Natalie Diaz

Postcolonial Love Poem is a thunderous river of a book. It demands that every body carried in its pages - bodies of language, land, suffering brothers, enemies and lovers - be touched and held. Where the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dune fields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves. Her poetry questions what kind of future we might create, built from the choices we make now.

Postcolonial Love Poem

Water remembers everything it travels over and through. lf you have been in water, part of you remains there still.

Marion

We admitted that we were human beings and melted for love in this desert.

Aha Malay is the true name of our people, given to us by our Creator who loosed the river from the earth and built it into at hones bodies.

Translated into English, Aha Makav means the river runs through the middle of our body, the same way it runs through the midle of our land.

This is a poor translation, like all translations.

In American imaginations, the logic of this image will lend itself to surrealism or magical realism-

Americans prefer a magical red Indian, or a shaman, or a fake Indian in a red dress, over a real Native. Even a real Native carrying the dangerous and heavy blues of a river in her body.

What threatens white people is often dismissed as myth. I have never been true in America. America is my myth.

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 languages 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?

In Mojave thinking, body and land are the same. The words are separated only by the letters ii and 'a: "imat for body, 'mat 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?

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.

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.

America is a land of bad math and science. The Right believes Rapture will save them from the violence they are delivering upon the earth and water; the Left believes technology, the same technology wrecking the earth and water, will save them from the wreckage or help them build a new world on Mars.

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