And what of flags? I
refuse the immediate meaning. I wrestle the word down to the ground and find
life seeping up. Wild iris, march herb calamus, fabric signal, the tail of some
dogs, the tail of some deer, something rippling or wagging, object for attraction,
stone suitable for pavement, to lay such stones, they say it’s for allegiance,
my aunt thinks skin, I’m looking to a porous and fluid border, where the
boundary cracks and green pours through, herb to mouth, to quilt to stone,
water tucking into the bends, all this motion fills in! to flag or hang loose,
to tire, decline, to hail, raise a concern, lost steadiness, oh love, greening
earth, to mark for remembrance and return.
Set in six sections—“Untitled,” “Land mouth,” “The Black Bettys,” “One wild blue day,” “Flag” and “Slow coups”—each section rides an unfolding, an unfurling, of accumulations set as individual prose blocks, allowing the music of these lyric narratives a kind of propulsion. As she offers as part of the first section: “It bears repeating that Toni Morrison / said all water has a perfect memory / and is forever trying to get back / to where it was. Writers are like / that: remembering where we were, / what valley we ran through, what / the banks were like, the light that / was there and the route back to / our original place.” She writes of history, slavery and arrival, and the ongoing impacts of that history, little of which has been properly acknowledged by the descendants of the perpetrators. “Certain facts stand.” Or, further on: “Some of us can be traced by how we / arrived—which way up or down. Some / of us don’t remember. Simply can’t.”
Moving from American border space through “Louisiana and Mississippi,” south to Guyana and the “Meeting of Waters in Brazil,” Jackson’s text is lively, powerful and performative; bearing an incredible weight with a music and craft that provides such a quality of light. I would suspect such a collection equally comfortable on the stage as it is on the page, and an adaptation for the theatre wouldn’t be impossible to imagine. Composed through an array of short narrative bursts that string and sing together to form something greater, Jackson’s FLAG articulates a conversation around borders and depictions, notions of country and self-description, and how often that narrative contradicts, and so often at the expense of the very populace they claim to protect. FLAG weaves a variety of histories, music and story, providing an incredible collage-effect of fierce intensity. This is a remarkable book.
Clear Rock’s recording
ambles at a slow pace, slower than Leadbelly’s,
slower than the version
of it popularized by the late-1970s band Ram
Jam, whose rendition made
them a one hit wonder. Was it slow work
Clear Rock did on the
chain gang—lifting the axe, swinging the axe,
felling the trees—despite
the rush of the whip. (“The Black Bettys”)
