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Reviewed by:
  • Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
  • John Yohe (bio)
Natalie Diaz. Postcolonial Love Poem. Graywolf.

Postcolonial Love Poem builds on Natalie Diaz’s first book, When My Brother Was An Aztec, with more poems about her brother, who serves as a metaphor for the trauma experienced by Native Americans living under the colonial rule of American Empire. In this work, the brother character becomes a man in a long slow decline, who has moved through the drugs and crime of the first book to [End Page 184] become a now-older version who still takes drugs and/or medication, but who above all seems to be suffering from some kind of mental illness. In “It Was the Animals”, he brings her what he thinks is a piece of the Noah’s Ark:

It’s the ark, he said.You mean Noah’s ark? I asked.What other ark is there? he answered.

Read the inscription, he told me.It tells what’s going to happen at the end.What end? I wanted to know.He laughed. What do you mean, ‘What end?The end end.

Then he lifted it out. The plastic bag rattled.His fingers were silkened by pipe blisters.He held the jagged piece of wood so gently.I had forgotten my brother could be gentle.

That last line of this excerpt is heartbreaking, revealing a whole life—two whole lives—of pain. In these brother poems, the border between “real” and “unreal” becomes blurred, like later in this poem when the animals of the title appear to Diaz. Her brother has brought them in the ark.

They are not “real”—they come in a dream or vision, as a way to work through her pain about her brother’s decline, but that makes them real on the page.

Her brother is as familiar in Diaz’s work as basketball. Postcolonial Love Poem is, in many ways, Diaz’s own form of basketball diaries, with prose poems like “Run’n’Gun” and “Top Ten Reasons Why Indians Are Good At Basketball,” in which she invokes (and perhaps echoes) another Indian poet who wrote about basketball:

1.

The same reason we are good in bed.

2.

Because a long time ago, Creator gave us a choice: You can write like an Indian god, or you can have a jump shot sweeter than a 44oz. can of government grape juice—one or other. Everyone but Sherman Alexie chose the jump shot. . . .

8.

On the court is the one place we will never be hungry—that net is an emptiness we can fill up all day long.

Here Diaz adopts Alexie’s use of humor as a way to approach pain and transcend into joy. Yes, there’s the basketball humor, but Diaz wields seriousness, too, in almost epic poems like “exhibits from The American Water Museum” (inspired [End Page 185] by Luis Alberto Urrea’s book, The Water Museum) and especially “The First Water Is The Body,” where Diaz explores the Mojave relationship with the Colorado River:

In Mojave thinking, body and land are the same. The words are separated only by the letters ‘ii and ‘a: ‘iimat for body, ‘amat for land. In conversation, we often use the a shortened form for each: mat-. Unless you know the context of a conversation you might not know if we are speaking about our body or our land. You might not know which has been injured, which is remembering, which is alive, which was dreamed, which needs care. You might not know we mean both.

If I say, My river is disappearing, do I also mean, My people are disappearing?

Diaz is actively involved in working to save and bring back the Mojave language, and this excerpt shows how important that work is, how important that language is. English language doesn’t work like this. As Diaz makes clear, if the settler language itself thought of people and bodies as so closely tied, it would not be easy to view either as things to be colonized.

There are also love poems to a single person, whom Diaz calls “my love”. Through all the pain of losing, slowly, a brother...

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