Eng Fall 2026: Oct 26: Comprehensive Study Notes on Natalie Diaz's Postcolonial Love Poem
Textual and Formal Analysis of "Postcolonial Love Poem"
The Title Poem in Context:
The collection opens with its title poem, "Postcolonial Love Poem," placed in its own introductory section.
The opening lines introduce the mineralogical and therapeutic imagery: "blood stones can cure a snake bite. It can stop the bleeding. Most people forgot this when the war ended."
Bloodstones carry historical folklore associations with coagulant properties and the curing of venomous bites, grounding the text immediately in practices of physical and spiritual healing.
The Temporal Problem of War and Ending:
The initial assertion of peace is immediately problematized by the lines: "The war ended depending on which war you meant. Those we started before those millennia ago and onward, those which started me, which I lost and won, these ever blooming wounds."
The concept of a singular, concluded war is destabilized; one formal conflict may have ceased, but ongoing structural and ancestral wars spanning millennia continue.
The phrase "ever blooming wounds" establishes the first convergence between floral imagery and physical trauma, presenting open wounds as living, growing organisms rather than static injuries.
Martial Imagery and Romantic Diction:
Line 8 marks a tonal pivot: "I was built by wage, so I wage love and worse, always another campaign to march across a desert night I dismount my dark horse befriend you there, delivering you the hard pull of all my thirst."
The double meaning of "wage" links capitalist subsistence to the waging of war and the waging of love.
Romantic intimacy is articulated through the lexicon of military maneuvers: campaigns, night marches, cavalry mounts, and conquests.
Lapidary Lexicon and Gemstone Terminology:
"We plead pleasure to hurt, leave marks the size of stones, each cabochon polished by our mouths. I, your lapidary, your lapidary wheel turned green mottled red, the jaspers of our desires."
Cabochon: A gemstone that has been shaped and polished into a smooth, rounded surface rather than cut with facets.
Lapidary: As a noun, an artisan who cuts, polishes, and engraves precious stones; as an adjective or tool reference (lapidary wheel), the mechanical apparatus used for stone grinding.
Jasper: An opaque, impure variety of silica/quartz, typically displaying red, yellow, brown, or green mottled patterns.
The erotic interaction between bodies produces physical marks that are figured as gems, transforming acts of passion and pain into precious, durable mineral artifacts.
Auditory and Consonantal Texture:
The poem uses dense acoustic patterning and consonance to generate auditory weight, observable in phrasing such as "I learned to drink in a country of dread" and "the jaspers of our desires."
Desert Botany and Geologic Metaphor:
The text turns toward arid botanical life: "There are wildflowers in my desert which take up to twenty years to grow." This likely refers to desert flora such as the agave of the Mojave Desert, which requires decades of maturation prior to flowering.
"The seeds sleep like geodes. They eat hot, feldspar sand until flash flood bolts the arroyo lifting…"
Geode: A hollow, spherical or subspherical rock lined internally with crystals or mineral matter.
Feldspar: An abundant rock-forming mineral group consisting of aluminum silicates.
Arroyo: A dry, steep-sided gulch or gully cut by running water, liable to rapid inundation during sudden rainfall.
Mixed Registers as a Formal Device:
The poem deploys mixed registers by synthesizing distinct lexical systems within a single aesthetic framework:
Highly technical and scientific geological/botanical terms (feldspar, geodes, cabochon, arroyo, heliotrope, scorpion phacelia).
Martial and military vocabulary (wage, campaign, march, war, boot).
Sensual, erotic, and vulnerable romantic language (pleasure, hurt, mouths, thirst, desires).
This technique mirrors the collision of registers seen in the final quatrain of Gwendolyn Brooks's poetry, where everyday vernacular collides with elevated diction ("chaos in the windy grays or red glare").
The blending of registers underscores the inseparability of historical violence, environmental ecology, and erotic desire.
The Flood and Unrealized Futurity:
The text describes environmental metamorphosis: "before the November sky untethers a hundred year flood, the desert returns suddenly to its ancient sea. Arise the wild heliotrope, scorpion phacelia, which hold purple the way the throat can hold the shape of any great hand."
The physical throat holding the shape of a hand unites the erotic grasp with the floral pigmentation of purple blossoms.
The poem concludes by revealing this lush landscape to be an unactualized vision: "the rain will eventually come or not. Until then, we touch our bodies like boot. The war never ended and somehow begins again."
The deluge, the inland sea, and the blooming desert remain hypothetical projections rather than completed historical transformations.
Poetic Structure and Mechanics:
The poem operates without stanzaic divisions, reading as a single, unbroken block of text.
Lines are long, heavily punctuated with em dashes, colons, commas, and periods, creating a dense, continuous momentum.
This formal construction matches the diluvial (deluge-like) imagery, generating an unceasing, "sticky" propulsion that mirrors an unending war.
Postcolonial Theory and Settler Colonial Realities
Two Primary Definitions of Postcolonialism:
Historical/Temporal Periodization: A chronological state of affairs following the formal conclusion and withdrawal of Western imperial rule.
Intellectual and Critical Project: An ongoing academic, philosophical, and aesthetic interrogation into the consequences, structural legacies, and epistemologies of colonialism.
Critique of the Term in Indigenous Contexts:
Applying the prefix "post-" to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas is historically inaccurate and theoretically fraught, as settler colonialism has not concluded.
If postcolonial status assumes political self-determination, self-definition, and recognized territorial sovereignty, Indigenous nations within the United States do not inhabit a postcolonial era.
Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee author and academic) demonstrates that within the Americas, colonialism continues as an assumed element of the socio-political fabric, in which any assertions of Indigenous political, social, economic, or intellectual sovereignty are cast as "special privileges" rather than inherent rights.
Colonialism remains ongoing through physical land dispossession, resource extraction, linguistic erasure, and institutional interference with self-determination.
Postcolonialism as a Speculative Horizon:
In the poetry of Natalie Diaz, "postcolonial" does not signify a present historical reality. Instead, it functions as a future decolonized condition that must be imagined.
The text challenges the concept by demonstrating that love, desire, and survival are enacted under ongoing conditions of colonial occupation.
Wounds as Inscription and Source of Life:
In public commentary, Diaz argues that wounds are not merely markers of damage, but serve as a "source of life."
Wounds function as historical inscriptions upon the physical body; genuine decolonial healing demands reading and understanding these ancestral marks rather than repressing or erasing them.
Core Anchoring Concepts of the Collection:
Land: Geography, desert topography, and ecosystems as living entities rather than passive settings.
Water: Sacred and political resource, threatened lifeblood, and river systems mapped onto the human body.
The Mojave Language: Ancestral linguistic frameworks preserving relational worldviews.
Queer Love/Desire: A site of relational sovereignty, reclamation, and bodily survival.
"The First Water Is the Body":
Found on page 76 of the collection, written in an urgent prose-poem mode that moves away from traditional decorative lyricism under the immense weight of historical crisis.
Section 3 asserts: "Americans prefer a magical red Indian or a shaman or a fake Indian in a red dress over a real native. Even a real native carrying the dangerous and heavy fluids of a river in her body. What threatens white people is often dismissed as myth. I have never been true in America. America is my myth."
The term "red dress" points to racial performance and stylized Indigenous representation, contrasting with the living Indigenous body bearing the ecological collapse of wounded rivers.
Visual Counterparts: Kent Monkman and Revisionist History
Emanuel Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware" (1851):
A cornerstone painting of American national mythology depicting George Washington's surprise attack at Trenton during the Revolutionary War against Great Britain.
Leutze constructed the scene as an idealized cross-section of the emergent American republic: rowers include a Black man (frequently identified as Prince Whipple), a frontiersman wearing a Scottish bonnet, and a figure in Indigenous garb steering the boat.
This aesthetic serves the founding myth of the American Revolution as an anti-colonial struggle of liberation from British hegemony, a framing celebrated in historical sites across Boston.
Kent Monkman's Revisionist Intervention:
Kent Monkman (Cree artist) reinterprets classical Western historical masterworks to critique contemporary and historical settler violence.
In his monumental revision of Leutze's canvas, George Washington is replaced by Monkman's gender-fluid alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle.
Miss Chief stands poised at the bow in high-fashion attire, echoing the iconography of the Statue of Liberty.
Iconographic Shifts in Monkman's Composition:
Migrant Vessel Parallels: The central boat evokes contemporary refugee vessels navigating turbulent seas.
Indigenous Salvation: The composition reframes Indigenous people not as vanishing background figures, but as agents of rescue, hospitality, and life-saving generosity for displaced and imperiled peoples of diverse origins.
The Coup Stick: The American flag is replaced by an Indigenous coup stick—a staff used by Plains warriors to touch an enemy in battle without killing them, signifying supreme acts of bravery.
Stranded Imperial Figures: Armed soldiers and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are depicted stranded on floating ice sheets in the background.
Thematic Parallels Between Monkman and Diaz:
Both artists reject the American foundational myth that paints the United States as an anti-colonial nation born of revolution.
Both utilize diluvial, flooded, and cataclysmic landscapes to dismantle colonial structures.
Both frame decolonization not as a past milestone, but as a speculative, unresolved project led by Indigenous resurgence and care.
Intertextuality and the Function of Epigraphs
Definitions and Mechanics of Literary Reference:
Epigraph: A short quotation placed at the beginning of a literary work, chapter, or section to introduce core motifs, themes, or conceptual questions. Epigraphs are explicitly attributed by the author and provide thematic framing without requiring the reader to have mastered the referenced text.
Intertextuality: The network of relationships and dependencies between different literary and cultural texts, generating complex meanings via mutual dialogue. Texts situated within these relationships are called intertexts.
Allusion: A brief, indirect, unattributed reference to an external person, event, text, or myth that imports external context and resonance into the host text.
The Five Epigraphs of "Postcolonial Love Poem":
Section 1 Epigraph:
Quote: "I am singing a song that can only be born after losing a country."
Author & Source: Joy Harjo (prominent Native American poet and musician, member of the Muscogee [Creek] Nation), from an untitled prose poem in her 2015 collection Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.
Function: Links song, poetic utterance, and music directly to radical loss, land dispossession, and territorial grief.
Section 2 Epigraph:
Quote: "We admitted that we were human beings and melted for love in this desert."
Author & Source: Mahmoud Darwish (celebrated national poet of Palestine and author of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence), from the poem "Hoopoe."
Context: The hoopoe (hudhud) is an Old World bird, the only bird explicitly mentioned in the Quran, acting as an emissary for the prophet Solomon. Darwish's poem addresses exile, displacement, collective identity, and Islamic mystical Sufism within desert topographies.
Section 3 Epigraph:
Quote: "My country needs me. And if I were not here, I would have to be invented."
Author & Source: Hortense Spillers (American literary critic and theorist), from the seminal essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Baby: An American Grammar Book" (1987).
Context: Spillers repudiates the findings of the 1965 Moynihan Report, which pathologized the Black community by blaming systemic injustices on dysfunctional family structures and Black mothers. Spillers argues that America relies on the constructed figure of the Black woman to define its racial boundaries and project its systemic guilt.
Section 4 Epigraph:
Quote: "Didn't they tell you that I was savage?"
Author & Source: Robyn Fenty (Rihanna; singer, entrepreneur, and artist from Barbados), from the 2016 single "Needed Me."
Context: In the musical context, the lyrics dismantle male dependence and dismiss male vanity. In Diaz's poetic framework, the line reclaims the colonial discourse of the "savage," weaponized historically to justify violence by counter-posing imperial "civilization" against Indigenous "primitivism."
Section 5 Epigraph:
Quote: "¿Qué admiro? / ¿Quién en amor ha sido más dichosa?" ("What do I admire? / Who has been happier in love?")
Author & Source: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (seventeenth-century Hieronymite nun, polymath, and poet in colonial New Spain/Mexico).
Context: Operating within her convent quarters as an intellectual and literary salon for early modern women thinkers, Sor Juana interrogates the intellectual paradoxes, ecstasies, and sufferings of romantic love.
Thematic Synthesis of Epigraphs:
The pairing of Spillers and Rihanna highlights how dominant colonial societies construct marginalized figures—the Black mother, the violent or primitive Indigenous subject—to stabilize their own identities.
Rihanna's rhetorical question functions as a defiant reclamation of a racial slur, transforming a tool of degradation into an assertion of agency.
The continued physical and cultural existence of Indigenous and racialized peoples disrupts the foundational myth of the United States: an ongoing settler-colonial state cannot claim the moral authority of a liberated, postcolonial democracy.
Intersections of Love, Violence, and "My Brother's Bullet"
Representational Pitfalls of Indigenous Peoples:
American cultural iconography typically traps Indigenous peoples in binary narratives of violence:
Historical Cartoons/Westerns: Depicted as brutal, uncivilized aggressors threatening white settlers.
Contemporary Pathologizing: Portrayed almost exclusively as passive victims enduring poverty, substance abuse, and physical trauma.
Following the 2020 publication of Postcolonial Love Poem, Diaz noted that critics praised the book yet framed it as an accounting of violence against Native bodies. Diaz countered that the driving intention was to write about the myriad forms of love.
The artistic challenge of the collection is to represent queer love, desire, and beauty without ignoring or sanitizing structural and physical violence.
Textual Recitation and Close Reading of "My Brother's Bullet":
Ballistic Geometry: "My brother's bullet is a head. It's all geometry. From a distance, it's just a bee and its sting. Like a bee, you should see my brother's bullet make a comb by chewing holes in what is sweet." Ballistics are transformed into natural insect life, turning destructive metal into an organic entity building a hive inside tissue.
Domestic Intimacy with Violence: "My brothers lose their bullet all the time. When their bullet takes off, I'm gonna go eat coal. My brothers search their houses, their bodies for their bullet, and a little red ghost moans. Eventually, my brother calls out, here, bullet. Here. The bullet comes running buzzing. Their bullet always comes back to them. When the bullet comes back to them, their bullet leaves holes."
Personification of the Projectile: "My brothers are too slow for their bullet because their bullet is in a hurry and wants to get delivered. My brother's bullet is dressed for a red carpet in a copper jacket. My brothers tell their bullet, carefully don't hurt somebody with all that flash." The metal casing is characterized as glamorous formal attire ("copper jacket").
Eroticized Closeness and Ritual: "My brothers kiss their bullet in a dark cul de sac in front of the corner store ice machine in the passenger seat of their car on a strobe lighted dance floor. My brother's bullet kisses them back. My brothers break and dance with their bullet. The jerk, the stanky leg, they pop, lock, and drop for their bullet." The physical threat is embraced in communal spaces, street corners, and popular dances.
Subverted Allegiance: "My brothers never call the cops on their bullet. Instead, pledge allegiance to the bullet with hands over their hearts and stomachs and throats. My brothers say they would die for their bullet. If my brothers die, their bullet would be lost. If my brothers die, there's no bullet to begin with. The bullet is for living blood."
Sacrificial Pagan Imagery: "My brothers feed the bullet the way the bulls fed Zeus burning on a pyre, their own thigh bones black to the black. My brothers take a knee, bow against the asphalt, prostrate on the concrete of the bullet. We wouldn't go so far as to call our bullet a prophet, my brothers say. But…"
The poem tracks the fatal intimacy between young men and systemic violence, using ritualistic, mythological, and erotic language to illustrate how violence becomes integrated into daily survival.
Questions & Discussion
Healing Gemstones and Forgotten Medicine:
Prompt: The poem states that bloodstones cure snakebites and stop bleeding, but most people forgot this when the war ended. What does this transition suggest about post-war realities?
Response: The passage suggests that once formal warfare concluded, people forgot traditional methods of healing. Humanity moved toward a ruined state where the ability to recover from trauma was lost in the immediate aftermath of violence.
Interpretation of "Ever Blooming Wounds":
Prompt: What does the phrase "these ever blooming wounds" signify within line 20 of the text?
Response: The image connects open, wounded flesh with botanical growth. Wounds do not simply close or disappear; they remain open and active, continuing to produce historical and bodily consequences like living blossoms.
Lexical Clarification of "Lapidary" and "Jasper":
Prompt: What are the formal definitions of a lapidary and a jasper?
Response: A lapidary is a craftsman who cuts, polishes, and engraves gemstones. A jasper is an opaque variety of quartz stone characterized by rich red, brown, and green mineral patterns.
Linguistic Categorization of Mixed Diction:
Prompt: What critical term describes the simultaneous presence of everyday vernacular and elevated or technical language within a single poetic text?
Response: Mixed registers.
Formal Dimensions of the Poem:
Prompt: How should readers characterize the physical form and lineation of "Postcolonial Love Poem"?
Response (Morgan): The form can be characterized as "sticky." It avoids stanzaic breaks, operating as a continuous, dense block of text marked by heavy internal punctuation (em dashes, colons, commas). This continuous structure mirrors diluvial imagery, evoking a rushing flood that refuses to stop and reinforces the sense of an unending war.
The Postcolonial Paradox in the Title:
Prompt: What does the title Postcolonial Love Poem imply about the state of love in a postcolonial world?
Response: It fundamentally challenges the presumption that a postcolonial world exists. The poem shows that love persists despite the absence of true decolonization, functioning as a surviving human force even while the structural conditions for collective healing remain unachieved.
Contemporary Resonance of Monkman's Painting:
Prompt: What contemporary imagery does Kent Monkman's canvas invoke alongside its classical references?
Response: The boat overfilled with diverse subjects invokes modern images of migrant boats navigating maritime crossings, presenting Indigenous figures as sources of sanctuary and salvation.
The Conceptual Alliance of Spillers and Rihanna:
Prompt: How do the epigraphs from Hortense Spillers and Rihanna interact conceptually?
Response (Katie & Morgan): Both address how the American nation creates and exploits marginalized identities to define its own normative boundaries. Spillers shows how the state requires the figure of the Black mother to assign blame for systemic dysfunction. Rihanna's question—"Didn't they tell you that I was savage?"—addresses the slur of "savagery" used to justify colonial domination, reclaiming that violent categorization into a tool of personal power and defiance that destabilizes the myth of American innocence.