A Flag of No Nation

"Inspired by his ancestral story of Sephardi diasporas across empires and nation-states, Haviv produced a moving and visionary critique of the intractable Israeli/Palestinian conflict. A Flag of No Nation moves from the phantasmagoric to the concrete, from the disturbing blindness of nationalisms to new visions of peace. He makes powerful use of voice, not only through his poetic imagination but also through oral history, in recorded conversations with his grandmother documented in time and beautifully phrased in verse. He reminds us of the importance of history and family memory in envisioning a different pathway toward inclusivity and equality."
—Rina Benmayor, professor emerita at California State University, Monterey Bay and author of Romances judeo-españoles de Oriente (Eastern Judeo-Spanish Ballads)

"Like the 'confident acrobat' he has so gently envisioned, Tom Haviv's beautiful poetry and art ripple through the pages of this book, opening doors where surprises smile all of a sudden, connecting the most daunting dots of our yearnings. What's the reason for the flag? To whom belongs this poem? Traveling through imagined landscapes and inherited narratives of loss, Haviv creates a home here, perhaps even a sacred temporary haven, a place for us to land."
—Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, founder of Lab/Shul

"The son of an Israeli fighter pilot, and the grandson of activists with Istanbul's underground Zionist youth movement, Haviv is all too aware that the story—like matter—cannot be destroyed, only refashioned. Using a number of different modes—from allegory to oral history to the lyric poem—Haviv attempts to chart a path through the collective making and unmaking of the Zionist narrative to a proposed remaking in a post-Zionist context, declaring that path as valid and as rooted as the one that created and sustained the original Zionist myth. What Haviv has given us in A Flag of No Nation is a map of this almost alchemical process, a necessary one if we're ever to break through to something new."
—Arielle Angel, editor of Jewish Currents

"I was captivated from the first paragraph of Tom Haviv's book when he witnesses his storytelling accomplice, transhistorical spirit guide, subject, and grandmother Yvette pour deep time into her waiter's ear. Huge gratitude to both of them for providing an experience full of geographical landings and historical surfaces where our thoughts and feelings can rest while they share their minutely observant journey through Jewish and Levantine identity in the 20th century. It is truly wonderful when a prismatic work of art girds the reader for strategic action in real life. Thank you Tom and Yvette."
—Jenny Romaine, theater artist and organizer

"Tom Haviv's A Flag of No Nation is a magnificent rendering of family history and migration, as presented through 'this cascade of choices/we call our stories.' Dedicated to his grandmother Yvette, Haviv's meditative and visionary book of poems gathers and disperses the ephemera of the past in a structurally inventive and fluid landscape of text, image, pixels, and sound. The reader, set on a voyage at once mythical and digital, is dazzled by Haviv's explorations of style and the concert of voices that guide the multitudinous sections of this book. A Flag of No Nation recalls and reveres generations in a compassionate timescape that yields, like land appearing on the horizon, something sublime and unknown."
—Connie Mae Concepción Oliver, author of science fiction fiction and editor of FEELINGS

"A Flag of No Nation is an artful and tragic, ambitious and generous book. Its enveloping intimacy humbles us as much as it estranges, inviting us to imagine those political possibilities weaving together beneath our very noses."
—Ben Ratskoff, founder and editor-in-chief of PROTOCOLS

"A Flag of No Nation is as much architecture as it is verse. Haviv's poems build up and down the page, like houses being constructed—or perhaps demolished. They invite you in, to learn distractedly. Not as from a litany or a liturgy but wandering and inhabiting a broken library with fragments of different worlds and times, the recent history of the near east, family, migration, and oh so many breaks. He has, in his own way, politicized aesthetics. Not in the trivial way that poems are about politics—although so many, if certainly not all, are. But in the way that the poetry works on you, pushes and pulls you, stretches where your senses might end. It asks you questions. Not directly. And I suppose not one question—it asks you about memory and time and history, how to record a string of events, why to make a flag, where family stories end and official stories begin. It asks you to ask questions. The poems make demands on you. And the question cannot just linger—you can't get away that easy once you've walked inside."
—Ajay Singh Chaudhary, executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

"Tom Haviv's A Flag of No Nation is an interdisciplinary amalgam of poetic forms—myth, oral family history, political ethnography, conceptual performance art, and imagistic alchemy. Each chapter follows a different aesthetic path to the same critical point: the intersection of history with the human heart. By artfully weaving together the living memories of his own family members as they sought to navigate a monumentally volatile moment in Ottoman, European, Jewish, and Palestinian history, Haviv never lets the reader collapse the multidimensionality of life or the complexities of our various identities, both inherited and constructed, into rigidified theory. We have heard the truism for decades that 'the personal is political,' and Haviv's genre-bending work of poetic activism creatively and compassionately reminds us all of the more complex and messier truth that the political is also personal. This is a daring new work of political imagination that is inspiringly ambitious in scope, while at the same time accessible and enjoyable to read and discuss."
—Eden Pearlstein (ePRHYME), multimedia artist and educator

"Tom Haviv takes the beauty, pain, and particularity of his family's immigration stories and examines them like a precious stone, with each side and angle revealing a different depth of identity, history, contemporary relevance, and questioning. At once sweeping and intimate, Haviv's words and images linger with vivid color and brilliant sensation on every page, as the poems mingle characters, flags and journeys, chronologies and deep loves between people. Haviv's work is political as he sensitively brings out a complex allegory at the precise moment when understanding intersectional identities and reimagining togetherness may be the only things that can truly save us."
—Libby Lenkinski, vice president of New Israel Fund

"Tom Haviv's relentlessly inventive first collection offers a fresh and moving reckoning with the charged nature of his family's Levantine-Jewish identity. Weaving a hybrid text out of a richly complex tale, Haviv makes his personal story come to stand for a much larger history, one that is, as he shows here—politically and poetically—re-membered best by being broken open."
—Peter Cole, author of Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations

"Tom Haviv's A Flag of No Nation gives image and language to places and peoples that were not only lost and forgotten, but forced to be forgotten, othered, and shamed. The starting point of the writer's journey asking his grandmother 'Where are you from?' is answered throughout the text beautifully and delicately, giving again and again the opportunity to be in that place where the poem comes from, where the image is caught so wonderfully, where this conversation still continues."
—Tehila Hakimi, author of Company and We'll Work Tomorrow

"In this remarkable first collection, we are shown history is built from stories. We learn who tells, who's told, and how it's told makes all the difference. A Flag of No Nation refigures or recalls the poet as mythmaker, as archivist and historian, as the living pulse that links these things together through the human breath. In these formally inventive and deeply felt poems, Tom Haviv bears witness through inherited narratives, text, and emails. This is a living and essential book."
—sam sax, author of Bury It and Madness