It was a joy to have Natalie Diaz on the show, drawing vital connections between basketball, dance, poetry, discovery and love. How to let poetry belong to more people; how writing can clarify "what you mean, and what you want"; how loving is sometimes easier on the page -- these are among the themes of our conversation with Diaz. She also shares about the creation of her latest collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, touches on her private work of language revitalization, and models speaking of and from the heart.
Author Bio
Natalie Diaz was born and raised on the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. Her most recent collection, Postcolonial Love Poem,was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, as well as a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Diaz teaches at the Arizona State University Creative Writing MFA program.
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[00:00:00] Dwayne Betts: There's somebody in like, you know, Sydney, Australia right now with a book in their hand is thinking about the world. Along the same lines of the conversation that we're having.
[00:00:12] Jason Reynolds: It's literally us manipulating and maneuvering 26 letters into different arrangements that might just liberate somebody.
[00:00:21] Miriam Toews: Literacy is is freedom.
[00:00:25] Betts: And so, so many people was yelling, you know, and it was wild to me. I was like, this is literature right here. You know what I mean was like, I was like, this is the importance of books. You're listening to The Freedom Takes, a podcast from the Million Book Project. I'm your host Reginald, Dwayne Betts.
I'm a poet. I'm a lawyer. And, uh, I remember what it means to be in prison and need a book and need the voice of author to carry you home.
[00:00:55] Elsa Hardy: And I'm Elsa Hardy. I'm both a law student and a PhD student in African-American studies. I work with Dwayne and the team on the million book project.
[00:01:04] Betts: On this show, we talk to authors of books we are sending in to readers in prisons, across the country about their creative work and what inspires them and about what it means to be free. Today we are honored truly, truly honored to have Natalie Diaz. Diaz's first poetry collection. "When my brother was an Aztec" was published by Copper Canyon Press
Shout out to Copper Canyon Press. They wanted a few publications. The few presses that I bought books from when I was in prison, I think I got Neruda from them. But Diaz is also the author of the most recent "Postcolonial Love Poem", a beautiful, beautiful collection published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is a legit certified genius.
It is not me who said it, it is the MacArthur foundation. Although, honestly, I said it first. She also teaches at Arizona State University and the MFA program and was born and raised in a Fort Mojave Indian village in Needles, California on the banks of the Colorado river. She's Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian tribe.
[00:02:07] Natalie Diaz: Gracias, for having me, um,
[00:02:11] Hardy: So Natalie, a lot of people in prison never have the opportunity to hear directly from authors. And as we know, reading independently is really different from the experience of hearing a writer's words in their own voice. Some of our listeners will have read your book and some won't have. So could you introduce "Postcolonial Love Poem" for our listeners who haven't read it and read a little bit from it?
[00:02:31] Diaz: Yeah, definitely. Um, "Postcolonial Love Poem" is, um, in some ways it's a demand for love. I think for people like me, for people like, uh, the people who I love. Um, it's also very much engaged in, in land and home and all of the places that we make home. Um, I engage a lot with country and nation and with what that means being, you know, Mexican, um, being native, being queer, having family who've been impacted in many ways by, uh, all of the different modes of, of carcerality.
And it's also very much a celebration of love that that still happens. Um, I played basketball in college. That basketball is what, um, gave me an invitation to leave my reservation. And so, uh, basketball was always important. So I'm gonna read a couple poems about basketball. Basketball is also part of my relationship with Dwayne, um, whose work has been extremely important to, to my family.
And then I'm going to read a poem about, uh, a kind of, uh, goodness that I think, um, America has set us up to, to fail at a kind of American goodness. So I'm going to start with the, with the basketball poems, um, "Run and gun. I learned to play ball on the res on outdoor courts where the sky was our ceiling. Only a tribal kid shot has an arch made of sky.
We balled and the res park against a tag back board with the chain for a net where I watched a Walla pie boy from peach Springs, dunk the ball and a pair of flip-flops and slip on the slick, concrete to land on his wrist. His radius fractured and ripped up through his skin like a tusk. Which didn't stop him from pumping his other still beautiful arm into the air and yelling, 'yeah. Clyde, the glide mother fuckers' before some adults sped him off to the emergency room. I ran games in the abandoned school yard with an eight foot fence we had to hop. Where I tore so many pairs of shorts on the top spikes and where when my little brother got snagged, trying to climb down, my cousin and I let him hang by the waistband of his underwear for an entire game of 11.
And if that cousin hadn't overdosed on heroin a few years later, he might've proved us right and been the first res jump man. I got run by my older brother on our slanted driveway. The same brother I write about now who taught me that there is nothing easy in our desert. Who blocked every shot I ever took against him until I was about 12 years old. By then his addictions had stolen his game, while I found mine.
I learned the game with my brothers and cousins, with my friends and enemies. We had jacked up shoes and mismatched socks. Our knees were scabbed and we licked our lips chapped. We were small, but we learned to play big enough to beat the bigger older white kids at the rec center on the Hill, which to get to we crossed underneath the I-40 freeway across the train tracks and through a big Sandy wash. We played bigger and bigger until we began winning.
And we won by doing what all Indians before us had done against their bigger, whiter opponents. We became coyotes and rivers and we ran faster than their fancy kicks could up and down the court game after game. We became the weather. We blew by them. We rained buckets. We lit up the gym with our moves. We learned something more important than fist.
At least at that age, we learned to make guns of our hands and we pulled the trigger on jumpers all damn day. And when they talked about the way we played, they called it run and gun, and it made them tired before they ever stepped on the court. Just thinking about a pickup game against us, made the white boys from the junior high and high school teams go to sleep.
And while they slept, we played our dreams." Basketball is still one of the ways my brother and I have been closest, my brother who has, uh, you know, been in and out of, um, the prison systems here. You know, it's always difficult to write about family or, uh, you know, to write about family and deal with things like guilt or do, uh, you know, whose story is this to tell.
And in some ways, the way I, the way I approach, writing these poems or writing about family, and my brother in particular is that I've realized that sometimes I can love my brother best on the page and I can love him in a way that's so much harder to love him sometimes in real life. So in some ways I think of, when my brother appears in a poem, I think of it as a way of holding him
The Mustangs. "In another life. My older brother was a beautiful muscular boy who could jump from a standing position to grab a miss shot, right from the rim. And either hit a weighting outlet on a fast break or spring, back up and drop it through the net for an easy two points. He had thin ankles, long lean legs with high calf muscles, balled tight like fists and split like upside down hearts. Runners legs. Jumpers legs. Indian legs.
He also had the upper body of a Mojave man wide chested, broad shoulders, arms and hands that hung down near his knees. Like slingshots is what my mother says. Meaning he is a fighter. He played varsity basketball for our small town high school, the Needles Mustangs. They were Royal blue and white. A bright blue Mustang was painted on the front of the gymnasium, another inside against the brick wall and a third and a circle on the wooden middle half court.
Mustangs. I associate them with basketball. I have felt them in me. Hooves rumbling, like weather in my ears and sternum. Jolts of muscle, like bolts in my throat. The way my brother must have felt those herds stampeding his veins in those years and done his best to break them. I love my brother best in memory, such as this one, I sat in the rattling bleachers of the Needles, Mustang gymnasium with my mother, my father, and all of my siblings, watching my brother run out to the warmup song, Thunderstruck by AC DC.
It begins with an unhinged chant like yo followed by the strike of the word thunder and then thunder struck. The word thunder is growled 15 times followed by 19 war cried versions of thunderstruck. Dressed in Mustang, blue tearaway, warm-up pants and shirts, my brother and his teammates, some of whom were from our reservation, were all glide and finesse.
Their high tops barely touched the floor. They circled the court twice before crossing it and moving into a layup drill, while thunder struck field, the gymnasium, they were all the things they could ever be. They were young Kings and conquerors. To that song they made lay up after layup. Passed the ball, like a planet between them. Pulled it back and forth from the floor to their hands like Mars. Thunder struck, played so loudly that I couldn't hear what my mother hollered to cheer my brother. I could only see her mouth opening and closing. I was 10 years old and realized right there on those bleachers thundering, like guns that this game had the power to quiet what seems so loud in us.
That it might have the power to set the fantastic beasts trampling our hearts loose. I saw it in my mother, in my brother in those wild boys. We ran up and down the length of our lives. All of us lit by the lights of the gym toward freedom. We Mustangs. On those nights, we were forgiven for all we would ever do wrong.
And then this last one for me, feels really important to the collection, to me. I also feel it, Dwayne, when I'm reading from Felon, this idea of goodness that we've been given that. Uh, that America has placed on so many of us. And it's a, it's a trap in some ways it's, uh, you know, all of these rules that say, this is what it means to be good when those rules or those structures have been set up so that we'll never achieve that.
And so this poem to me, feels essential. Uh, it also samples from two songs. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs you'll hear that in the poem. And then, uh, Beyonce who also sampled the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song, uh, Maps.
"They don't love you like, I love you. My mother said this to me long before Beyonce lifted the lyrics from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. And what my mother meant by don't stray was that she knew all about it.
The way it feels to need someone to love you. Someone not your kind. Someone white. Someone, some many who live because so many of mine have not. And further live on top of those of ours who don't. I'll say, say, say, I'll say, say, say, what is the United States if not a clot of clouds. If not spilled milk or blood. If not the place we once were in the millions.
America is maps. Maps are ghosts: white and layered with people and places I see through. My mother has always known best. Knew that I'd been begging for them to lay my face against their white laps to be held in something more than the loud light of their projectors. As they flicker themselves, sepia or blue all over my body.
All this time I thought my mother said, 'wait,' as in, give them a little more time to know your worth. When really she said, 'weight', meaning heft preparing me for the yoke of myself, the beast of my country's burdens, which is less worse than my country's plough. Yes, when my mother said they don't love you, like, I love you, she meant 'Natalie that doesn't mean you aren't good."
[00:13:00] Betts: Yeah. Those poems are so, so good. Um, particularly the basketball joints, I feel like, um, I feel like it's a way in which a few of the things we write guarantee that people hear us. And every time I hear you talk about basketball, I feel like you, like it's, it's like a building a bridge to to the bigger conversation.
[00:13:21] Diaz: Yeah. I think a lot about touch and like how, uh, like basketball is that. You know? Like basketball is that relationship of touch. It's like it's, and it's also a place where we can trust ourselves the most in some ways, like I trust my body the most on a court, you know, I learned to trust my body on a court, like it's strength, it's its ability to like, uh, to think quickly, you know, up against somebody else, you know, uh, pushing back.
[00:13:50] Hardy: I read somewhere. You said that you think poetry should belong to more people. So I was wondering, how did you find your way to poetry and also what might it look like for poetry to belong to more people?
[00:14:01] Diaz: Poetry for me, I think first is just, um, attention to language and it's understanding the power of language, you know, it's, we can remember all of the things people have said to us that have hurt us, no matter how far away they happened.
Um, And at the same time, we also know what it feels like to hear someone who loves you call your name. Our days are so busy. Our lives are so structured and so controlled by certain mechanisms that sometimes we don't have this- what is a luxury to appreciate language in that way. Um, however, I don't think it should be a luxury, right?
It should be in the hands of more people because we're all storytellers in some way. Um, for me, I came to poetry through basketball. Uh, poetry, like all language for me is very physical. I think about the way it makes my body feel when I hear certain words or when people are talking to me or when I hear a story, you know. I had a major knee injury that stopped me from playing basketball, that diverted me to poetry. So I came very late to it. I mean, for a long time, the Academy has told us that poetry belongs to them, but it belonged to all of our peoples long before that. Thinking about like what the first stories we heard were, whether they were ghost stories or gossip or teasing, you know, or mythology.
[00:15:28] Betts: That's interesting. Cause I, I asked myself too, what does it mean for poetry to belong to more people. And Elsa, I remember, cause I came to poetry in prison, but I remember the first poem that hit me. It was, um, it was a poem by, um, Lucille Clifton and she says something like 'every day, something has tried to kill me and has failed.'
And it was sort of just so, exact, or like [laughs] or like Derek Walcott. I'ma I'ma, read this poem just because I want you to hear this. It's in this poem called The Schooner Flight. I've been on a schooner too, um, this summer. A schooner's like a boat. It's like a giant sailboat kind of thing. And we went to Maine and I jumped on a schooner and it, it was really fun.
I kept, I kept asking the captain. I was like, have you ever read The Schooner Flight? He was looking at me like I was a damn fool. I was like, a poem! He just had no clue what I was talking about. And my son was like, "you're embarrassing uDad". [Laughs] So it's interesting cause you say like poems or stories and some stories are complicated, but I just want you to hear this line cause I, I know like everybody gets it. He says, uh, "I know these islands from Monos to Nassau. A rusty head sailor with sea green eyes that they nicknamed Shabine. The patois for any red nigger and I, Shabine, saw when these slums of empire was paradise. I'm just a red nigga who loved the sea. I had a sound colonial education. I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I'm nobody or I'm a nation."
And I don't even care what the rest of the poem means that line: "either I'm nobody or I'm a nation" is like if I was a person that was willing to have more than four tattoos, I would have that tattooed on me somewhere. Cause I feel like it's just this permission to, to claim space in a poem in a concise way that sometimes it's hard is hard for a story to do.
[00:17:33] Diaz: Yeah. And they claim, I think we're denied lineage, right? Like so many of us are denied lineage because our lineage is what we think of as history. So we become all of these stories our own nation has told us about ourselves. And the danger of that is like that prophecy. Right? It's like, I somehow become the things they've told me I am. And there's a certain limitation in that. And so that, that Walcott line, "I'm nobody, or I'm a nation," like imagine the nation of stories we each are. Right. I mean, one of the most powerful things about story and poetry, I think is that you have the choice of when to tell it. Even now, like Walcott, like thinking about, uh, "in these slums of empire is paradise."
I'm on the res right now, and there's no place that I, I feel more at home that I feel more myself, that I feel more connected and it's, it's not always an easy love, but it's a, it's a paradise. And I think that's something that, that feels really powerful too, about poetry, uh, using, you know, what you just brought up, uh, Derek Walcott's poem is that I can make my own paradise in it, even when I'm talking about something that's painful, you know? It's still reminding myself, Hey, I still deserve good things. Might not know how to get to them right now, or they might be hard to get to, but I deserve them still.
[00:18:56] Hardy: In terms of reading a poem, what is the best way you think to sit with a poem so you really feel it?
[00:19:05] Diaz: I like to read poems out loud. For me, just, reading them aloud over and over again, and letting those words become something more than just the page. People are always comparing poetry to, to song or to prayer or to.. you know...
[00:19:21] Betts: Elsa's smiling because I did that yesterday. [Laughs]
[00:19:24] Diaz: Yeah.
[00:19:25] Hardy: Well it's yeah, I was talking to Dwayne about like, just how anxious I feel when I'm reading poetry, because I feel like there's something I'm supposed to get that I'm not getting.
And I was telling him my grandmother was a modern dancer and I always go see Alvin Ailey kind of as like a little Memorial to her every year. And I always bring a different friend. And I went one time with this friend who was like, so she was just like paralyzed with anxiety during the performance that she she wasn't getting it. And I was so like taken aback by that because I was like, there's nothing to get. Like you just let it wash over you, and sometimes there'll be a beautiful moment sometimes, you know, there'll be something you don't like, and that's okay. And Dwayne was like, "well, well poems are like songs."
And the thing about songs is that we listened to them over and over again. And over the course of listening to them over and over again, we get a sense of what they're about. But usually with poems, we'll read them once and be like, Oh, that was weird. Or I didn't get that. Or, you know, whatever, and then never revisit it.
And, and that's, you know, why do we do that? But with dance, you usually only see it once too.
[00:20:32] Diaz: Yeah well, it's interesting thinking about dance because the language is so similar, right? Um, you know, when you, when a dancer makes a move or a gesture, it's called a phrase. And so I'm really fascinated by that because it feels like where, like, no matter what the art form is, there's a physicality to it.
Sometimes we focus so much on the product and that's, I think where that idea of like, I need to know what it means, you know? And. In some ways I think to go backwards and reverse a little bit and to think just about what the feeling is. Like for me, I love language. Um, and part of it as I love language, because I come from a language that, that this country intentionally tried to silence.
So I know that my Mojave language, which we have two speakers of now, and I work with those people, uh, with my elders and my teachers on, you know, with that language. And so for me, I guess I, I'm lucky in a way that I'm also unlucky. I'm unlucky my languages is, uh, is so quiet right now. And I'm also lucky because it's made me learn to appreciate not what things mean, but how they feel.
Um, and, and what the difference is between those things. I think, you know, it kinda lets you join your mind with your body, that they're not separate. They're the same. And that's, I think where poetry is really, really beautiful, whether you're screaming it or singing it or whispering it, um, in some ways it's, uh, you get to be.
Yeah, I guess it's that idea that I'm more myself when I'm like reading poems aloud, but I'm also less myself in ways that make me a little bit freer. I think.
[00:22:16] Hardy: Dwayne had mentioned your work around language preservation. And so I was wondering if you produce scholarship around that project, in addition to your poetry, or like how you find different ways to communicate with different audiences.
[00:22:30] Diaz: Yeah, my language work, it's really intimate work. And for me, the work that I do do with my community, um, it stays in my community. I th- I feel like that'ssomething that's really important, um, is that there are some. There are some knowledges that are not for other people, they're just for us. And I don't mean in like a coded sort of way, but I mean, in that intimate, private way.
And so most of the work I do, I record a lot of songs. Um, I record a lot of older stories. I, I record songs that aren't meant for the public. Um, and I do that so that my elders can try to teach younger people. Um, but I, I try really hard to not make my Mojave language, speak English. Um, and so I try to keep it really close. In.. so, I mean, I'm keeping it close to my own self and my own heart, and I'm also like keeping it close to my community. And in some ways I probably won't ever do any, any work on the page. That's no poems, no stories that are more important than the language work I'm doing, you know, with my elders. So it's really lucky work.
[00:23:39] Betts: That's actually fascinating because one. I don't think I fully understood the work that you do with language. And I still think I don't, but now I feel satisfied in my ignorance. And I remember when, when, when Miles was working on the project, you know, one of the things that when he interviewed you, one of the things that he was trying to figure out.
So, so Elsa, um, my son, Nate, they do a project every year about, about, um, like Native Americans. And so Myles had, I said, Myles, you got to do the Mojave. And he was like, "Why? You always telling me what to do."
[00:24:10] Diaz: Cause we're great warriors. [Laughs]
[00:24:12] Betts: Well, naw, see I should have said that, but I was like, not, it wouldn't have worked though. What worked was I said, "Oh, cause they ball players." He was like, "they ball players?" I was like, "yeah, you know, my friend Natalie." And uh, and so anyway, he, he did it and it was interesting 'cause back to language, what really pulled him in that, that shocked him was, was the notion that like y'all play ball. Like he plays ball and it was the language that was, that was actually meant to allow us to communicate with each other. And I think it's something that's, that's like soulful about being able to recognize what language is private. I think most of us have, have no real privacy. And I, you know, I'm thinking about my boys in prison, um, and in a world that we share, I don't know.
I don't know if there's a name for that thing and because there's no name for it, I don't know if there's a way to really articulate, the privacy at all, you know, sadly.
[00:25:09] Diaz: Yeah.
[00:25:10] Betts: I want to read one of your poems to you. Um, cause I'd never get to be read people's poems to them.
[00:25:16] Diaz: [Laughs]
[00:25:16] Betts: And so I'm always struck by, by your love poems, but partly because it's, it's like real joy in it, you know?
And, um, I read, I read something it's Res, you know, and, and, um, and it was just cool. You know, it was just like cool to-to borrow your words for a minute and then clothe myself in it. So, um, right let me read this poem to ya'll. "These hands, if not Gods haven't they moved like rivers, like glory, like light over the seven days of your body.
And wasn't that good? Them at your hips. Isn't this what God felt when he pressed together the first beloved. Everything. Fever, vapor, atmun, pulsus. Finally a sin worth hurting for. A fervor, a sweet you are mine. It is hard not to have faith in this from the blue Brown clay of night, these two potters crushed and smoothed you into being.
Grind then curve, built your form up Atlas of bone, fields of muscle, one breast, the fig tree, the other, a Nightingale. Both morning and evening. Oh, the beautiful making they do, of trigger and carve suffering and stars. Aren't they, too, the dark carpenters of your small church. Have they not burned on the altar of your belly, eaten the bread of your thighs, broke you to wine, to ichor to nectareous feast? Haven't they riveted your wrists. Haven't they had you at your knees? And when these hands touched your throat, showed you how to take the apple and the rib. How to slip a thumb into your mouth and taste it all. Didn't you sing out there nintey-nine names? So here I left hands-time-seven, Sphinx, Leonids, locomotura, Rubidium, August and September.
And when you cried out, Oh, Prometheans didn't they bring fire? These hands, if not God's, then why, when you have come to me and I have returned you to that from what you came, bright mud, mineral salt. Why then do you whisper? Oh my Hecatonchire, my Centimani, my hundred handed one?
I ain't going front, Terese was like, "I don't really know, exactly what that poem means." And I was like, "I don't either, but doesn't it make, I mean, it makes me want to touch you though, right?" I mean, that's like the point and, um, it was like a cool conversation that, that, that, that me and her were having about, um, like what do you get from a poem?
And, um, and I I wonder, what pushes you to, to, to write these, um, you know, Post-Colonial Love Poem and a lot of the poems are really, really political, but what pushes you to, infuse so much of this work with a tenderness, um, and a love amidst, the landscape of really, um, really ruins, you know, some of, some of the landscape that you cover here is just like really ruinous. But not that.
[00:28:44] Diaz: Yeah, I think, I mean, part of it is just that I really don't want to keep writing only against something only against what's held us back or pressed on us or hurt us or wounded us. And so for me, part of that is I, in some ways I'm imagining backward to like who my people were before, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
But also I'm also imagining forward about what, what might be waiting for me up ahead, still of, of who I might be or what I might become. I talk a lot about story in poems. And sometimes that, I think that means like there's a narrative to it, but a poem like this, like I wanted it to be kind of like ecstatic.
Like how do you even explain desire? You know, how do you explain anger? And is there a difference between anger and desire? How do you explain like pleasure or tenderness? Like what language can you possibly use to tell somebody, uh, what you want or how you feel, um, or that moment, right before you, you touch something or someone.
And so for me, some of it is like just allowing myself to be a little bit drunk with language. Even like, you know, fever, vapor, atman, pulsus. Like I looked up those words and they were interesting to me.
[00:30:02] Betts: I'm so glad you said that. Cause I was like, I don't know what none of this shit means.
[00:30:07] Diaz: Well, I was trying to find, like I was trying to find a word that could mean like, God or breath. So, I mean, for me, the, one of the ways I write poetry is in the OED or Oxford English dictionary. And like, I spend a ton of time just in the dictionary looking at words like that's, that's where poetry starts for me is it's, it's not usually a poem. It's just words. I love words. I love them because I want to break him, you know, and like words are so, uh, they're so dangerous, right?
Because every word has in it, it's history from its beginning. And so all the bad things a word has ever done or been used for is still in that word. And yet I can take it and make it mean love or make it mean something of possibility for myself. Like even in that poem, these hands are not "if these hands, if not, God's" like I was imagining like every bad thing I've done has in some ways started with my hands. And yet every good thing I've done has also started with these same hands. So that's something I think a lot about is just like, what are all the small tendernesss is that, that I'm also holding alongside these other rougher rougher things.
[00:31:20] Hardy: It's interesting hearing you talk about starting from a dictionary. And it's interesting, Dwayne, that you're both a lawyer and a poet, because one of the strangest things to me about my first semester of law school is that like different Supreme court justices and more conservative leaning ones their, their, decision will completely hinge on the dictionary definition of one word, like even a small word, like "youths." Read these opinions and there's this kind of implication that words only have one meaning. And as if like use or use can only mean one thing. And it's just so blatantly not the case, but it's like lawyers really do try to use language in a way or in a different way than poets do, but kind of in the same vein. I don't know if you have thoughts about that, Dwayne.
[00:32:08] Betts: Yeah, I think, I think lawyers are liars generally speaking and I think poets are liars too. [laughs]
[00:32:14] Diaz: Well, language lies, right? Like it's so it's, it's funny because we use it as our main mode of communication and yet it's so, um, it's so imprecise.
[00:32:26] Betts: But I think what I, when I say that, I, I mean to say that both are trying to find ways to make language, do what it is they want, and that's why the people who, um, I think the people who are best at it, both as writers and the lawyers, they try to do it to, to, to do something that comes from the gut and to say something honest. Cause I, you know, I ultimately, I think the poem, I just read to you, it was like, um, Natalie mentioned her's it's been like, how do you, like, how do you illustrate desire with language? And I was like, how do you illustrate this?
Desperate love of another person with just words and it's, you know, and the words never really suffice. And I think that's what I was trying to animate in that poem is constant reaching, but acknowledgement that we have ways to say, we love everything. And for me to say, I love you. I got to use all of those ways.
[00:33:15] Diaz: And that one line that slipped in was like, uh, How do, how do I live closer to you that line? Like, so all this like kind of language and words of love and love, and then like that moment of truth hits, you know, like that moment, that's just like a real like needy.
[00:33:33] Betts: Yeah.
[00:33:35] Diaz: Yeah. Like desirous moment is like, how do I live closer to you?
Or how do I, I think that's like the beautiful thing that those kinds of catalogs and lists of language can arrive you at. Are those small moments of just where you surprise yourself with what you meant or what you want.
[00:33:52] Hardy: So I wanted to ask about American arithmetic at the beginning of the poem, you talk about how native Americans make up 0.8% of the population, and you have this line or this verse," but in an American room of 100 people, I am native American, less than one, less than whole. I am less than myself, only a fraction of a body. Let's say I am only a hand."
And I was thinking about, um, how statistics can never really tell the whole story. And like, in the context of Black history, I was thinking about, um, Khalil Muhammad book, The Condemnation of Blackness, where he talks about how statistics have also been weaponized, um, to kind of like prove this inherent Black criminality.
And so I was wondering what, what is that what you mean by American arithmetic? The way that statistics can never really tell the whole story or become weaponized or is there, is there more to it?
[00:34:49] Diaz: Yeah, I think a lot about statistics because that's one of the few ways that natives are known is that we have these very small statistics.
Yet those small statistics of course become larger when you're thinking per capita. COVID is a perfect example of that, that we're, you know, affected at a very high rate. But, but that those statistics erase our, our flesh persons, our flesh bodies and our desires and our fears and our families, and those statistics are how we're dealt with by government, by policymakers is we we aren't, we aren't persons at that level, we just become those statistics.
And so that was one of the things that I really wanted to question is "can I create a poem about love or about touch using statistics." Um, and what, what do I know that I have meant, or my brothers or sisters have meant of statistics in certain scenarios? Um, you know, I've lived in the Southwes, so when my brothers and sisters have been in prison, there's a population of, a native population that's present yet as I move across the country and like, you know, visiting folks in, uh, New York or in institutions there, I very rarely find native, native folks.
Um, but some of that, like what is the statistic? Is it that the government has once marked you as what you are, whether that's native or black or, or Mexican or Latino or Hispanic, all these different ways they mark us. And then what does that statistic mean of us and how do we work backward from it? You know, like what, what would happen if, if there were, instead of saying like, um, this many people are in the system or this many people have died, if we forced you to sit there and listen to every single one of their names and then to list every single one of their mother's names.
And all of the children they left. Like when my sister was in prison, um, you know, she was a number and her kids were at home. You know, she left four kids without their mother. No one is thinking about that when they're making policy that says you're not 10 years old, you can't visit your mother, you know?
And so I definitely wanted to work backwards and say, you know, after all these statistics, what if my last move in this poem is toward love or toward, uh, the body in a, in a different way.
[00:37:09] Betts: I'm just going to read the end of the poem, just so... because you've mentioned it. I want listeners to hear the end of the poem when you make that move.
"But in an American room of 100 people, I am native American, less than one, less than whole. I am less than myself, only a fraction of a body, let's say. I am only a hand. And when I slip it beneath the shirt of my lover, I disappear completely."
I think you got some fantastic turns in all of these poems and I just like, love reading it. And I love hearing you talk about your work in the becoming of a poet. Um, one thing I wanted to ask though is every time we talk, one of the things you say and it's cool, cause you were the first person to say this to me is, um, it's, "how's your heart doing?" And, and um, and I, I find it especially talking about incarceration and thinking about you know, friends of mine in prison now, friends who have come home and died. Um, friends who have come home and are struggling. And even when I was in prison, it is literally something that I never asked anybody. And it, it makes me a little sad because it makes me think about, um, everything I gave myself permission to do to other people.
And I gave myself permission to ignore when it was done to other people, was all under the auspices of not caring about how folks' around me heart was doing or even my own. I don't know. I just found that to be, uh, uh, something that's far more profoundly complicated than "how you doing," which, which literally has never in life gotten an honest answer.
You know, "how you doing? I'm good." [Laughs] You got one arm is hanging off cause it's bleeding. And they just got bit by a rattlesnake. "How you doing? I'm good."
[00:38:54] Diaz: Yeah. Yeah. It's um, I mean, that's like, it's, it's like a direct translation of Mojave. Um, and so we wouldn't ever ask you, like, "how are you" because we actually want to know, you know, like the quickness of language too sometimes, and how fast it's language is so fast, because it wants us to forget our bodies in one another.
Um, and I think, like you say Dwayne, like it's crazy because nobody ever answers that, you know, what, what would you do if you're like, "Hey, how are you doing?" And you're like, "well, actually, do you have a couple hours? Because I've been dealing with some really messed up things." Like nobody wants to stop and do that.
[00:39:32] Betts: I know
[00:39:32] Diaz: But there's a way that asking, uh, like how is your heart? Um, I feel like it, it's also giving you space to, to hurt. You know, like who goes through a day, not hurting. How, you can't really look up in the world without also hurting, uh, even in joyous moments, I think. And then you also can't, you know, when you're hurting, there are also joys that you can find somewhere, even if it's in the future or if it's far behind you in memory.
But like, for me, that, it feels important. And I, uh, I learned that in the Mojave language, like I say, and I actually didn't even know what the translation was, when I was younger. I just knew that that was the way you approached one another and greeted one another. And then, you know, what's strange is in Mojave culture, when you ask that, like, how is your heart, you also get a direct answer. So there's an immediate relationship of time that's very different. It's saying like, "I actually care about how you're doing" and, and always the replies um, they go in a kind of order. It's like, we talk about what we dreamed. So you talk about your dreams and then you talk about your body and then you talk about like what you might do.
So there's like something of like, past, present, future happening all at once. Um, and I feel, I know when I say it to you, I feel good when I ask you. Like, it's one of those things that reaffirms you it's like reciprocal, right? Like when I ask you it's because I'm really thinking about you Dwayne, like, I'm wondering how you are. I'm wondering how the boys are doing, I'm wondering how Terese is doing. I'm wondering how your work is. I'm wondering if you're tired or if you're resting, you know, I'm wondering if you have something good to drink. Not some of that cheap stuff .
[00:41:13] Betts: I keep some good to drink too. This is, this is COVID. The COVID, COVID and pandemic, is it like I simply have just up to the base game. I haven't figured out how to mix anything. So I just drink better whiskey.
[00:41:26] Hardy: Well, we usually ask the same question to all of our guests to close out. So Frederick Douglas said that when we read, we become forever free and we would love to hear what, if anything that means to you?
[00:41:40] Diaz: Yeah, I think, I think, I think about free in a different, in a different way. I think one just being indigenous and being native, I think there is something about freedom that I want to support for, for people who want freedom. And I think there's something maybe that I'm looking for. That's a little bit further back. I guess the way I think about freedom is relationship and kinship.
And I think that's why I used some of the language that I do because I'm trying to move backward and make sure I can find me or my family or the people I love and in every language and every word. And so when I read texts, I think that's what I'm doing. I'm, I'm looking for for ways that we can exist in those spaces or have existed.
I mean, I think that's something that's really important too, when we're reading, especially I think reading authors of color and reading our elders, like thinking of the folks who like, who are your elders and, you know, who've written because I think that they, they found ways that even if they don't match what I think freedom might be, or kinship might be, they were finding ways to do it.
And, uh, and so I guess if I had to, to be a little bit more succinct, when I think of that we become free. I think there's also something about we become, we become our ancestors in a way. You know, like we're, we're often just the descendants. So we're the descendants of what our ancestors endured or were the descendants of what was done to us.
But I think there's something really powerful in reading in that my imagination can be charged in a way that I am now tasked with imagining what comes next or imagining how things can be different. So maybe that's how I would, um, you know, be able to be in proximity to that really powerful, uh, quote from Douglass.
[00:43:29] Hardy: That was beautiful and very different from other answers we've gotten. I love it.
[00:43:33] Betts: It was. And Oh, and the other part about it is I'm doing this solo show and I talk about my dad a lot, and one of the things I realize I try to do is, it just came from you too, because Natalie went to ODU. And, um, and so my dad went to ODU and I was just trying to be closer to you, which is funny, right?
Like I spent like hours and hours on the internet trying to find evidence that my dad went to ODU and this is 1978. So he went there the year you were born, you know what I mean? And I, um, and I found like a scrapbook from a yearbook from 1978 that had his name and it was "wow" how, like ecstatic, I was to have some evidence that he had been the ODU and it was cause I could place a part of his narrative in his story, like just outside of, you know, the suffering, you know? But yeah.
[00:44:19] Diaz: It's crazy too. Cause we say, we say those things are dreamed here. It's not fate or destiny, but what's crazy is that. Somewhere, someone knew your father would be there. And they also knew that I would be behind in some way. So I encountered your father first, even though he wasn't there and then I encountered you.
[00:44:42] Betts: Right.
[00:44:42] Diaz: And like, then it all spins backward. It's strange. It's strange to try to explain, but, but in the ways that we've been taught to think like those things are all connected. You know, like I, there, there wouldn't have been a me right now that wasn't connected to you, Dwayne. Because like that had been like dreamed before. And what's even stranger is that not only were the people who came before me dreaming this life for me, but I was also in some way, which is why it's almost like why I can recognize you and why I can like love you and your work and stuff. And so. Yeah, it's kind of now we're getting like dream catcher-y but... [Laughs]
[00:45:22] Betts: Nah well, I love you too. And next time we'll have to talk about dreams. Uh, but thank you, Natalie. Truly. It's always a pleasure.
[00:45:28] Diaz: No, gracias.
[00:45:29] Hardy: Thank you so much.
[00:45:30] Diaz: Yeah, changed my day to talk with you all so I really appreciate it. But I'm wishing you all good things and love and health and we'll talk soon.
[00:45:36] Betts: And the same. Take care of your heart.
Thanks for joining us for The Freedom Takes. The new podcast from the Million Book Project. We'll be back next time with another contemporary writer. You can find out more about the Million Book Project and subscribe to our newsletter at million book project dot org. Our initiative was made possible by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.
This podcast was produced by Erin Slomski-Pritz with production and research assistance from Elsa Hardy, Tess Wheelwright, and Molly Aunger. Theme music by Reed Turchi.