Skin Is, My is an experimental short, providing commentary on the hyper-association my brother and I have experienced throughout our lives as children of mixed race. With an ambiguous name like “Miho,” no one even associated me with the heritage of my mother or my mother at all. Although the public eye never assigned me to the person that birthed me, I remained linked to the person who was birthed alongside me: my older brother, John-Henry. Without representation of mixed race families growing up, we formed a bond through our mutual exclusion from the American family portrait. Using the chaotic yet mechanical song, Skin Is, My, by Andrew Bird, I attempt to relay Bird’s feelings of distance between his soul and skin to my own experience. Although this isn’t the way I feel about my skin, the detachment Bird feels resonates with our experiences: our skins create a distance between the woman who birthed us and ourselves. It doesn’t illustrate the ways in which we are close to her and even identical to her. Experiencing this alongside John-Henry has enunciated a fluidity between our skins and bodies.
