For a while I thought about designing a flag. Something bigger, blurrier than "nation." I imagined a hovering planet on a field of blue, and "United We Stand" could be written under that--which felt good. I mentioned my idea to a few visual artists, who smiled and said I know what you mean, though some felt the American flag was fine and did stand for "something." Though no one could say what that something was, except maybe a desire to feel safe, together. Nonetheless, it kept happening. The war got sold on TV right in front of us. First, "Attack on America," then "America Strikes Back," then "America at War." It felt like a gradual poem coming across the TV screen in the same way a news story keeps adding one tiny little detail every hour on the hour. A poetry of repetition, so very American. We do understand the selling of a thing. Patriotism is, of course, a language system; a reality is getting constructed, just like "sobriety" exists as it does because of AA and the success of its endless repetitions ("it works if you work it!"), because, as Fredric Jameson says, conviction is related to the amount of redundancy in the message. But what about a flag for that other us? If there is another country, or many of them, in North America, or even in the world, how shall we know ourselves? Or shall we just darkly slide into the abyss under Gertrude Stein's ominous words: "Each civilization insisted in its own way, until it went away."

Long before September 11, I received countless e-mail petitions, still do, concerning the inhumane treatment of women in Afghanistan, though at dinner parties one hears the "good news" about the war--that windows in Afghanistan have been flung open, TV stations are coming back on and women are abandoning their burqas, going back to work. Suddenly, the US military has become the liberator of Afghan women. Yet this cheeriness is complicated by the story of Lieut. Col. Martha McSally, the highest-ranking female jet pilot in the Air Force, stationed in Saudi Arabia, who was, until recently, bizarrely forced to wear restrictive clothing--a black head-to-foot robe called an abaya, female Muslim attire, for her own protection whenever she was off base. Also, she was required to sit in the back seat of the car, as Saudi women do. (The Pentagon recently declared the black head-to-toe robe is now "not mandatory but strongly recommended" as off-base dress code. And McSally was reassigned to Arizona in what didn't sound like a promotion.) So while women were being liberated in Afghanistan, McSally's experience seemed like a recapitulation of the same oppression in mini-form, as if Muslim culture and the entire incident afforded the US military an opportunity to restrain women within its own ranks--obviously a goal. Because no one would ever suggest that a man in the military wear a dress for any reason. It would get him thrown out--so the masculine "out" is the feminine "in." Clearly, the patriotic have lots of work to do to change this pattern. Perhaps the war is "our" opportunity. We really need a flag.

In recent months I've read some radically female books that use poetics to promote a sexy and beguiling peace. Lisa Robertson, a Canadian writer, has written a small but epochal collection of poemlike prose passages and intermittent poems called The Weather. Once you crack the cover of this incidentally stunning-looking book--three floating white spheres in an azure sky--a folded turquoise sheet tumbles out, a press release it seems, from "The Office for Soft Architecture." It pronounces in boldface, "We think of the design and construction of these weather descriptions as important decorative work," and it wonders grandly, "How should we adorn mortality now?" This is a serious political question, since, it explains, "sincerity's eroticism is different from wit's." I suspect "sincerity's eroticism" is the condition of that "other America" that put Colonel McSally in an abaya. Lisa Robertson embarked on The Weather during a residency at the University of Cambridge, where she began an intense yet eccentric research in the "rhetorical structure in English meteorological descriptions." Referring to these weather descriptions, the Office for Soft Architecture temptingly promises, "They sculpt what rhythmed peace could be." The Office for Soft Architecture is a poet's fiction, a poet's dream--utopia, what used to be called a manifesto. Robertson's trope is exactly what we need to see whapping in the air, and, as the vastness of her international conceit reminds us, it is the air. In this so-often-impersonal book (which is no small crime for a female writer) she lets the landscape narrate, and from this newly constructed body politic, a collective tells the tale. The writing of the weather descriptions (which, I must admit, instantly changed mine) is incantatory. The Weather is a work of dazzling surface divided up into the days of the week, each "day" being rhythmic prose with a pendant poem at its end.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.