New American Poets: Natalie Diaz

Introduction to the work of Natalie Diaz
Adrian Matejka

It's tempting to get caught up in the biographical elements of Natalie Diaz's writing. The poems, as well as her author bio and interviews, invite the reader to draw direct connections between her varied identities—Mojave, a former pro-basketball player, an MFA-holder, and an archivist of Indigenous languages—and those of the speaker in her first collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec. Diaz has done so many different kinds of things that her stories have stories, but what she does on the page is much more dexterous and surprising than confessionalism or any of its variant offshoots. When My Brother Was an Aztec is a spacious, sophisticated collection, one that puts in work addressing the author's divergent experiences—whether it be family, skin politics, hoops, code switching, or government commodities.

The source material is unquestionably valuable and necessary, but what helps make Diaz's work unique is the language itself. She is a capacious linguist, one who is adept at allusion, metaphor, form, and narrative. She takes her experiences, distills them into English, Mojave, or Spanish, then twists the resultant moment with wit and grace. In Diaz's hands, the narratives are not beholden to the original experience. Rather, the experience becomes a new machine for myth, one that is simultaneous specific to Indigenous cultures and universally American. As her speaker in "Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation" puts it: "You better hope you never see angels on the rez. If you do, they'll be marching you off to / Zion or Oklahoma, or some other hell they've mapped out for us."

Which is to say Diaz both embraces and subverts mythology in whatever form it shows up—Indigenous, Western, counterculture, it doesn't matter. In her work, myth is simultaneously reified and undercut because it has to be. Myth is only "myth" insofar as it approximates the human condition. Joseph Campbell once said all myths address "transformation of consciousness," and we find these transformations everywhere in Diaz's work. In her poems, love becomes "a pound of sticky raisins / packed tight in black and white / government boxes" while a meth-addicted brother is "Borges's Bestiary. / He is a zoo of imaginary beings."

At its center, this collection is about the transformation of traditions—the traditions of poverty, the traditions of Indigenousness, the traditions of poetics. It takes a poet of rare skill and clarity to write a triolet that includes assault arrests, Sisyphus, meth and Lionel Richie. And it is in these moments where Diaz so elegantly negotiates experience, tradition, and myth that show us the range of her skill as a writer. She is a poet who understands tradition but is not beholden to it. She is a poet who will help us write into the future as she excavates the past and interrogates the present. She finds beauty and worth in the zoo of drug addiction and the gut-busting weight of government raisins, and her experiential insights make us wiser, more self-aware, and, in the end, more human.


Statement
Natalie Diaz

When I received the two advance copies of my first poetry book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, I kept one and gave the second copy to my brother Mino—he is the tattooed brother who posed for the photo on the book's cover. That night, unbeknownst to me, my mother, my father, and five of my eight siblings gathered in Mino's living room taking turns reading from the book. They didn't read out loud. Instead, they read quietly, flipping to poems at random. Sometime after midnight, I received a rain of text messages with comments or questions from my siblings. One of those text was from my youngest brother. It said: What do u mean? Did u mean u want Richie to die? That's fukd up. He was referring to a poem in the book called "No More Cake Here," in which I imagine the events that might take place after a phone call announcing the death of my meth-wrecked oldest brother. It was a poem that surprised even me when I wrote it. It uncovered a truth in me that I almost wished I didn't know existed: the late-night-early-morning phone calls that we all dread because they usually bring some form of bad news about my brother might one day bring us/me a type of relief or at least an ease of sorts, because one day that phone call might announce that my brother is free of his worst self, meaning we/I would be free from this version of him as well, meaning he would be dead.

The next morning, my mother and my youngest sister, Franki, dropped by my house unexpectedly. I knew my mother was bothered as soon as she walked in the door.

Go ahead, Mom, tell me, I said.

Tell you what? she replied.

I can tell you're bothered, so you might as well just say what's in you, I continued.

Well, it's just that the things you wrote…it didn't happen like that, she told me. That's not the way it was.

Before I could respond, Franki blurted out, What do you mean, Mom? That's exactly how it happened.

Of course, my Mom and Franki were both right, and they were both wrong—it was all true; none of it was true. And just as Val was right when he said what I wrote about my brother was fukd up, he was also wrong by thinking I shouldn't have acknowledged the truth in me that led to that horrible poem.

The greatest and perhaps single piece of knowledge I carry in me when I write is that there are multitudes of truths contained in a single story. I learned this not by any academic lesson, but within my family. I grew up in the Arizona/California desert, on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation, which everyone called the Indian Village, with four brothers and four sisters in a two-bedroom house, to a native mother and a Spanish, Catholic father. We held to many truths all at once. Each seemed to strengthen the possibility of the other, rather than cancel it out. In my house, we never had to choose between the numerous parts of ourselves—we were all of those things, at the same time, sometimes in a noisy collision, sometimes in an easy weave.

When I write, I bring all of my truths, even the Judas-truths that make me feel like the betrayer whose dirty hands are resting on the table for everyone to see, including God. For me, writing is less a declaration of those truths than it is my interrogation of them. Uncovering the darkness in me that led to some of the poems about my brother also lights up the hard, bright way in which I love him and the small wars I wage to win him back. The monsters and hoofermen I choose to look in the eyes and teeth when considering my rez and this country's history are also the truths that have built in me a strength and compassion that help me to survive this world. Truth is that little animal we chase and chase until we suddenly glance over our shoulder and realize it has been chasing us all along.