“What joy is this that never knew us?”
Sasha Banks’s
searing debut poetry collection america, MINE is a radical
conjuring of a post-white supremacist United States of America.
Blending speculative poetics and historiography, Banks creates a rich
revisionist account of America, in which its most fraught
institutions collapse and Uhmareka emerges—layering a new, strange,
and graphic landscape with the textures of supernatural happenings,
ghosts, creatures, and inconsistent recollections of American
histories. Spurred on by the trauma of and lack of local and national
accountability for Michael Brown’s murder in 2014, Banks mixes
magical realism and keen rage to interrogate white supremacy’s
narratives, challenge its prerogatives, and usher in a future where
it can thrive no longer. In so doing, these Afrofuturist poems by
turns summon historical and archetypal Black figures like Fannie Lou
Hamer and Aunt Jemima to the National Mall; rouse the ghosts of
Tituba, Rekia Boyd, and Cynthia Wesley at the Canfield Green
Apartments in Ferguson; and describe a period of raucous destruction
before Uhmareka is ushered in by the strange and mysterious forces
that herald it. Will Black lives thrive in the re-envisioned
Uhmareka, or will they struggle to balance new freedom with the
lingering fear of the old ways’ return? In america, MINE,
Sasha Banks demands that we consider what possibility may spring
forth from this imagining.
