In deftly navigating the waters of history, memory, and identity, Natalie Diaz crafts a resounding and emotional collection of poetry that complicates the historical erasure of subaltern bodies and voices. Through a breathtaking and dazzling declaration of love, Diaz’s lyrical stanzas and verses delve into the intimate realms of personal love and loss, while simultaneously mobilizing and reflecting a collective mourning that seems to resonate widely in a world fraught with political upheavals, tremblements, and cyclical destructions of Black, brown and Indigenous bodies. At the heart of her universe lies the interrogation of language – its untranslatability, scalability, and transformability – its ability to oppress, but also, liberate. Here, she invites and calls on us to reconsider the grammar we embrace in our dreams, desires, and aspirations to create the world anew – built on the ruins and imprints of colonialism, capitalism, genocide, militarization, and carceral logic.
Herein, we are taken on a literary voyage that opens up a space for explorations into the intricacies of belonging and the contested intimacies of identity, threading together the personal and universal. In my reading, I am drawn to the echoes of lessons from Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth), Édouard Glissant (Poetics of Relation), Grada Kilomba (Plantation Memories), and others, all of which seem to reverberate in Diaz’s evocative portrayal of colonial afterlives, compounded by racial othering, loss, psychological repercussions, and systemic injustices. Yet, Diaz’s offering manifests as an entrancing embodiment of thought that invokes the corporeality of the thinking subject through lived experiences. It serves as a continuous meandering of past, present, and future lifeworlds, driven by categorical refusals enacted through practices of resistance, desire, and love.
Margarida Waco