An Ecopoetics for Take Back the Land

Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Zaina Alsous’s “Description de l’Égypte” appears in the October 2019 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.

What I have to tell you now is that
this world is about to end.
—Leslie Marmon Silko

Dedicated to the Umoja Village Shantytown

“What creates crisis cannot solve it,” reads the first core principle of the Red Deal, a proposal put forth by indigenous organizers with the Red Nation imagining an alternative of life to the existing forces of economic and political domination driving humanity to the brink of extinction. If the burning Amazon, the rising sea, and the increasingly violent battle for homemaking under the tyranny of privatization is any indication, the land crisis over the last decade has grown only more hideous and pronounced.

On an afternoon in late October of 2006, a group of activists, residents, and houseless community members in Miami, Florida responded to that crisis by taking over a vacant lot in Liberty City—a primarily Black and working-class neighborhood. The shantytown—named Umoja Village, after the Swahili word for “unity”—was, according to organizer Max Rameau,

part living protest, part street theater and part solution to the problem. It was part militant, part loving. It was simultaneously the most and the least radical response to a disturbing crisis.

For the next six months, they maintained control over the land—feeding, studying, sheltering, and developing practices of autonomous community control.

In Ramallah there is a humble museum dedicated to the exiled Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Excerpts of Darwish’s writing hang on the wall in thick black letters. One wall reads, “The land is inherited as language.” If we can understand language as inextricable from a form of social being—mediated, made and remade (in our current epoch most often to reflect the eminent forces of settler domination), perhaps we can understand the Umoja Village as a poem—a form of description attempting to answer the land question with an alternative vocabulary. According to Rameu, “The work of Take Back the Land is not fundamentally about the homeless, or even gentrification: it is fundamentally about the collective control over land.” To take back the land is to take back the language, to return to a not-yet-realized subjunctive territory of mass-belonging. But what might a counter-mapping toward mass-belonging look like?

“Most maps,” write Adalaide Morris and Stephen Voyce in their essay “Precarity, Poetry, and the Practice of Countermapping,” “are scratched, traced, drawn, stitched, or plotted on one or another material substance, and all, if they are readable, locate things in relation to other things. What might it mean, then, to distinguish a cartographic practice as ‘embodied and locative’?” Morris and Voyce disrupt the idea that mapping must always be a process of introducing distance from the vantage of conquerors and their administrators; examining instead poetic mapping as a way to return to and through the body—our vital and constitutive bounding.

One example of what a countermapping toward intimacy and intermingling might look like is Raquel Salas Rivera’s Lo Terciario/The Tertiary, a response to the US-imposed austerity and debt crisis in Puerto Rico filtered through a queer, decolonial reading of Marx’s Capital. In a poem titled “second stage: productive consumption of the purchased commodities by the capitalist,” they write:

if you undress on la noche de san juan,
the memories of raped mermaids
will sink into your sores
and for the rest of your days you’ll have to sing
poems dedicated to lost lungs.

inverse evolution:
let’s return to the sea.
those who don’t know how to leave their loot on the sand
will drown in the air.

Rivera’s poetic logic works against the logic of development, against debt and accumulation, instead amplifying the ultimately fallible nature of what is artificially planted as superior. All that remains intact within our interior geographies and all that still escapes, in spite of imposed extraction, will outlive the technologies of imperial maintenance.  

In Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS, the language of treaty monumentalized by settlers is contravened and excised to reveal a militant rumbling, tremored by the pulse of land.

I don’t trust nobody
         but the land I said
I don’t mean
present company
of course
you understand the grasses
hear me too always
present the grasses
confident grasses polite
command to shhhhh
shhh listen
—From “Steady Summer”

The sonic presence of the grasses cannot be separated from the presence of breath in the poem; both are integral—the land accompanying and sustaining the pauses and instances of breath. Contrast this with the monumentation of settler conquerors, who violently announce and memorialize their presence as it upends and impedes the social relationship to the land that always exists, a relationship that is dangerous to their order.

From an article by Nishnaabeg artist and academic Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, quoting an article by Jarrett Martineau and Eric Riskes, both of which appear in the journal Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society:

The freedom realized through flight and refusal is the freedom to imagine and create an elsewhere in the here; a present future beyond the imaginative and territorial bounds of colonialism. It is a performance of other worlds, an embodied practice of flight.

Flight and refusal—to be fugitive—is to remain uncaptured and untamed or, put another way, unmappable by the settler imaginary. To fugitive in the poem is to tether language to militant refusal, a refusal to succumb to the ordered boundaries.

A poem by Long Soldier is dedicated to the Dakota warriors who rebelled against settlers and traders during the Sioux Uprising. One executed trader specifically named in the poem, Andrew Myrick, refused to provide necessary credit to the Dakota people who had been forcibly relocated by settlers of the US colony, saying, “if they are hungry, let them eat grass.”

When Myrick’s body was found,

 

                      his mouth was stuffed with grass.

 

I am inclined to call this act by the Dakota warriors a poem.

 

There’s irony in their poem.

 

There was no text.
—From “38”

In Rameu’s account of Take Back the Land, he writes of the impact of the community-run Umoja Village Shantytown: “In this new society, people not only related differently to the land itself, they related differently to one another and, ultimately, to power—they had all of it while on the land.... In this new society human beings are valued over and above material things, creature comforts and even profit.”

To take back the land is to poem the de-territorialized we; to poem map (we) as insurgent, unconquered, owed to what is lost, what must be protected, and always what is shared; to harvest without accumulation, again, again.