Postcolonial Love Poem

“Postcolonial Love Poem” is the title poem of Mojave American poet Natalie Diaz’s second poetry collection. This 2020 collection won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. This poem features prominently in her canon. In this poem, Diaz describes her complex feelings about her experiences as an Indigenous woman in America who is in a relationship with a white woman. The poet’s postcolonial point of view informs her imagery and thematic work.

Poet Biography

Natalie Diaz was born on September 4, 1978, in Needles, California and grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village. She has eight siblings. She is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe and identifies as both Akimel O’odham and Latina. Diaz speaks Mojave, Spanish, and English.

Diaz attended Old Dominion University for her bachelor’s degree, where she also played basketball. She played basketball professionally in Europe before returning to Old Dominion University to earn her MFA in poetry and fiction.

In June 2007, she won the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry for her poem “No More Cake Here.”

In 2012, her first book of poetry, When My Brother was an Aztec, was published. Her brother’s addiction to crystal meth and his death are a prominent focus of the collection.

That same year, she was awarded a poetry fellowship by the Lannan Literary Fellowship, and she was interviewed by PBS NewsHour about both her poetry and her work in language rehabilitation.

In 2018, she was named as the modern and contemporary poetry chair at Arizona State University. She also won a MacArthur Fellowship for poetry.

In 2019, she was a faculty member at the Canto Mundo Retreat, which is a conference that supports Latinx writers.

In 2020, she published her second collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, for which she won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Diaz was also elected to be a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Her work has appeared in Narrative, Poetry Magazine, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, the New Republic, Tin House, and Crab Orchard Review. She has also received fellowships from the Native Arts Council Foundation and Princeton University. She was awarded the Princeton Holmes National Poetry Prize, the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from Bread Loaf, the Narrative Poetry Prize, and the Tobias Wolff Fiction Prize.

In 2022, Diaz is teaching as an Associate Professor at Arizona State University. She is the director for the school’s Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Diaz also works as an activist. She works with Mojave-speaking elders on Mojave language revitalization.

Poem Text

Diaz, Natalie. “Postcolonial Love Poem.” 2020. Library of Congress.

Summary

Diaz’s speaker describes the external and internal conflict she experiences as an Indigenous woman in America and in her relationship with a white woman. The poem begins with an extended description of the violence Indigenous people have experienced for centuries in both physical and cultural wars and the speaker’s attempts at healing. She continues by describing how her relationship with a white woman continues these battles on a smaller and more intimate scale. This conflict is internal, as the speaker struggles with marrying the violence of colonial culture with the love of her partner. The speaker seems to find this relationship to ultimately be transformative, allowing her to grow and transform. Yet despite the positives of their relationship, the speaker is left to consider when broader societal change will come as her people still experience ongoing genocide and eradication.