Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz review – intimate, electric and defiant
The Mojave and Latinx poet, up for this year’s Forward prize, is on breathtaking form in this intellectually rigorous collection exploring love and identity
Natalie Diaz’s second poetry collection – up for this year’s Forward prize – opens with its title poem, in which past and present blur in an eternal conflict. “The war never ended and somehow begins again,” she declares. Diaz, a US-based poet and MacArthur “genius grant” winner, identifies as queer, Mojave, Latinx, and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian tribe. In the US, she is, as the minotaur in her poem I, Minotaur suggests, “citizen of what savages” her. To be savaged is to be brutalised by her nation, but also lurking beneath the verb is the savage, a slur for indigenous people.
Conveying clear ideas through crisp, dazzling images, Diaz’s poems typically unfold in long lines grouped into short stanzas. She instructs and inquires; she mourns and rhapsodises. And though she is at the centre of several “wars” – squaring off with institutional racism, her brother’s drug addiction and environmental destruction – she also devotes much of the collection to eros and “wag[ing] love”. She nimbly shifts between English, Spanish and Chuukwar Makav (Mojave language), using vocabulary rich with Greek myth and geology. She shuns the western idea of reality, explaining to the non-Mojave reader in her poem The First Water Is the Body that Aha Makav, “the true name of our people”, means “the river runs through the middle of our body, the same way it runs through the middle of our land”. If this sounds like magical realism, it’s only because “Americans prefer a magical Indian”. She challenges the reader not to see the river-as-body as metaphor, but instead to accept that the fate of the river is the fate of all people: “How can I translate – not in words but in belief – that a river is a body, as alive as you or I, that there can be no life without it?”
This is a breathtaking, groundbreaking book, an intellectually rigorous exploration of the postcolonial toll on land, love and people
Postcolonial Love Poem is published by Faber & Faber (£10.99). To order a copy for £9.56 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.
Emily Pérez is a Ledbury Poetry Critic, a mentoring programme launched by Sandeep Parmar and Sarah Howe with Ledbury poetry festival and the University of Liverpool to tackle the underrepresentation of BAME poets and reviewers in critical culture.
