Dear Natalie Diaz,
The pieces you’ve given us in Postcolonial Love Poem speak to the heaviness of caring intimately for others in the storms of American imperialism. Some poems luxuriate in the quiet moments of intimacy— waiting at the kitchen table, curling around another’s body, beckoning someone you love to stay— while others reveal the burdens of history and politics that wrack your life. Perhaps even more miraculously, most of these poems do both so seamlessly, I am left certain that the two are inextricably bound for all of us.
One of my favorite examples of this blending comes in “They Don’t Love You Like I Love You,” which takes its title from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ song “Maps.” The song has always been a comforting one to me. With its minimal lyrics and insistent drumbeat, it calls to mind the safety of falling asleep in the back of the car while my mom drives me home; trusting her blindly, entirely. In your take on the lyrics, the song becomes the mantra for an ‘Aha Makav mother trying to help her daughter understand her inherent worth in a country bent on her destruction:
“and what my mother meant by,
Don’t stray, was that she knew
all about it— the way it feels to need
someone to love you, someone
not your kind, someone white,
some one some many who live
because so many of mine
have not…”
In this context, the title of the poem and main refrain of the song are more than a loving sentiment, but an assertion of fact, as your mother prepares you for the cruelty of white people and for “the beast of my country’s burdens.” As mothers of brown girls are so often called upon to do, the mother in this poem must find a way to make her child understand that she may not be loved fully, or even partly, by the people who dominate her society. She uses what she can— metaphors, songs on the radio— to get her daughter to see that she is so much more than a punching bag or fantasy for white people. The poem ends by turning its title on its head, in a stanza that made me weep immediately upon reading it, “…when my mother said, / They don’t love you like I love you, / she meant, / Natalie, that doesn’t mean / you aren’t good.”
In all of these poems, you find ways to upend the English language and create new ways for defining and speaking about your body. You cause your audience to question what a body even is, like in “Isn’t the Air Also a Body, Moving?,” which itself inhales and exhales across the page: “I am touched— I am. / This is my knee, since she touches me there. / This is my throat, as defined by her reaching.” In this new model for the body, it is called into existence by a lover, brought from the generality of existence into a sharp and tangible present. Isn’t this what it is to be loved by someone? To feel every molecule of your being made new in their eyes and embrace? And yet, you show us that love expands the body even further. In “These Hands, If Not Gods,” you describe touching your lover’s hips as a kind of cosmic genesis: “isn’t this what God felt when he pressed together / the first Beloved: Everything. / Fever, Vapor, Atman, Pulsus.” Your words liberate us from one, static definition of the body, as these poems show the constant movement and changeability inherent in our human form.
In “The First Water is The Body,” you wind your way through a series of stanzas that expand the contours of the human body as you describe how “In Mojave thinking, body and land are the same.” This is not a metaphor. This is not poetic. We all depend on water to live, and as we continue to disrespect and destroy rivers like the Colorado, we threaten our very existence, our very bodies. This notion, which is so clear in Mojave thinking and language, is broken in English. It requires translation and reconfiguration, which you do so bitingly in this piece:
“If I was created to hold the Colorado River, to carry its rushing inside me,
if the very shape of my throat, of my thighs is for wetness, how can I say
who I am if the river is gone?”
Postcolonial Love Poem is one of the most sensuous, knowledgeable and biting poetry collections I have read in a long time. It grips you tightly and refuses to let you go for the weeks and months after you read it, lingering in the veins and rivers of your body. Thank you, from the very root of me, for writing this.
Sincerely,
Vahni Kurra
