The United States of open wounds

Mr Jackson's work is set in Portland, Ore., one of the whitest big cities in America, scarred by a long history of racist violence and intimidation

All literature is literature in translation. There is no mother tongue. All of it migrates out of the body, out of a tangle of sensations and intuitions, obscure rancour and desires; we hunt racks of ready-made language for words that might fit. 

Mitchell S. Jackson is the author of a sharply drawn novel, The Residue Years, and a new memoir, Survival Math.  Questions of translating his experience have long preoccupied him. “I’m not writing for white people, to inform them on black lives,” he has said. Nor does he want the reader to be dazzled by the instability and violence