?