Natalie Diaz Interview by Dora Malech This conversation was conducted virtually on February 10, 2021, the day after Natalie Diaz’s virtual reading as Albert Dowling Visiting Writer in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. It has been edited for length and clarity. Dora Malech: In some ways, this conversation is a continuation of a conversation that began last night with your beautiful reading from your new book Postcolonial Love Poem, which just came out from Graywolf Press last year. In thinking about your books and writing and all that you have also accomplished as an athlete and as a language activist and preservationist and as a teacher of writing, I started thinking about that little word “and.” That little, tiny word that is so capacious and holds so much weight in your work. I wanted to start with this “and,” as I’m struck by how Postcolonial Love Poem navigates and blurs perceived or assumed boundaries between public and private discourse, between the sensual and the social, between self and other, between the lived and the imagined, between the body and the natural world. Can you speak to this blurring of perceived or assumed boundaries or borders? For example, in a poem like “These Hands, If Not Gods,” you say, “O, the beautiful making they do— / of trigger and carve, suffering and stars—,” and last night you were talking about the question of repetition and the role of repetition in your work, and so I suppose my initial question about blurring of boundaries and your more explicit speaking yesterday on repetition made me want to ask you a little bit more about whether you see this “and,” this capaciousness, as a way of seeing or being—as [End Page 360] political, personal, cultural, a poetics, all of the above—and how it comes to play for you in terms of process. Natalie Diaz: It’s such an incredible little word, right? And I think there’s something impossible about it, because it’s asking you to be many or to be more. It’s asking you, even physically, to hold more than one thing. But I think—I feel—so many of us are more multiple than the languages we have cultivated have allowed us to be. I think language is extremely prophetic, and so you say, and suddenly those things happen, or you say, and you may well be closer to doing, or you’ve done something that you suddenly need to find language for so that it can be done again. And I’m so many things, and I think often I’m considered this and this and this, largely because I’m “raced.” I am Native, which immediately means I’m something other than American, and then I’m also Mexican and Spanish, and then suddenly we bring in how I sleep with people, so suddenly I am queer. We have so many ways that we’re asking ourselves to be, and there’s a certain stillness that I feel is necessary to disrupt. A word I really love is “unpinnable”—to be unpinnable, to not be still. And even stillness is still moving. It’s still full of a kind of energy. For me, language is already in that state. I think we have been slowed in a lot of moments to be linear, when I actually don’t think linearity exists—and you know I’m a pretty strongly narrative poet in some moments. So, when you ask about the political, the personal, in some ways just my very existence is that I will always be political. There’s nothing else I can do as a Native within my own occupied country. And yet I also think it’s more. I don’t think it’s identity politics at all, and that’s what I think is so beautiful about language, is that it does have a capacity that we will never fully uncover, and so, who might I be, what might I do, what is yet undone within the scope of that language. And the “and” itself, I think it exists on a plane, so it isn’t necessarily binary this-and...