Postcolonial Love Poem Poems
Reviews
(reread) a favorite for a million reasons.
there's a fine difference between appearing to be poetic and ambiguous for the sake of it rather than genuinely letting the prose speak for itself. diaz's poems can be the latter and also curiosly, the former. for this collection i enjoyed some and most others not so.
I FEEL FERAL… okay made general notes but will properly analyze later on
díaz's simplicity and complexity with words will always mesmerize me. "trust your anger", she says. "it is a demand for love."
"The First Water is the Body" and "exhibits from The American Water Museum" are must-reads.
I love the visual language and the reoccurring symbols of this so much. It boils together to this beautiful ending that ties it all together. That said I didn't feel... completely blown away by some of these poems, but that should by no means speak of a lack of quality of them. Title poem + exhibits from the American Water Museum are two major highlights.
Wow. The poems on rivers and bodies of water are stunning.
“To write is to be eaten. To read, to be full.”
9/10
Highlights
now who I come to, I come clean to, / I come good to.
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.
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.
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?
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?
We admitted that we were human beings and melted for love in this desert.
-MAHMOUD DARWISH
Water remembers everything it travels over and through. lf you have been in water, part of you remains there still.