Energy

“WE ARE ALIVE BECAUSE OF STORY. IT IS ONE OF OUR ANCESTORS’ MOST POWERFUL TECHNOLOGIES. AND WE ARE ALL STORYTELLERS. A STORY IS AN ENERGY, AND LIKE THE WALLS OF JERICHO, MAYBE IF WE PUT ENOUGH OF OUR STORIES OUT THERE, INTO THE AIR, THE WALLS WILL START FALLING; THEY ARE ALREADY CRACKING.”
—NATALIE DIAZ, WHOSE NEW BOOK, POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM, WILL BE OUT IN MARCH FROM GRAYWOLF PRESS.

I CAN’T remember the first time I met Natalie Diaz. Maybe that’s because she has always felt like family, someone I have always known. Someone who has always been a part of me—of all of us. To hear her speak of our connections to ancestors, the land, water, the self is to be at once moved and awakened. She is thoughtful and connected. She is Indigenous, Latinx, queer. She is brilliant both on and off the page. So many of us knew this long before the MacArthur Foundation awarded her a “Genius” Fellowship in 2018. She is a woman fiercely allied to people, to animals and to the land, to the past and to the present, to poetry and to activism. To sit with her is to become aware of both how much I know about the world and myself and how much I don’t. To sit with her is to understand the depth and strength of our words, the magnitude of our voices against a country and history that has too often tried to erase us.

Diaz was born on the Fort Mojave Indian reservation in Needles, California, the daughter of a Mexican Spanish father and a Fort Mojave Akimel O’odham mother. She is a member of the Gila River Indian Community. While she is currently the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, as a child she could have scarcely imagined herself a poet. Basketball, the dream ticket off the reservation, took Diaz to Old Dominion University. There, when not playing on the team, she played hoops with the poet Tim Seibles, who encouraged Diaz to write while she was recovering from an injury. And while a professional basketball career took her abroad, to Turkey, Austria, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal, she returned home to start a language revitalization program with her elders at Fort Mojave.

There is a deep kindness to Diaz, a generosity, quietude, and patience that I, as a child, having first been introduced to poetry through the words of Langston Hughes (“I loved my friend. /He went away from me.”) and Robert Frost (“The woods are lovely, dark and deep, /but I have promises to keep…”), thought existed, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012, Diaz said, “As I was writing, I realized I’d been writing toward [my brother].” With mythology as the backdrop for exploring the impact of a brother’s drug addiction on not just one family, but on all of us, Diaz explores the thin lines between love and pathos, empathy and rage, living and dying. Her new collection, , published by Graywolf Press in March, continues the narrative of love, this time with an eye on not only the lover, but on what she has always been: an activist, with a gaze bent on our survival.