Within A Legacy Of Colonization, 'Postcolonial Love Poem' Empowers Native Voice
Poet Natalie Diaz returns, interrogating the lasting effects of colonization asking: If a colonizer's influence can't be eradicated from a culture, how can you push back against violence and erasure?
How do we center, in this postcolonial experience, not the perspective of the western European colonizer but the perspective of the indigenous, black, and people of color who were colonized? Even the very language of this concept — postcolonial — betrays a perspective still situated around the white colonizer.
So we begin with this question: How do you create meaning when the language itself undercuts the meaning you are trying to create?
Natalie Diaz, whose incendiary transformed language eight years ago, addresses these ideas in her new poetry collection through authorial choices that center Native perspective in content, point of view, agency, and normalization of Native culture and mythos — in short, the myriad ways the white gaze is
