"uhmareka, post collapse: three" by Sasha Banks, originally published by Poor Claudia

After emailing me the above Sasha Bank’s poem, “uhmareka, post collapse: three,” my friend and colleague Adjua Greaves (another brilliant poet/poethicist I could write at length about) added “Sasha Banks is the truth.” Of course, and thank the lord, Adjua is right. In this astonishing speculative poem, Banks imagines or divines life on this land after The United States has crumbled and disappeared, where only the salt from the tears that nourish us is unchanging, where the body is sovereign and free and not the violent nation, where the body creates the stars that light the world after we realize there never was a sun, at least not in the way we thought. Banks imagines a dismantling of the world that complete. It reminds me not only of da Silva’s Black Feminist Poet, but also of Katherine McKittrick’s description of Dionne Brand in Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. McKittrick writes of Brand:

She not only refuses a comfortable belonging to nation, or country, or a local street, she alters them by demonstrating that geography, the material world, is infused with sensations and distinct ways of knowing… Brand’s decision, to give up on land, to want no country, to disclose that geography is always human and that humanness is always geographic -- blood, bones, hands, lips, wrists, this is your land, your planet, your road, your sea —​ suggests that her surroundings are speakable. (xi)

​Banks similarly speaks the land, lends her voice to the land not because it doesn’t have its own, but because people can be such bad listeners that we don’t always hear it.

Sasha Banks, Image: Poetry Project

​In an interview with PBS Newshour about her work organizing poets for Ferguson, Banks explains, “I think what poetry has the power to do is to put a voice to something, to make something real just by naming it. There’s so much power and validation in being able to speak on something, and a lot of people don’t know they have shared experiences unless they hear someone else talking about it.” I think certainly da Silva and Lorde and McKittrick would all agree. Banks sees her poetry as a place to make connections, or rather make visible the connections that are already there but intentionally occulted for fear of the power they yield. And she sees the power of poetry to dismantle as well as build, saying later in the interview, “The way that Black and Brown people are murdered in this country is so unapologetic, I wanted to meet that violence with the same kind of aggression and mercilessness… I wanted to vandalize what we know as America, as this big, untouchable great thing that was founded on all of these noble principles, and to call that down.”

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Banks calls upon the power of her knowledge and her voice to show what is true and what is possible. In the next poem in the series, “uhmareka, post-post collapse,” a beautiful litany of things that exist, she writes:

there is your mother under a streetlight
calling your name after sunset and
you answer, you answer; answering exists,
answering exists, which means the
living exist, existing exists, and maybe
so much death is vanishing or
existing less and less

In this future Banks is making existing, being, living, are not states conferred by a nation that values only the most limited life, the lives of the white and powerful, but instead are expansive and interconnecting states, states that are full of love. In this future she is making, like the future Janie Starks finds in Their Eyes Were Watching God​, there is enough love and care to conquer death and dying.

Works Cited:
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• Banks, Sasha. Five Poems. Poor Claudia, https://poorclaudia.org/sasha-banks-five-poems. Accessed December 2017.
• McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
• Segal, Corinne. "Poetry is protest for poet Sasha Banks." PBS, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/poetry/sasha-banks-poetry-protest. Accessed December 2017.