Land,Body,Language: Corporeal Poetics of Reclaiming in Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love

The Colonization of Native Americans and the Historical Museum

In “American Arithmetic,” Diaz writes:

Native Americans make up less than

1 percent of the population of America.

0.8 percent of 100 percent. . ..

I do not remember the days before America—

I do not remember the days when we were all here.

Police kill Native Americans more

than any other race. Race is a funny word.

Race implies someone will win,

implies, I have as good a chance of winning as—

Who wins the race that isn’t a race?

Native Americans make up 1.9 percent of all

police killings, higher per capita than any race—

sometimes race means run. . ..

We are Americans, and we are less than 1 percent

of Americans. We do a better job of dying

by police than we do existing.

When we are dying, who should we call?

The police? Or our senator?

Please, someone, call my mother.

At the National Museum of the American Indian,

68 percent of the collection is from the United States.

I am doing my best to not become a museum

of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out.

I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible. But in an American room of one hundred people,

I am Native American—less than one,

less than

whole—I am less than myself. Only a fraction

of a body. (Diaz, 2020: 17–18)

In the above passage, Diaz reveals that Native American is the most victimized race in America, not only because of its far back history of colonial exploitation, but also because of contemporary police violence. Native Americans were slaughtered and are going into extinction, so that the survivors of the race, including the poet herself, lead an existence like museum objects. The bodies of Native Americans were so much lacerated that whoever survives no longer has a whole body, but symbolically possesses only “a fraction of a body”—her very existence is a crying wound. The survivors are so scant that they don’t even have a “race” left to “win the race” (the poet puns on the two meanings of “race”—as a people and as competition), so that their only fate is to “run”—to escape. The poet cannot “call for the police or the senator,” because they themselves are the perpetrators. She “calls for her mother,” symbolically her cultural legacy, her mother tongue and her motherland/native land. Living on a reservation near the Mojave Desert, a symbolic landscape that was extracted, drunk dry and depleted by the plundering whites, the poet’s thirst for her lover symbolizes her thirst for the exuberance of her race’s lost land and cultural legacy.

In Diaz’s verse, the Native Americans are becoming museum objects—something even if alive, already falling into the process of extinction and existing only as a relic. Diaz writes about her brother in both this book and her poetry collection “When My Brother Was an Aztec,” where she restores him into the image of an ancient warrior of Native Americans, but only in a self-destructive, warped, and violent way. The pent-up anger and powerlessness in the persecuted native American men are transformed into her brother’s appalling violence toward his own people—a warped psych of self-humiliation, self-wounding, and self-destruction. In this poetry collection, he was shown to cut his father with knife, and fork his sister in the rib. In the strange mechanism of violence, violence becomes its own escape. Feeling the racial wound and exerting more wound on himself and on other people are the only possible existence for him to keep a psychological balance, in the same way as a surgeon applies the pain of scorching iron to a patient when operating on him without anesthetic in ancient days, so that one kind of pain, self-inflicted, balances and eases another pain that is inescapable. In “It Was the Animals,” the poet’s brother showed her a sculpture of “Noah’s Ark.” The minimal number of survivors in Noah’s ark symbolizes the meagre population left of the mass slaughter of native Americans, mirroring their lives on the reservation. Those unsaved and drowned animals’ tumultuous impulses symbolically went into the passionate rebellion and love in the survived human beings: in her brother’s love of violence, knives, bullets, and drugs, and in the poet’s turbulent love life.

It was the animals—the animals I could not take—

They came up the walkway into my house,

cracked the doorframes with their hooves and hips,

marched past me, into my kitchen, into my brother,

tails snaking across my feet before disappearing (Diaz, 2020: 59)

For the poet, the anxiety out of her race’s loss and the thirst of erotic desire are the same thing, and serve as replacement of each other, as Diaz (2020: 12) expresses, “let me call my anxiety, desire, then./ Let me call it, a garden.”

Colonial Capitalist Plunder of Land, Language, and Body

In his book The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon (2005: 35) states that the land constitutes the foremost target of colonialist capitalism, because land is capable of generating value in the process of agrarian labor. Western Marxist Lefebvre (1992: 335) emphasizes “the political economy of space” in his work The Production of Space: “capitalism has taken possession of the land, and mobilized it to the point where this sector has become central.” In the colonialist logic of capitalism, the land is occupied, plundered, usurped, and exploited. Native Americans were displaced from their homeland, oppressed, and killed.

Colonialism does not only begin with the plunder of the land, but also with cultural control—the forced extinction of the Native American’s language. Australian postcolonialist critics like Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin (1995: 283) assert that “the colonial process itself begins in language.” The Lebanese novelist Elias Khouri (quoted in Harlow, 1987: 34) maintains that language is “the very framework of steadfastness. . .the repository of the collective memory. It is the basic national value that must be preserved.” The destruction and forced extinction of the language of a people amounts to cultural genocide, which often goes hand in hand with physical massacre.

In postcolonial literature, body often emerges as the embodiment of colonial violence. Mbembe (2017: 39) argues that the fundamental relation on which the enslaving and colonizing relies thrives on a metaphysics of corporeality:

The black Man is above all a body—gigantic and fantastic—member, organs, color, a smell, flesh, and meat. . .If he is movement, it can only be a contraction while stuck in one place. . .And if it is strength, it can only be the brute strength of the body, excessive, convulsive, spasmodic and resisting thought.

According to Duncan and Cumpsty (2020: 590), “underpinning hierarchies of race in the context of Western European imperialism, there is a dualism of mind and body, which open out to become a dualism of rational humanity and brute nature.” It comes from Cartesian logic of the opposition of mind and body. While European colonizers are identified with mind and thoughts, the colonized are identified with body—barbarous strength of a brute to be exploited to generate capitalist profit. The colonized people become what Mbembe calls “bodies of extraction,” “a body from which great efforts are made to extract maximum profit,” (2017: 18) and designates, at the same time, that which “could be. . .discarded once it was no longer useful” (2017: 40) Colonized body becomes a construct, a commodity, objectified and divorced from mind and subjectivity, from other lived experience of human life. Female bodies of colonized people, ravaged and tortured, in postcolonial literature, often figure colonial violence exerted on the land and on the nation. Ravaged female bodies become an allegory of the colonized nation.

The Homology of Land, Language, and Body in Native American Cosmology

Diaz subverts colonial capitalist logic that commodifies land, language, and body by restoring to them a sentient life, subjectivity, and holistic connection that she found in Native American cosmology. In “The First Water Is the Body,” Diaz (2020: 46) writes:

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. We are telling a story of our existence. The river runs through the middle of my body.

So far, I have said the word river in every stanza. I don’t want to waste water. I must preserve the river in my body.

The above passage brings into confluence land, language, and human body in Native American cosmology. The Colorado River that runs through the Native Americans’ lost land and by which Diaz had lived is “part of her body,” so that she “carries a river” inside her. From the land emanate the lives of animals and human beings, who are made of the same substance, and the outer river and inner water of a human body are one. The Native American language as revealed in this passage is a concretization of land and body. The river runs through the body and through “the words in every stanza.”

While the postcolonial logic of capitalism or the capitalist logic of colonialism make land into the site of plunder and exploitation for its labor and surplus value, deplete and dry it for extraction, Diaz’s resistance to colonialism takes the symbolic form of restoring to the depleted desert the body of water from inside and outside her body, and the living vitality of animal and erotic life. Such assertion of the living vitality of erotic/bodily life, in kinship with her reclaiming of her race’s lost land and resuscitation of her extinct native language, is a fight against historical fossilization of her race—against the historical current of turning the survivors of her race into lifeless museum objects and relics. In the later part of “The First Water is the Body,” Diaz writes again about the homology of land/water, body, and language. The oneness of land, body, and language merges Cartesian opposition of mind and body, and subverts the logic of capitalist colonialism that regards the colonized subject as mere body for extraction:

In Mojave thinking, body and land are the same. The words are separated only by the letters ‘ii and ‘a: ‘iimat for body, ‘amat for land. In conversation, we often use a shortened form for each: mat-. Unless you know the context of a conversation, you might not know if we are speaking about our body or our land. You might not know which has been injured, which is remembering, which is alive, which was dreamed, which needs care. You might not know we mean both.

If I say, My river is disappearing, do I also mean, My people are disappearing?

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? (Diaz, 2020: 48)

In the above passage, Diaz makes it clear that in Mojave thinking, body and land are one, unified in almost identical vocabularies whose meanings can be conflated unless there is a context of specification. Thus, the Native Americans’ suffering from the loss of their land is the same as that inflicts on their bodies, because their land and their bodies are one. Colonialism also destroys their native language, forcing the language into extinction, a language that has an original, pre-verbal text that is in the land and the body themselves. Thus, Diaz established a parallel of the colonial destruction of land, body, and language. Diaz, writing in English, writes essentially in the enemy’s language. Her very act of writing in English to express her Mojave thinking is an act of translation, impossible kind of translation, and also an act of mourning according to the language theory of Jacques Derrida:

Jacques Derrida says, every text remains in mourning until it is translated.

When Mojaves say the word for tears, we return to our word for river, as if our river were flowing from our eyes. A great weeping is how you might translate it. Or a river of grief.

But who is this translation for and will they come to my language’s four-night funeral to grieve what has been lost in my efforts at translation? When they have drunk dry my river will they join the mourning procession across our bleached desert? (Diaz, 2020: 47)

The poetic text of Diaz was scattered with dead Mojave language that is impossible to translate into English. “Translated into English, ‘Aha Makav’ means the river runs through the middle of our body, the same way it runs through the middle of our land. This is a poor translation, like all translations” (Diaz, 2020: 46).

Diaz’s poetry writing, as an act of translation, is “triangular” instead of binary according to her quotation of John Berger:

John Berger wrote, True translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal. (Diaz, 2020: 48)

Diaz further adds,

Between the English translation I offered, and the urgency I felt typing ‘Aha Makav’ in the lines above, is not the point where this story ends or begins. We must go to the place before those two points—we must go to the third place that is the river. (Diaz, 2020: 48)

As revealed in the above passages, the act of translation, which is also Diaz’s poetry writing, is “triangular,” returning to the pre-verbal place before two languages, “to the river,” to the river inside the body, and thus to the body and erotic love. The act of erotic love is also the act of poetry writing and racial re-inscription. As Diaz (2020: 49) writes, “We must go to the point of the lance entering the earth, and the river becoming the first body bursting from earth’s clay body into my sudden body.”

At the beginning of the book, Diaz quoted Native American poet Joy Harjo’s words, “I am singing a song that can only be born after losing a country.” In keeping with Derrida’s definition of untranslated text as mourning, Diaz’s writing of postcolonial love comes out of mourning—the loss of a country—and is the entanglement of Eros and mourning. Harjo exposes the consistency of colonial logic of economic plunder with cultural colonialism constitutive of the forced extinction of Native American’s mother tongue: “They plunder the people’s language/And falsify the people’s words (Just like the people’s money).”

Postcolonial Love as an Act of Reclaiming

In this poetry collection, erotic love is a symbolic act of healing the racial wound, returning to the lost Native American cultural origin with its mythologized Nature—land, rivers, and animals, and reclaiming their lost land, language, and vitality of life.

In the first poem, “Postcolonial Love,” whose title becomes the title of the whole book, Diaz (2020: 1) writes: “The rain will eventually come, or not./ Until then, we touch our bodies like wounds—/ the war never ended and somehow begins again.” To the poet, the slaughtering of the Native Americans is not only a historical memory. It is a continuous war, extending to the present, between contemporary racism and postcolonial resistance, with the scar relived again and again in the victimized people. Erotic love is the symbolic act of feeling the wound and healing, of transforming from wound to blossoming, from depletion to plenitude, from loss of cultural origin to the discovery of the first body of water—inside and outside human bodies.

In the eroticism of this book, wound, desire and deification are interwoven: “one way to open a body to the stars, with a knife./ One way to love a sister, help her bleed light” (Diaz, 2020: 5). The deified sensuality of erotic love, “light-wrapped and light mongers” (Diaz, 2020: 22), recalls the exuberance of Biblical songs: Israel’s lost homeland, exodus and reclaiming of a promised land. The abundant gastrological imagery linked with lovemaking suggests the persecuted people’s feeding on Manna provided by God. The ubiquitous imagery of light evokes Biblical creation myth, implying the birth of the native American’s racial identity. Christian imagery is mixed with native American mythology of Nature—crouched in the erotic transformation of lovers’ bodies into land, water, lions, wolves, deer, bears, and snakes in the act of love. Like in Harjo’s Deer Dancer, where a pregnant Native American woman undergoes the mythological transformation of assuming the deer form, the abundance of animal imagery and mythologized synthetic body of human and animal in Diaz’s Postcolonial Love suggests a return to the mythicized Nature in native American cosmology, hence a return to the native American’s cultural origin. In sensuous love, the lovers’ bodies returned to the substance of their race’s lost land: “haven’t they moved like rivers— like glory, like light—/ over the seven days of your body?” (Diaz, 2020: 7). “I have returned you/ to that from which you came—white mud, mica, mineral, salt—” (Diaz, 2020: 8). Stranded in the metropolitan Manhattan as the only native American in her hotel, powerless and lonely, the poet’s act of love is a counter-aggression and re-possession, an enactment of colonizing the lover’s body and turning colonialism against itself:

Her, come—in the green night, a lion.

I sleep her bees with my mouth of smoke,

dip honey with my hands stung sweet

on the darksome hive.

Out of the eater I eat. Meaning,

She is mine, colony.

The things I know aren’t easy:

I’m the only Native American

on the 8th floor of this hotel or any,

looking out any window of a turn-of-the-century building

in Manhattan. (Diaz, 2020: 14–15)

In “Wolf OR-7,” Diaz compares her and her lover in the act of love to the wolf leaving his pack to find a mate—a near-extinct wolf pact like the Native Americans: “Oregon’s seventh collared wolf, named OR-7 by state biologists, became the first wolf in California since 1927, when the last one was killed for government bounty” (Diaz, 2020: 32). The imagistic oneness of wolf and women conveys counter-aggression to colonial exploitation and asserts the persecuted people’s survival instinct:

my mind climbed the rise, fall, rise of your bared back.

In me a pack of wolves appeared and disappeared

over the hill of my heart.

I, too, follow toward where I am forever returning—

Her.

And somewhere in the dark

of a remote night-vision camera,

the quivering green music of animals. (Diaz, 2020: 33)

In “Ink Light,” the act of love inscribes further “alphabet,” “a new text” of re-claiming, of reaching into the plentitude of land and animal life, and becomes a metaphor of poetry writing itself:

We move within the snow-chromed world: Like-animal. Like-deer. An alphabet. Along a street white as lamplight into the winter, walking—: like language, a new text. I touch her with the eyes of my skin. (Diaz 2020, 34)

Language, lost land, and body come together again in “Snake Light”:

In the wood with my love, there was a snakeskin

Dangling from the tree bark. Sleeve of

Gold, honeycombed,

Scaled with light.

I touched it softly—the way I touch a line

while reading—

Trembling with the body of the snake

Before it left itself (Diaz, 2020: 83)

The empty snakeskin symbolizes what is left of the population of Native Americans. Snake is the symbol of carnal love as vilified, like the natural exuberance of Native Americans vilified as savagery. In many cultures, snake is also the symbol of defiant, diabolical wisdom, akin to Diaz’s poetry of counter-aggressive anticolonialism and assertive eroticism of reclaiming the colonized body. When the poet touches the snakeskin, she “touches a line while reading,” implying that the racial relic of snakeskin is the source of poetic inspiration—the song that is born after the country is lost. The conflation of native language, body in carnal love, and Native Americans’ victimization is reiterated in the following lines in the same poem:

In the beginning, the letter N

Was the image of a snake.

Phoenicians scribes held it in their

Hands, gave it.

They deepened the body’s curve

And chopped off the snake’s head,

Which didn’t change the body’s song (Diaz, 2020: 84–85)

The snake is the pictograph of letter N, a linguistic sign. It is also linked with the body and takes the form of “the body’s curve.” The beheading of the snake suggests the victimization of Native Americans. The snakeskin becomes the symbolic spirit of survived Native Americans—“the body’s song” that persists after beheading, after the near-extinction of Native Americans as a race.

The colonizers culturally denigrate Native Americans to squalid, savagery existence. Diaz writes,

All my life I’ve been working,

to get clean—to be clean is to be good,

in America.

To be clean is the grind.

Except my desert is made of sand, my skin

the color of sand. It gets everywhere.

America is the condition—of the blood and of the rivers,

of what we can spill and who we can

spill it from.

A dream they call it, what is American. (Diaz, 2020: 42)

The above passage conveys the tarnishing and stigmatizing that colonizers inflicted on Native American identity. The Native Americans were made to feel themselves as dirty. They were made to feel themselves as violent, savagery, bestial, and uncouth. They were made to feel shame and the compulsion of cleaning themselves. Diaz once writes in this book:

You could say my brothers’ bullet

cleans them—the way red ants

wash the empty white bowl

of a dead coyote’s eye socket.

Yes, my brothers’ bullet

cleans them, makes them

ready for God.” (Diaz, 2020: 11).

Such a comparison of violence to “cleaning” suggests that her brothers’ violence is an attempt of finishing the destructive work of colonists (symbolized in the image of a dead coyote’s eye socket) with self-destructive violence (symbolized in the work of the ants). Violence is his character stain as much as cleansing. Through violence, life is cleaned through its extermination. It also reveals that racial violence and genocide often appear as a cleansing endeavor—a purification of species and blood. However, the Native American’s “sand-colored” desert is the product of the white people’s exploitation. Their “sand-colored skin” is their racial identity fostered by their suffering history. It cannot be cleaned because the colonial crime is unclean and is what made Native Americans “unclean”—Native Americans’ violent traits (such as the violent trait of the poet’s brother), their “uncleanness,” if there are any, are reactive violence and self-destructiveness in response to the sordid crime of colonial violence. Here, Diaz denounces white people’s shunning of the responsibility of racial crime and their scapegoating of Native Americans based on their “cultural deficits”: their “savagery” and “uncleanness.”

Diaz turns the derogative, colonialist metaphor of animal and savagery upside down, turns Edward Said’s savage in Orientalism—the white people’s otherization of colonized subjects—upside down, and transforms it into a glorification of her native people’s natural abundance and vital life. Besides Christian imagery of creation myth wrapped in light and lavished with sacred banquets, besides Native American’s natural mythology of animal and mineral lives, Diaz also utilizes Greek mythology in her description of the transformative effect of erotic love: the subjugated vitality of Minotaur—half-horse, half human; dried-up river god Asterion in his labyrinth, suggesting the Native Americans’ exploited, depleted land and their trapped vitality and rage. The triple connotations of “labor” in its sense of giving birth, toiling, and lovemaking recur in the book, casting the poet’s postcolonial resistance into a text of female corporeal poetics. The word “labor” appears again at the very end, bringing to culmination the travail of the whole book:

I do my grief work

With her body—:

Labor to make the emerald tigers

In her throat leap,

Lead them burning green to drink

From the deep-violet jetting of her breast.

We go where there is love,

To the river, on our knees beneath

The sweet water. (Diaz, 2020, 96)

To sum it up, in Postcolonial Love, Natalie Diaz establishes a homology of native Americans’ plundered and lost land, their extinct native language, and wounded bodies. In her corporeal poetics, she attempts to restore the oneness of land, body, and language in Native American cosmology that is fractured by exploiting political economy of colonialist capitalism. The postcolonial love—the deified eroticism of the book brings wound into blossoming, depletion into plenitude, desert into the body of water, and represents symbolically the healing of wounds by reclaiming her land, native language, and the living vitality and subjectivity of the bodies of her people.