James Barrowman reviews Red Threads by Henry Bell (Pluto, 2024)
Early on in Henry Bell’s new book, an expansive history of the people’s flag and all those that have stood beneath it, he speculates on the significance of its colour. Red stays in our retinas the longest; when we survey an image from a distance it is the colour red that stands out most prominently. The author points out that it is the first and only colour a foetus sees, the one we all see when we close our eyes tightly at night, universally accessible to humanity through a slicing of the hand. ‘Red is the colour of life.’
Appropriate then that Red Threads is a book that, like Buñuel’s scalpel, slices the eye and inserts its own optical machine. While I was reading it, I looked upon my surroundings differently. It acted as a lens, a gel, a heat seeking missile that trained my eyes upon the colour with a new interest. On my daily commute, my eyes would fixate upon humdrum scarlet flashes as if they had previously been invisible to me. The bell, bird and fish that decorate Glasgow bus stops like true religious icons, the decaying TJ Hughes shop front with its ever present ‘vacancy’ in the window turned into a staging post or a winter palace, every traffic light or roadworks diversion a revolutionary signal.
The afternoon I started reading it I went on a first date at a coffee shop. Her long ginger hair brought to mind other redheaded radicals: Lucille Ball, Garibaldi, Judas. The frills on her red top the corners of the thrilling ‘Drapeau Rouge’. When the subject of dating red flags came up, the weighty tome I was carrying on the subject was almost burning a hole in my rucksack. She went to the bathroom as I looked through an encyclopedia on the shelf beside us and settled on the page marked ‘reproduction’. As she returned we joked I was like a teenage boy with a biology textbook. Yet, when I looked down at the seed pods and cell structures pictured, my brain was busy weaving connections with the Red Threads I had untangled in the Mitchell beforehand.
While I was at work, busy making drinks for the Christmas crowds, the book helped me through. Every shake of the red cloth I used to wipe the steam wand felt like a flaunt of the banner. Whenever I affixed a red cardboard clutch to a coffee cup I imagined it as a subversive stamp on the commodity my labour produces for the thirsty and uncaffeinated consumers. When a young boy accidentally pulled on the red emergency cord in the disabled toilet during a shift, emitting a high pitched and nauseating alarm, it resonated with me like a rallying cry, the ‘emergency brake’ of the Walter Benjamin quote that appears at the beginning and the end of the volume: ‘It may be that revolutions are the act by which the human race traveling in the train applies the emergency brake.’
Red Threads excels at making our world historical locomotive feel cohesive. Even in moments where, like the new Glasgow subway carriages, passengers are packed in and the ceiling seems incapable of holding figures at such heights, the book seems to calm the rattling. It is truly international in scope, Henry Bell sits struggles from around the world beside each other and does so without flattening them or indulging in tedious comparison. He does so, in part, because the plasticity of the red flag as a symbol allows him to. It has meant so many different things to so many different groups of people that by its very nature it cannot be treated as a monolithic subject.
He also avoids this flattening in the construction of his narrative, by composing ‘scenes’ which instead of provoking comparison, offer juxtaposition and contrast. He arrives at something akin to Jacques Ranciere’s conception of parataxis, where scenes act as: ‘The optical machine that shows us thought busy weaving together perceptions, affects, names and ideas, constituting the sensible community that these links create, and the intellectual community that makes such weaving thinkable. The scene captures concepts at work, in their relation to the new objects they seek to appropriate, old objects that they try to reconsider, and the patterns they build or transform to this end.’
This book would serve as an excellent introductory volume for somebody with left wing values who does not yet have a grip on the history of the struggle. It has everything in it, and it does not suffer from the problems that comprehensive histories ordinarily do. It is not dry and academic, it is not patronising and condescending. It retells familiar stories with both style and substance. It also reaches beyond the familiar to give new insights. Even to the seasoned communist historian the book will have much to offer. Later chapters on the use of the red flag within colonised nations and on ‘The Flag of the Present’ are a corrective to eurocentric and defeatist currents. It ends on a note of hope and optimism, looking to the red flag also as ‘The Flag of the Future’.It is also a beautiful object. It is a book worthy of community bookshelves, of being tabled at workshops to be curiously pawed over. It features a lovingly curated selection of photographs of the flag held aloft by revolutionaries and activists, and stunning artistic depictions from Géricault to Chagall. If I was to take a break from all my praise for the volume, I could only say that its forward march does eventually produce a monotonous effect. That too though serves its purpose, making clear the scale of the subject, and the sheer number of people who have lived, worked, and died in service to the cause of the flag. Like a loom, or one of Duchamp’s optical machines, the repetitive motions of Red Threads are enthralling. Hopefully some of its readers may grab the filament, and run with it.
James Barrowman is a poet, a barista, and a scholar of Dundonian literary history.