The Rumpus Talks to Natalie Diaz About Postcolonial Love Poem

At The Rumpus, Janet Rodriguez interviews Natalie Diaz about Postcolonial Love Poem, just released from Graywolf Press. "In her poetry, informed by Fort Mojave, the reservation on which she grew up, Diaz examines a world that’s been complicit in the erasure of her people, a world of which she is part and a world for which she has mixed feelings," writes Rodriguez in her intro. From this conversation:

Rumpus: The titular poem, “Postcolonial Love Poem” speaks of identity (American, Mojave, lover, etc.) How do the rhythmic language and references to the natural world hold it all together?

Diaz: Identity is one of those little traps, a trap we all keep in our pocket and in our mouths, placing it before others or stepping in it ourselves. Because we know it has currency out there in this nation we beg to be whole in. In your first question I spoke toward, I listed all the things I was—I turned myself into a context. Context pretends to know what we are and what we have done, so it can predict how we might act. But what about the conditions? This nation doesn’t want us to be whole, and so identity becomes this weapon used against us. I mean, I own a Certificate of Indian Blood, which certifies the blood in my body is Indian blood.

I’m dumbfounded lately when I catch myself using the word PoC or WoC—it’s so engrained in me I don’t always catch myself, or worse, I’m willing to use it for the sake of clarity in institutional settings. What a terrible condition we are in, in which we call each other by this least part of who we are and who our people are. Identity tends to be used as a thing to pin us down and hold us still. It’s not that I don’t understand what identity means or how it functions, but I am imagining ways to become unpinnable. My partner and I come home from our days and we never look at each other and think, you are a queer Black woman and I am a queer Mojave, Akimel O’odham, Mexican, LatinX woman. That doesn’t mean we don’t talk about what it means to be us, of our experiences as who we each are in this world as well as who we are together. It’s striking that many of us do not use these markers (PoC, WoC) in our communities or families...

Read on at The Rumpus.