Security Briefing, II

ISSUE: Winter 2012

Photo by Marcus Bleasdale

“As you can see the camps are overpopulated,
and the small parts in between, if somebody
vanishes, getting to them is like a reunion date
that never goes down. In rain, roads are too muddy,
at all times too narrow. UN police are afraid
of patrolling in between on crowded footpaths
because you never know who will shoot you, what laid
plans will ambush your breath. There’s no moth’s
flickering, because there’s no lighting at night.
So far, my security has not had to face similar
plight, but the risk is there. The other possible case
that you are looking at is the threat of hostage
taking. We now have confirmed the presence
of Raskamboni, al Shabaab, TVG, the offstage players
who snatch refugees then vanish quick as a scent.”

Major Jackson

Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (Norton, 2023), The Absurd Man (Norton, 2020), Roll Deep (Norton, 2015), Holding Company (Norton, 2010), Hoops (Norton, 2006), and Leaving Saturn (Georgia UP, 2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, the New Yorker, Orion, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. Jackson is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University and serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.