Review of Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz (Graywolf Press, 2020)
“What does it mean that your life is made of someone else’s shed water and blood?”
I bought a copy of Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem this past December, happy to be physically present, even masked and gloved, in an actual local bookstore. I intended to give it away as a Christmas gift--after I read it first myself, of course. In the end, however, I kept it as a present to myself, not wanting to hurry through it to get it in the mail. I’m glad I was able to take my time to read this collection of poems and that I had my own copy for later rereading. The whole book is a love poem to Diaz’s family, to her Indigenous nation, to her lover, and to herself. The writing shimmers and eviscerates. More than a few poems troubled my complicity as a descendant of white settler colonials--even a descendant trying to make amends for sins of her forefathers and mothers. Language gives her power to overcome sorrows borne of centuries of abuse and neglect of Native people.
Diaz is of Mojave and Latina descent and is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. She was born in 1978 and raised next to the Colorado River in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. Diaz played basketball in high school and college, and then professionally in Europe and Asia for several years. Afterwards, she returned to her alma mater, Old Dominion University, to get an MFA in poetry and fiction. She then moved back to the place where she grew up to direct a language revitalization program at Fort Mojave, working with the last Elder speakers of the Mojave language. Her first book of poetry, When My Brother Was an Aztec, published in 2012 by Copper Canyon Press, won an American Book Award. Diaz was a 2018 MacArthur Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow, and a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellow. Currently she teaches at Arizona State University in Phoenix as the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry.
Basketball led her to poetry through her friendship with Tim Siebles, who she first met playing pickup games before she knew he was a poet. When she eventually heard him read his work, she said in a Poets and Writers interview last spring that she was “blown away” by its “physicality and sensuality. She said, “This is when I first knew what poetry was--it was the body...it was that energy.” And it is the body that these poems are about--bodies that exist in a complicated world of relationships with people inside and outside of family, in the present and in the past--people you love, the people who love you, and people who have hurt you and who you have hurt.
Bodies play basketball in two of my favorite poems in this book. In a 2012 interview with PBS’ Jeffery Brown, Diaz says, “I think it [basketball] was my way to kind of navigate between the two cultures.” I, myself, found common ground with her in the language of this game I know, even as the poems also speak of what divides white and Indigenous people. More than that, however, they are an anthem to an embodiment of joy. In “Run’n’Gun,” she writes,
“We played bigger and bigger until we began winning. And we won by doing what all Indians before us had done against their bigger whiter opponents--we became coyotes and rivers, and we ran faster than their fancy kicks could, up and down the court, game after game. We became the weather--we blew by them, we rained buckets, we lit up the gym with our moves.”
In “The Top Ten Reasons Indians are Good at Basketball,” as in many of her poems, difficult truth is also laced with dark humor. For example,
“3. We know how to block shots, how to stuff them down your throat, because when you say, Shoot, we hear Horwitzer and Hotchkiss and Springfield Model 1873.”
-- o --
I felt the most personal connection to “Cranes, mafiosos, and Polaroid cameras.” This poem is about her complicated reaction to a disturbing/paranoid (but not unusual) midnight call from her brother asking her for help it is impossible for her to give. It made me think about the entanglements of love and guilt and obligation in my own life. Poignantly she asks whether, “...there a difference between aperture and wound.” In this one poem she holds space for many seemingly conflicting feelings--her deep caring for her brother, her frustration with him for the demands he puts on her love, an awareness of beauty in the natural world that surrounds her as she wakes in the middle of the night, and a final moment of light-heartedness that she needs to make her commitment to him possible. The poem crystalizes the way we can hold love and heartbreak inside of ourselves simultaneously, without contradiction.
-- o --
Water is the elemental core of bodies in many of Diaz’s poems. This water/body connection is powerfully evident in the poem, “exhibits from the Water Museum.” Diaz notes that this piece was inspired by the short story, “The Water Museum,” in a book by the same title by Luis Alberto Urrea. The story imagines a visit to such a museum by schoolchildren who have grown up in a world where there has been no rain in 17 years. Verses in this poem mimic information one might read about each museum exhibit--these conjured for Diaz’s own imagined museum. Each stanza laments a world where Indigenous water systems are destroyed by colonial disdain. Label #7 left me gut-punched.
“7. Text RVR followed by # to sign up for the text message survey:
What does it feel like when you’re nourished
on the bodies of fleshes of those felled for your
arrival? A butterfly sipping on the opened neck
of a horse stiffening beneath the mottled shade
wept by a cottonwood tree? What does it mean
that your life is made of someone else’s shed
water and blood? Dial 1 if you don’t care.”
I thought, “wait a minute Natalie! I do care. Which number do I dial?” Give me another option. Please.
She had already answered my plea in her Poets and Writers interview. “I am done asking this country to recognize me and my wounds.” She doesn’t care than I am unsettled by these words. And of course, that is the point. It is not her responsibility to give that option to white settler descendants. The blunt honesty about the reasons for her pain in this and other poems opens the possibility for white readers like me to take the blow and face the truth of our privilege vis a vis her wounds.
-- o --
The water/body images of rivers flow throughout this book. Poems written for her lover are filled with a fluid eroticism that call forth movement over the landscape of the body. In “Wolf-OR-7,” she writes,
“In the tourmaline dusk I go a same wilding path,
pulled by a night’s map into the forests and dunes of your hips,
divining from you rivers, then crossing them--
proving the long thirst I’d wander to be sated by you.”
In her poems, sensual love is not without loss, not without heartbreak, but also brings joy and wonder.
Poems in this volume are thick with meaning, and with language and culture sometimes unfamiliar to me. I worried about not understanding them at all levels, but then I remembered that art gives something different to everyone who comes to it because we all come with different experiences and abilities, different gifts and needs. Consider the opening verse from “Ink Light,
“We move within the snow-chromed world: Like-animal. Like-deer. An alphabet. Along a street white as lamplight into the winter, walking--:like
language, a new text. I touch her with the eyes of my skin.”
Verses so lovely to listen to with our minds--a pleasure just for that. Every poem in the book has combinations of words that I am happy to let wash over me and seep into a subconscious dreamscape. I cannot always explain to others their meanings for me, but these poems still challenged me and changed me. Read this book. You will find yourself baptized in the river of its language and its heart.