“– everyone knows angels are white. Quit bothering with angels…They are no good for Indians…you better hope you never see angels on the rez…If you do, they’ll be marching you off to Zion or Oklahoma …”
Natalie Diaz’s darkly funny Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation introduced me to When My Brother Was an Aztec, a key poetry collection from the last decade. In Post-Colonial Love Poem, Diaz has built something even more extraordinary.
Building is the operative word – pages filled with dense low building blocks of narrative and meditation, rubbing shoulders with lapidary dancing love lyrics. Numbers, along with fluid, watery tilde symbols, exult in an anaphoric rhythm, favouring “and” over “but”.
Diaz tackles erasure like it’s never been tackled before. The acronyms of her lexicon, recalling that raisin box, “USDA stamped like a fist on its side” from her first collection, are proliferating now, forcing us to recognise the connections between brown skin and poverty, implying that colonialism may not be “post” after all when “commod-bods” refers to those who have gained weight on cheap Government “commodities”. Yet, what should be the saddest collection is an exultant sky hook, dark humour flickering like a whiplash, like the “Snake-light” allowing Diaz “to read a text in anything”.
They think brown people fuck better when we are sad. Like horses. Or coyotes…
You ask, Who is they?
even though you know. You want me to name names. Shoot, we are named after them. You think my Creator had heard of the word Natalie? Ha!
When he first made me he called me Snake –
(Like Church)
Stephen Dedalus agonised over using the language of the oppressor, but we can’t imagine the pain of losing language through the systematic, brutal separation of children from their parents. Only a handful of elders were able to transmit the Mojave language when Diaz returned to her community in 2013 to work on saving it. Her sense of community, like her fine collaborations with Ada Limón, are part of a particular Native American generosity.
Maria Martinez, the famous Pueblo potter, signed her valuable name on her contemporaries’ work to ensure they didn’t starve. The Choctaws contributed to Irish Famine victims while on their own Trail of Tears. An enraged white man on YouTube talks of his American constitutional rights after his eviction from the Colorado River Tribes territory, where he didn’t pay a penny of reasonable rent for 20 years. What western landlord waits that long in the face of hateful racism?
Standing Rock casts a strong shadow as drought spreads through neighbouring California:
The Colorado River is the most endangered river in the United States – also, it is a part of my body.
I carry a river. It is who I am: 'Aha Makav. This is not metaphor.
When a Mojave says, Inyech 'Aha Makavch ithuum, we are saying our name.
(The First Water is the Body)
Water is central here, the word “thirst” occurring more than 20 times. The lyrical essay-poem Extracts from The American Water Museum – inspired by a futuristic, prophetic story by Luis Alberto Urrea about a parched community in the southwest – is a tremendous meditation on the history of water in the body and on the land, water that has been taken away so many times in broken “treaties”:
What does a day feel like when you're nourished
on the bodies and fleshes of those felled for your
arrival? A butterfly sipping on the opened neck
of a horse stiffening beneath the mottled shade
wept by a cottonwood tree? What does it mean
that your life is made of someone else's shed
water and blood? Dial 1 if you don't care.
This is not just a critique of American society; we all have to ask ourselves the unbearable questions. Where does our privilege lie? Who are we sipping from?
In one of many zoomorphic poems about Diaz’s veteran brother, he tries to build an ark with a picture frame:
It's the ark, he said.
You mean Noah's ark? I asked.
What other ark is there? he answered.
(It Was the Animals )
This is an arresting question from a man who’s lost his way. Especially when the Mojave have their own flood story. Whenever Diaz’s brother appears, Christianity raises a misshapen comical head, recalling these lines from her first collection. “Maybe one day you will laugh at this –/arguing with a meth-head dressed/ like a Judas effigy about Jesus’s sandals…”
Diaz’s brother is one of the many Native Americans war veterans. And yet:
Native Americans make up less than
1 percent of the population of America.
0.8 percent of 100 percent…
Police kill Native Americans more
than any other race. Race is a funny word.
Race implies someone will win,…
…We do a better job of dying
by police than we do existing.
(American Arithmetic)
Close to the love lyrics are the poems on basketball, a sport so central to Native American identity, related to the ancient ball games of Mesoamerica. Diaz, a former NBA player, could have been “Lucy” the “little warrior” , the community’s hope in Sherman Alexie’s The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore. I know little of sport yet these are my favourite poems.
Top Ten Reasons Why Indians Are Good at Basketball begins “1. The same reason we are good in bed” and ends with an exhilarating time-collapsing slam dunk:
10. a basketball has never been just a basketball-it has always been a full moon…the one taillight in Jimmy Jack Tall Can’s gray Granada cutting along the back dirt roads on a beer run, the Creator’s heart that Coyote stole …, the left breast of a Mojave woman three Budweisers into Saturday night…a slick, bright bullet we can sling from the 3-point arc with 5 seconds left on a clock in the year 1492, and as it rips down through the net, our enemies will fall to their wounded knees, with torn ACLs.
