Poems of Love and Desire That Push Back Against Oppression - The New York Times

Early in Natalie Diaz’s second book, the speaker has an epiphany that she’s “the only Native American / on the 8th floor of this hotel or any” in New York City’s smallest borough. The poem, “Manhattan Is a Lenape Word,” grieves the fact that “nobody asks, Where have all / the Natives gone?” even as it recognizes where the Natives are: “Not here.” Violence against Indigenous people is not just historical but ongoing, systemic and institutional, Diaz reminds us. “Native Americans make up less than / 1 percent of the population of America,” she writes in “American Arithmetic,” but “Police kill Native Americans more / than any other race.” This knowledge, however fraught, emboldens Diaz to celebrate her survival as a queer Aha Makhav woman living in the 21st century.

“Why not now go toward the things I love?” she writes in the final poem. From the hips of a beloved to a game of reservation basketball, from the endangered Colorado River to her branching literary heritages, Diaz catalogs the things that connect her to her body and her art, her languages and her cultures. As such, the book rejects stereotypes that cast Indigenous people as monocultural. “Americans prefer a magical red Indian, or a shaman, or a fake Indian in a red dress, over a real Native,” she writes in “The First Water Is the Body,” a piece that straddles the line between prose poem and lyric essay. As it flows associatively through a meditation on the Colorado River and its relationship to the Aha Makhav people (called “Mojave” by the Spanish), it reflects on the untranslatability of language, metaphor and logic:

Jacques Derrida says, Every text remains in mourning until it is translated.

When Mojaves say the word for tears, we return to our word for river, as if our river were flowing from our eyes. A great weeping is how you might translate it. Or a river of grief.

But who is this translation for and will they come to my language’s four-night funeral to grieve what has been lost in my efforts at translation?

With her background as a linguist, Diaz understands that the translation of an Indigenous language isn’t preservation; rather, the work projects the needs of another culture — in this case, a colonizer’s culture — onto the language. Who is the translation for? Not the speakers of the original language.

“Postcolonial Love Poem” is charged by the often violent intersection of colonizing languages (in this case, first Spanish and then English) with an Indigenous one (Mojave). That’s not to say the poems long for a pre-colonial culture. Diaz, after all, signals that she has been shaped not only by the languages and traditions of the Aha Makhav but also by those of the European colonizers and other groups who came to the continent, through their own volition or through the slave trade, and influenced American culture.

Among some scholars, the term “postcolonial” is controversial, as it implies that colonization is over. For Indigenous Americans, though, colonization is a never-ending condition of life. So what does it mean to write a “postcolonial love poem”? In English, love poems are grounded in European traditions dominated by patriarchal power dynamics and heterosexual gender roles. Diaz claims the form — its imagery, its language — and makes it her own, centering the experiences of queer women of color. In “Like Church,” Diaz writes that white people think “brown people” have better sex “when we are sad. / Like horses. Or coyotes. All hoof or howl.” Later, she reflects on this racist assumption:

But it’s hard, isn’t it? Not to perform

what they say about our sadness, when we are

always so sad.

…

They are only light because we are dark.

If we didn’t exist, it wouldn’t be long before

They had to invent us. Like the light switch.

Yet there’s nothing sad in the speaker and her beloved’s lovemaking, which is full of ecstatic renewal, “full of God, and joy, and sins, / and sweet upside-down cake.” Diaz leans into desire, love and sex as a means to strengthen and heal wounds. “I do my grief work / with her body,” she writes, and “I’ve only ever escaped through her body.” In “Manhattan Is a Lenape Word,” Diaz writes that “in this city I have / many lovers” and that “All my loves / are reparations loves.”

There is an extreme lushness to the language Diaz uses, especially about love, sex and desire. She often figures herself as the Minotaur in the labyrinth or at least as having horns:

But sometimes when I get my horns in a thing—

a wonder, a grief, or a line of her—it is a sticky and ruined

fruit to unfasten from ….

And:

I am the animal born to rush your rich red

muletas—each breath, each sigh, each groan—

a hooked horn of want. My mouth at your inner

thigh.

In these poems of desire Diaz’s gift for musicality and imagery is most apparent. In “Ode to the Beloved’s Hips,” she rockets through alliteration and other sonic devices as she plunders metaphor for rapturous praise:

I never tire

to shake this wild hive, split with thumb the sweet-

dripped comb—hot hexagonal hole, dark diamond—

to its nectar-dervished queen. Maenad tongue—

come-drunk hum-tranced honey-puller—for her hips,

I am—strummed-song and succubus.

A few poems in this collection recall the style and concerns of Diaz’s first book, “When My Brother Was an Aztec.” Poems like “My Brother, My Wound” and “The Mustangs,” about a brother who plays basketball and struggles against the world, offer a bridge between projects; why should one’s obsessions and concerns be resolved just because one finishes a book about them? “Americans worship their obsessions in violent ways— / they write them down,” Diaz writes, even as she counts herself among their number.

This book asks us to read the world carefully, knowing that not everything will be translated for us, knowing that it is made up of pluralities. “Let’s say it’s all text,” Diaz writes, “the animal, the dune, / the wind in the cottonwood, and the body.” Diaz’s collection is no doubt one of the most important poetry releases in years, one to applaud for its considerable demonstration of skill, its resistance to dominant perspectives and its light wrought of desire.

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Poems of Love and Desire That Push Back Against Oppression - The New York Times
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