Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz (review)

Mojave poet Natalie Diaz’s new collection from Graywolf Press immerses us in life within an unrelenting, intergenerational state of war— and the kinds of love we must bring into existence within such a landscape so we might continue. Having worked with Diaz on a few poetry projects, I’ve looked forward to this publication for years. “American Arithmetic,” a poem I’ve only heard her read aloud, confronts postcolonial reality in the form of its own statistics, and is especially striking on the page:

Native Americans make up less than1 percent of the population of America.0.8 percent of 100 percent.O, mine efficient country.

(17)

Unspoken yet hovering over this poem is another, invisible, statistic: precolonial Native Americans once made up 100 percent of the population of North America. The stanza break Diaz inserts here highlights that omission even as she foregrounds the efficiency of genocide.

“Postcolonial” is a word that confusingly doesn’t, and does, apply to life in today’s Native America: we are simultaneously alive after the initial blow of colonization and yet still subject to a barrage of colonizing injustices and microaggressions that impact our daily lives, often in violent ways. In “That Which Cannot be Stilled” Diaz spells out one of those darts:

Dirty Indian— a phrase blown likemagnetite dustagainst the small bones in my ear, manytimes, and dark.

Sometimes I believed them

. . .All my life I’ve been working,to get clean— to be clean is to be good, inAmerica.To be clean is the grind.

(42)

And yet love is also a constant in our experiences, too— it is love that revives us, sustains us, a transfusion for the blood we have lost. In these poems, Diaz chronicles how we seek companionship, how we endure the heart’s betrayals and earn the transformations of eros. She writes wonderingly in “Grief Work,”

We go where there is love,

to the river, on our knees beneath the sweetwater. I pull her under four times,

until we are rivered.We are rearranged.

(96)

In a postcolonial reality, damage along the way means love and war are often difficult to tell apart. Lovers, family members, friends, nonhuman relatives, light, mythological creatures, the erotic, despair, the Milky Way, water, basketball, death, ancestral voices, and the Beloved inhabit these pages. If this sounds crowded, it is: Diaz reveres the power of words. Her poems often consist of long lines tightly packed with precisely chosen images that mix metaphor with the fantastic: “Four fat quails making a campanile of the mesquite tree./Four hands shuttling nighthawks along a loom of electrical lines” (43). Frequently her poems break into a kind of erotic ecstasy. In a recent interview with Abigail Meinen for Sampsonian Way, Diaz says she asks of herself, “What if I try to treat every body on the page like the body of the beloved? . . . to think of letters as physical, as bodies.” We see her doing this on the pages of this book: the intensity, the sensuality, of her efforts to translate between body and emotion— a kind of lovemaking, a kind of erotic truth-seeking.

In Native American lives and in Natalie Diaz’s poetry, the personal and the political not only ignore official borders, they are actively engaged in the business of tearing down the wall between the two entities and using the scraps for a new mosaic. In her stunning poems about water, such as “exhibits from The American Water Museum,” Diaz sings the relationship with water felt by tribal peoples:

The first violence against any body of wateris to forget the name its creator first called it.Worse: forget the bodies who spoke that name

(64)

Diaz makes it clear: Indigenous bodies are bodies of water are Indigenous bodies, and each body “is beyond six senses. Is sensual. An ecstatic state of energy, always on the verge of praying” (63).

With Diaz readers are just as likely to...