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| Natalie Diaz |
Natalie Diaz’s “Postcolonial Love Poem” is a collection of haunting and heart-wrenching poems that emphasize thriving in beauty and love amid grief and pain. The Pulitzer Prize-award-winning book is the focus of Denver’s 2023-24 “Big Read” program, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. It was a gift to receive a free copy of the book through the Denver Public Library, and immerse in powerful and contemplative verses.
Diaz (Mojave), an enrolled member of the Gila River Tribe, focuses on themes of colonization, urban strife, and cultural identity. She writes plainly of Indigenous experiences of removal and erasure in the White supremacist system (see “Manhattan is a Lenape Word”), while centering a people’s pride and strength. Resistance against oppression is a central theme of the poem “Like Church,” where Diaz writes:
“… Remind yourself, your friends.
They are only light because we are dark.
If we didn’t exist it wouldn’t be long before
they had to invent us…”
Bodies – human, water, lovers – take shape in Diaz’s words, as she contemplates desire and extraction, love and decay, separation and collusion (see “How the Milky Way Was Made” and “The First Water is the Body”). Poems that emphasize youthful physicality assert the persistence of people rendered invisible to be seen and recognized. A number of poems focus on “Rez ball” or the importance of basketball in the lives of young Indigenous people (see “The Mustangs,” “Top Ten Reasons Why Indians are Good at Basketball,” and “Run’nGun.” Erotic symbols and sensuality are featured in poems like “The Cure for Melancholy is to Take the Horn” and “Ode to the Beloved’s Hips.”
Healthy and mutually beneficial relations with the natural world are the center of Indigenous life, a certainty that has suffered at the hands of America’s continuing colonial project. The spirit of perseverance and Indigenous ways of being and knowing are determined to live on. Metaphors abound in a deep reading of “exhibits from The American Water Museum,” as Diaz exposes the drought of morality, a lack of awareness about what we owe each other:
“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.”
In the final poem, “Grief Work,” Diaz laments: “Why not now go toward the things I love?” Each poem unveils harsh and breathtakingly gorgeous truths. Diaz’s explication of sorrow and fleeting moments of joy is a delicate dance between the sacred and the profane. Amid exclusion and marginalization, there is always an opportunity to remember immense beauty and the enduring lessons of thriving even in the face of annihilation.
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