All rights reserved. Free expression is its own threat. 9. I was drawn into his story. What are you reading next? We sing the National Anthem before games, which I still find strange. And as a Mojave and Pima American, how do you handle, balance, or negotiate expectations that you are always a witness to every issue in the Native community? My brother’s body was also his gimmick, it is what he burned down trying to escape. But really, the canon for me sometimes feels a little bit strange because where I come from, here on the reservation, in our community, you respect your elders and you know that all the things coming out of you have come through them to you. It is spacing, it is up and down the page, being two or three steps ahead of yourself. It’s about them being able to read some part of their own life in the poem, even if it’s a part they don’t understand. That’s why the third section feels like one of the most important to me, I guess. How do the rhythmic language and references to the natural world hold it all together? Most people don’t bear it at all, they just look, they just look with their eyes and write with their eyes, and go to sleep. Language is violent, it is touch, it is always a mere wish at meaning. I want to put him and us out of our misery.” And then to think there will be a time when the best way that I can love him will be when he’s gone, you know? There are twists and boomerangs: “I was built by wage. In fact, that sentiment is still reality—the language that accompanied the bounty for a dead Native is still present in our Declaration of Independence. How can poetry, like sports, be a form of reclaiming the body of color, holding it up, and honoring it? You can see someone touch someone else, but you can’t know how it feels to them.

I really want to headbutt it; you know, we headbutt out here. I am excited to read Diane Geller’s forthcoming book, Dog Flowers, from One World. Diaz teaches at the Arizona State University Creative Writing MFA program. They’re ours too. But after speaking with her myself, Diaz redefined how I saw her. Link, Copyright 2014 divedapper. I don’t know if I can exist alone and not in the midst or middle or tangle of others’ stories and songs. I’m grabbing onto them, and the energy is moving through me—these words came from somewhere else, somebody else, some other time. Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window). Can you talk to me about writing that particular poem? Natalie Diaz grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. The morning.” It doesn’t mean your grief is gone, it doesn’t mean what’s happened the day before is gone, it just means that the morning is there and what are you going to do? How lucky that I can have these desires as I watch my brother be drained by his. I am everything a body like mine has ever been, too—clay, a dream, a river, my ancestors, an absence, a missing, a war party, a touch, a wish, a joy, a story—and who I am now meets those things somewhere in the stream, in the happening. Maybe it’ll happen when we’re all some other place but while we’re here on earth there’s not a lot of salvation unless you can offer it to someone else or unless someone else offers it to you. How do you maintain momentum and remain inspired? A knife becomes a way of passing light into the belly. Our afterlife is reversed. Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. For me that was the moment that said: And then you wake up the next morning. What does your creative process look like? At The Rumpus, we know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. Borrowing Baldwin’s term, my body was my gimmick—it is what got me off my rez. One of the earliest images of obsession for me was the image of “hips.” I’ve talked about this in other places, but I was very close with my great grandmother, who was a double amputee.

Rumpus: There are ingredients and materials you use to create this first poem that reappear throughout the collection: snakes, scorpions, hands, light, neck, copper, stones, memory, thighs, blood, hips, etc. I don’t believe my writing is activism. When My Brother Was an Aztec AM: You wield the manifold capacities of words on the page—sonically, visually, semantically. . Or like 1/39th of every image I’ve seen or been afraid of or moved toward at night. You can find her on Twitter @abigail_mcfee. There are many parallels in the narratives of people of color, such as those you capture in your poems; our experiences with self-destruction, cycles of despair that trap us and our families, as well as an urgency for forms of survival. I think he’s seen as having no emotion himself in the poems, except that I see him struggle. You take what beautiful good things you can and you hold onto them when you’ve got them and when they’re close enough, because other than that it's going to hurt. One of the most striking ways the game figures into colonialism is that I knew very early that basketball would be the thing to get me off my reservation, and I wanted to get off badly. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. The fearful and fascinating brown body. And you do the things I talk about, you find that beautiful thing. Hear from reporters and organizers from Texas, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, NC, Louisiana, and Kentucky about how they are working to protect the #vote. And I’m now his contemporary in some ways, in terms of the way some people group us, but he’s somebody whose work I learned from because he had been writing for so much longer than I had been.

I am looking for a field for the body to run in. Could you speak about the possibilities of language on the graphic level? There’s this Denis Johnson line I love where he says, “Some people we glimpse as chasms, briefly but deeply, even to the death of us. Maybe he’s finding some flowers or something but he’ll come and hover above the river and get down in it and come back up. Yeah, for me that shift is one of the most important in the book. ND: I think I don’t think about double so much as simultaneous. They’re half me, like any character I imagine is going to be. Well, thanks. I’ve seen him lock himself into my parents' home so he would stay off of it and he was never able to last very long.

Why did you choose these forms? Diaz: This was my version of sampling and not a calling out of Beyoncé. And as a Mojave and Pima American, how do you handle, balance, or negotiate expectations that you are always a witness to every issue in the Native community? All rights reserved. What seems urgent to you right now in your writing life? What are some of the questions that sports bring up about the body, particularly about the body of color, and the female body of color?

But that poem in particular was kind of the momentum of it, the fast-pace of it. Inside there was a poem. It’s striking that many of us do not use these markers (PoC, WoC) in our communities or families. Wow. Because what I am is something that is, yes, part of this America but also something else, something more, something that America hasn’t quite been able to consume fully.” This feels in conversation with the line in “The First Water Is the Body” in Postcolonial Love Poem, “What threatens white people is often dismissed as myth. This week, Jared Jackson speaks with Natalie Diaz, author of Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf, 2020). Out of this, how did such beauty come forth? We are all the ways and conditions of love, some easy, some difficult, yet still love and still becoming what love is not yet but must be so that we can exist. We can’t edit ourselves into or out of empires’ intentions. Joy Harjo is still writing, she’s not dead and gone, you know. ND: Maybe a wound is a way of seeing into someone. Her current project asks how the interiority of human beings (particularly women) can be understood through landscapes. Nostalgia is dangerous because it has to keep happening in order to exist—what we pine for, what we ache to return to, is often what we are replicating or enacting now in such violent ways that what we look back toward seems beautiful, and it makes us want to conquer it, build it, and destroy it again. During the first book I was so close to the MFA that I was very aware of the distinctions, but now, for me, it’s not very different. Sports is the intersection, the collision of all of these things. What issues emerge out of bearing witness, so to speak, to a Native experience for an audience that includes non-Native and white readers?

The government ruined that for us. But it seems to me when people talk about the canon, that what they are often trying to talk about is assimilation. Human language operates like humans—it is one of our most physical and emotional technologies. Is the promise that “the afterlife would be reversed” about redemption? I don’t mean a perfect love. The risk is my life, my land, my hour, my pleasure, my ecstatic grief, my lover and her possibility, my failure at language.

Maybe I mean also. That’s the most natural mode of learning for me—questions, not answers. Who sits in the box in suit and ties while the brown bodies fly and break and sweat and glow? Diaz teaches in Arizona State University’s Creative Writing MFA program. It seems that people want, they need to know, “who do you associate yourself with because that’s going to help me one, determine if I understand you or not, and two, it’s going to help me determine if you’re authentic or legitimate or not.” That’s especially true when it comes to Natives, because it’s like what is our canon? You wake up from a dream and, oh, you’ve got a story already. ND: It could be said that all language is borrowed.

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