Throughout his career, Paul Holdengräber has chronicled the times we live in by interviewing artists who broaden our sense of creative life. This work continued through the start of the pandemic with The Quarantine Tapes, which he hosted for two years, documenting what was occupying the attentions of writers, musicians, and thinkers. On June 11, 2020, he phoned poet and scholar Natalie Diaz.
Though neither could know it then, one year later, Diaz would win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her second collection, Postcolonial Love Poem. This book is an “anthem of desire against erasure”; it paints the body as an “ecstatic state of energy” integrated with water, air, and land. When Postcolonial Love Poem debuted in March 2020, it was heralded as “one of the most important poetry releases in years.”
Diaz is a member of the Gila River Indian Tribe (Akimel O’odham). She is the founding director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. She resides in Phoenix, Arizona, but in June 2020, Diaz was in Fort Mojave, back in her homelands in Mojave Territory.
It is a love for people, land, and language that propels Natalie Diaz’s work, and we are witness to a taste of that love in the following conversation.
— Orly Zebak
Paul Holdengräber: Natalie, you once said, “It’s not that I don’t understand what identity means or how it functions, but I am imagining ways to become unpinnable.” In this moment, how are you thinking about what it means to be unpinnable?
Natalie Diaz: I think of my life and my days and my hours in terms of sensualities, and I think about the different sensualities in my day. One of those has become, more so than ever, technology—meaning an extension of the body or a way to connect or carry one body to another. I think language is a technology. Right now the census is happening. We have all of these modes of surveillance, and a lot of the surveillance technologies deployed across the globe began or are tested or are first imagined in the desert, ours being one of those deserts, down in Tucson. I’m thinking a lot about what it means to simply be a body and how I’m trying to subvert or resist simply being a body. I’m a little skeptical of the census, so how do I keep myself from mattering in that way or becoming that kind of matter? A lot of that has to do with returning to my land, thinking about life being beyond human life, thinking about my relationship to my beloveds, my friends, my family, my partner, strangers, but thinking of those connections as energetic ones. Those are some of the ways I’ve tried to not let myself become static in any particular category.
Holdengräber: When you use the word sensualities, what do you mean? It’s so resonant for me when I hear you say it. It makes me think of many things, which I’ll bring up in a moment, but tell me.
Diaz: We grew up in American education, which hammers you with the five senses. It’s as if these five senses are what being alive means, but many of our cultures are well beyond five senses. What is sight? That can easily be fractured a million times. And how is sight actually different than the ear? When I’m hearing words and somehow those words physically touch my ear, they create electrical impulses that I’m able to see inside my head. I was always getting the senses wrong when teachers would ask us to “describe the smell, the taste, the touch,” because I couldn’t quite figure out how to slow them down enough to fit into one of those categories. I grew up being told I had synesthesia, but I’ve since realized it’s more than that. My sensuality is very much connected to the desert. I can feel electricity in the air. I can feel water or moisture. We know when storms are coming. We can read a cloud as if we’re almost touching it, so sensuality exists well beyond what I’m able to control or contain with language. My body is one small energetic blip in what is actually happening in connection to sense and energy between the air and the tree and the water and all these different elements.
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Holdengräber: I’m a quote-o-maniac by profession. Roland Barthes, in a wonderful passage from A Lover’s Discourse, writes that “language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”
Diaz: That’s a beautiful quote. I’ve come across it a couple times before, and that’s within the constellation of how I’ve learned to think and continually reorganize how I make sense of things, which is by connecting things. The Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin has been very meaningful for me in allowing the language to become a type of body. I think a lot about physics and about the electrons and photons and that some of these small pieces of us can sense light. What does it mean that my fingers can sense light? What does it mean that there are these electrical happenings that actually make up touch? Barthes is describing, in one way, what touch is in terms of physics.
Holdengräber: To be fascinated is to be touched at a distance, and we talk extensively about what it means to be touched by something, to be moved by something. We use these metaphors to explain how we feel, so it’s quite natural that when we speak, we bring our bodies. I am particularly touched by the grain of the voice. I’ve often said I don’t think I could fall in love with somebody whose voice I didn’t love. It’s so important.
Diaz: Voice is physical, but we’ve been taught it’s just something we hear. Friends who are deaf and friends with whom I’ve needed to speak into their hands—that’s the voice I become to them and how they know what I “sound like.” It is actually feeling. We’ve cut ourselves off from not necessarily our body, but the ways our body exists within much larger energies. The body is just one energy, just one technology for whatever is in us that’s moving, that’s happening.
Holdengräber: You’ve said, “Truth is a funny word in America. It is the thing I trust least (or maybe I trust ‘America’ and ‘truth’ equally, which is little).” What did you mean by that?
Diaz: We’re seeing a lot of that disruption right now.
Holdengräber: No kidding.
Diaz: One way I’m looking at truth is that it’s a way of being asleep. As soon as something becomes true, I quit asking questions of it. Truth is gathered, and when it becomes a solidified power, I question it. In terms of energy, truth has come to a standstill. There’s an absurdity to being Native in America. As a country, we haven’t heard the voices of Black Americans and descendants of enslaved peoples the way we’re hearing from them right now. America is being forced to listen and to look, I think, in ways it has let itself look away or—
Holdengräber: Do you think we’re hearing?
Diaz: I don’t think we’re hearing yet. I don’t know that it’s reached everyone in terms of feeling yet. We’re realizing we don’t have the language or the lexicon to talk about a lot of these things. We either need to move completely back and find a language before empire, or we need to leap forward and imagine a language beyond empire. That’s what I mean by absurdity. How do you exist in a country that only exists because of your death? I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a Black American. It’s very difficult being an Indigenous person in this country because we’re asking a nation to listen that has been built upon us and has also insisted continually, in so many ways, that we not exist.
Holdengräber: A line from Joy Harjo’s Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings is haunting me: “For any spark to make a song it must be transformed by pressure. There must be unspeakable need, muscle of belief and wild, unknowable elements.” And then you write in your extraordinary collection, Postcolonial Love Poem: “I am singing a song that can only be born / after losing a country.”
Diaz: We need to lose it again. As Native people, we lost it once. We’re not all the same people, of course, but I live on a reservation because our lands have been diminished and had lines literally drawn around them that say, suddenly, this is our land, versus us being caretakers of the land and being a part of a land that stretched widely. It’s difficult to speak in these terms. It’s difficult to speak within institutions or within academies when you’re saying the problem is the state, the problem is the nation. It’s almost an impossibility for some people to think that way. I’m always struggling with the lack of language to express that because English is the language I use primarily.
Holdengräber: What does a language contain that isn’t contained elsewhere?
Diaz: I’ve been thinking about my Mojave language and the English language, and who I am because of them and how both exist inside me. English doesn’t have imagination enough for me to exist like my Mojave language does because it was made for me. It was given to Mojaves by a creator, and it was a language we could see ourselves in. A language about our lands. It was literally pulled up from our lands. There’s something almost impossible about existing among or between languages, and the impossibility is not necessarily me; it’s the languages themselves. I’m not sure where to situate this, and it’s very different being home in my land. I’m in Makav ‘amat, Mojave land, and when I teach at Arizona State, I live on Akimel O’odham land. Being connected to the land I’ve been raised to believe is also my body, it’s always these questions: How do I exist? How do I become possible? What is impossible about me right now? It’s the breath not held but breathed. It’s the one let out that’s moving. It’s the way we’ve learned. Language is in my mouth, but it was given to me, and it’s come from someplace else. It’s an energy, and I’m one small space of it. It’ll move through me.
Holdengräber: I’ve always loved this idea that thought is made in the mouth.
Diaz: I think of the mouth. I think of the hands. My hands know a lot more than I do. I feel I’m often chasing my hands through the day. I write longhand, so I don’t usually write on the computer until I reach a certain point, but I also draw. And it occurs to me often that wherever my mind exists in me in those moments, wherever that energy exists, it’s not necessarily in my head or behind my eyes. My hands are making decisions for me that I don’t know of until I arrive. They’re already doing their work. And that sometimes happens with anger. It happens with desire. There are ways that we’ve separated the mind and the body, but there are ways that they are inseparable. I imagine one chasing the other most of the time, and one sometimes manages to wrest control, mind over matter or something. But I think it’s a lot more complicated than that.
Holdengräber: Also this notion of unknowing. A line in one of your poems says, “I obey what I don’t understand, then I become it, / which needs no understanding.”
Diaz: My body has wants and desires that become me or that I become. In a way, desire exists so far outside of time. Rage exists so far out of time.
Holdengräber: You’ve said, so beautifully, that time is like an accordion, and I’m wondering what you meant by that.
Diaz: The accordion comes up because I believe we try to manipulate time. But one of the ways I’ve been taught to think, or that I’ve come to think by what I’ve been taught, is that—and this goes back to being unpinnable—I want to be out of time. I want to step out of time. I’ve learned that anything that’s arrived here has already been dreamed to me, for me, from somewhere else, from someone else. We’ve been taught this by using a word that translates to dream yet doesn’t mean the dream that happens when you sleep but “This was dreamed for me” or “I’m wishing you good dreams.” What it means is “I’m wishing you all the energy you need to arrive at the place you’re meant to.” Even this small conversation: We connected through someone else, and then I met you at the reading with Naomi Shihab Nye, and now here we are. I know each one of those things was already there waiting for me before I arrived to them.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER is an interviewer and curator. He was the founding executive director of Onassis Los Angeles. Previously, he founded and directed the New York Public Library’s LIVE from the NYPL cultural series, where he interviewed everyone from Patti Smith to Zadie Smith, Ricky Jay to Jay-Z, Wes Anderson to Helen Mirren, Werner Herzog to Mike Tyson, and hosted over six hundred events.