Straddling Two Words: Biracial Identity in "Flight"

If borderlands are the space between two territories that is the space bi-racial people occupy every day. Their entire life is lived in the space between creating a unique form of othering where they’re never fully part of either community their parents belonged to. In Sherman Alexie’s novel Flight, the Narrator Zits is a bi-racial Native American teenager who constantly grapples with his identity. Through the theme of past-lives Zits is able to embrace both parts of his ethnicity, establish his identity, and grow up. It is a coming of age tale that is remarkably unique. This paper draws on the work of Chris Hyeouk Hahm and Anna Elizabeth Kim’s, In the Path of Establishing Ethnic Identity and Raushanah Hud-Aleem and Jacqueline Countryman’s “Biracial Identity Development and Recommendations in Therapy” to discuss how ethnicity is a crucial concept to a person of color’s identity, and how biracial children struggle to form an ethnic identity. This paper is a literary analysis of Sherman Alexie’s novel Flight, a novel written by a Native American man about a Native American character. This paper contributes to the theme of the conference because it takes a look at the metaphysical borders that real-life people inhabit every day.