Natalie Diaz: ‘It is an important and dangerous time for language’
The Native American and Latinx poet’s Postcolonial Love Poem has been shortlisted for the Forward prize for best collection
Reading Natalie Diaz’s Forward prize shortlisted collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, feels like a radical political act. It opens “The war ended / depending on which war you mean: those we started, / before those, millennia ago and onward, / those which started me, which I lost and won – / these ever-blooming wounds.” Wounds reappear throughout Diaz’s book as an image of unhealing trauma, where the public body of history – the genocide of America’s Native population – encounters the private spaces of desire and loss. An intimacy, an erotic interconnectedness, faces this difficult and violent history with love.
Since lockdown, Diaz has been in Fort Mohave, Arizona, on the reservation where she grew up. Here the desert meets the Colorado river (at risk from pollution, damming and development, she calls it “the most endangered river in the United States”), not far from Needles, the California border town where she was born in 1978. ‘‘’Aha Makav is the true name of our people, given to us by our Creator who / loosed the river from the earth and built it into our living bodies.” Diaz is talking in this landscape during a time of national mourning and I learn from her book that the Mojave word for “tears” suggests the word “river”. That “a great weeping” might well be translated as “a river of grief”.
In Mojave, our words for want and need are the same – because why would you want what you don’t need?
