Re-Spiritualizing Colonial Landscapes: On Natalie Diaz's "Postcolonial Love Poem"

Natalie Diaz | Postcolonial Love Poem | Graywolf | March 2020 | 120 Pages

In the title of her second poetry collection, Natalie Diaz clearly announces the book’s intentions: to couple the political and the personal. “Postcolonial Love Poem” showcases what could be seen as competing emotions. The book’s bedrocks are both the angst and anger of indigenous people in a still colonized landscape as well as the refuge and grounding influence of familial and erotic love. Diaz does not try to reconcile these things. Rather, she examines the way they overlap. In the postcolonial world Diaz describes in her verse, love and intimacy are not quite a remedy but a certainly  bulwark against the continuing malignancy of racial oppression and the cultural erasure of colonization.

A central motif of the collection is thirst. Diaz announces in the opening, titular poem: “I learned Drink in a country of drought.” Though Diaz’s critique adds the additional lens of race, her examination of all that modern American culture is missing is not so unlike the mid twentieth century searching of fellow queer poet, Allen Ginsberg who describes his “hungry fatigue” of modern American culture in “A Supermarket in California.” If Ginsberg looked around modern America famished and estranged from nourishment that consumerism made inaccessible, Diaz is looking at modern American, parched and thirsty for a natural landscape that colonialism has obscured.

Thirst reverberates throughout the collection. In the poem, “Asterion’s Lament,” the speaker opines: “I know another name for holy is water--I have suffered the hot hurt of thirst.” In Greek mythology, Asterion was one of three river gods who were punished by Poseidon, god of the sea, so that the rivers would not flow unless it was raining and would otherwise be dry and inaccessible. Suffering, Asterion notes he is “alive and coursing to drink.”  

The loss of real rivers, not just mythic ones, is the focus of “The First Water is My Body.” Diaz notes, “I live in the desert along a dammed blue river. The only red people I’ve seen are the white tourists sunburned after staying out of the water too long” (46). Unlike the Whanganui River in New Zealand and the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers in India “which now have the same legal status of a human being,” U.S. rivers have been dammed, commodified, polluted and contaminated. The speaker of the poem strenuously objects and reminds the reader that water is life: “We cannot live good, we cannot live at all, without water.”

Water is not just a matter of physical suffering but also spiritual survival throughout the collection. It is understandably a critical piece of identity for Diaz, a member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. In “Exhibits from the American Water Museum,” the speaker states, “The first violence against any body of water is to forget the name its creator first called it. Worse: forget the bodies who spoke that name. An American way of forgetting Natives” (64). The Colorado and other American rivers have been desecrated by white colonization but the indigenous resilience still triumphs. As the poet notes: “ Let me tell you a story about water. Once upon a time there was us. America’s thirst tried to drink us away. And here we still are” (72). Reclamation of the natural and spiritual power of rivers is essential. “Have you ever considered your thirst as a weapon?” the speaker asks, weaponing this desire to be quenched.

The love poems in the collection demonstrate this same urgent striving to access the natural world. In the opening poem, the speaker tells her beloved, “I am in the dirt for you” and indeed the poem is packed with references to gemstones: geodes, cabochon, bloodstone, quartz. In the poem “Skin Light,” the speaker’s lover’s hips are likened to numerous cryptocrystalline stones--chalcedony, magnetite, limestone. Later poems in the collection reflect on snakeskin, skeletons of rattlesnakes. In “Snake-Light,” the speaker notes, “[w]hen my desert reads a life out loud it takes the body down, back to caliche and clay”  (82). We spring from these elements and return to them to be part of them. The speaker suggests, “[l]et’s say it’s all text--the animal, the dune, the wind in the cottonwood, and the body. Everything book: a form bound together” (82).

This search to find meaning and continuity in the natural world is seen as a saner answer than the options explored by the speaker’s brother. In “Cranes, Mafiosos and a Polaroid Camera,” the speaker’s visit to a crane sanctuary is interrupted by a desperate, sobbing, middle of the night call from her brother who believes the mafia “placed a transmitter deep within his Polaroid camera” (75). He wants instructions on how to take the camera apart but the speaker instead tells him about sandhill cranes, “the way they dance--moving into and giving way to one another, bowing down, cresting and collapsing their wings” but the speaker’s brother will be believe it, insisting instead of his mechanical answer (“if I love him, if I really love him, why haven’t I learned to reassemble a Polaroid camera” (75). In other poems, the speaker’s brother seeks out other man made objects to quench his thirst for meaning. In “My Brother, My Wound,” he stabs the speaker with a fork between the ribs: “Yes, he sang. A Jesus side wound” (88). In “Blood-Light,” the speaker’s brother stabs their father. “Catching Copper” is a meditation on the ways in which bullets are vested with dangerous, false spiritual power: “my brothers’ bullet is always lit like a night-church. It makes my brother holy” (11).

In this collection detailing pathos that includes both eros and violence, working against erasure is essential. As the speaker notes in “American Arithmetic”: “I am doing my best to not become a museum of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out” (17). The book is at once both a deeply personal tribute to a lover and cultural critique of a postcolonial world in need of re-spiritualization.