Poet’s Corner: “The First Water Is the Body” by Natalie Diaz

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North, Senior Editor

“The First Water Is the Body” by Natalie Diaz, from Postcolonial Love Poem. Copyright ©2020 by Natalie Diaz. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Graywolf Press, in Emergence Magazine.

Artwork by Logan Brewer

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it. 

When I read “The First Water Is the Body” in 2020, after Natalie Diaz’s book, Postcolonial Love Poem (in which the poem appears), won the Pulitzer Prize, my consciousness felt diverted like a river around a boulder. I struggled to grasp another poem as this one settled, alive, into my body. Perhaps it didn’t settle at all, like the settler I am in Canada. The poem helped me remember the river that I, too, already am.   

At first, before reading, you may wonder: Is this a poem? The prose poem and lyric essay have much in common—often a blend of narrative and personal experience held by poetic, lyric language and juxtaposition. You might say this form is much like a river, bed, and bank—curving, compressing, and expanding. What makes it a poem, to me, is the flow: Uninhibited, and yet, tethered to a strong form: A body, if you will. It’s also a poem because Natalie Diaz says it is (can you tell I’m a fan?). 

Further, deeper into the water, the poem’s syntax, diction, and imagery lift each other. The word ‘conservative’—and the way it’s included as the last word of a section and stanza—implicates many meanings. There’s also the use of red, white, and blue—the colours of the American flag—appearing as silt, rock, sun burns, Native/white bodies, blood, and water. The body, of course, recurs, but here is my favourite example:

“If I was created to hold the Colorado River, to carry its rushing inside me, if the very shape of my throat, of my thighs is for wetness, how can I say who I am if the river is gone?”

Like a river, most stanzas are only one sentence. The sentences, as water holds pebbles, carry images, descriptions, and declarations; muscles to the bones of the poem (of which there are many). The most visceral, I felt, is Diaz’s reckoning with translation, noting John Berger’s belief that true translation returns to the non-verbal. In this sense, what kind of translation is happening in the poem and outside of it? Who is it for? What has been lost in this process?

“In Mojave thinking, body and land are the same. The words are separated only by the letters ‘ii and ‘a: ‘iimat for body, ‘amat for land. In conversation, we often use a shortened form for each: mat-. Unless you know the context of a conversation, you might not know if we are speaking about our body or our land. You might not know which has been injured, which is remembering, which is alive, which was dreamed, which needs care. You might not know we mean both. // “If I say, My river is disappearing, do I also mean, My people are disappearing?”

The body and river cannot be separated—they are one. Therefore, as Diaz writes, there’s no metaphor or juxtaposition of tears, river, blood, though these appear in the poem side-by-side. This shows us the limit of language on the page, which Diaz reflects stunningly. Poems, often, tangle with metaphor and myth—which are in close relationship. Diaz writes that “What threatens white people is often dismissed as myth. I have never been true in America. America is my myth.” She follows this by asking, “If the river is a ghost, am I? // Unsoothable thirst is one type of haunting.” I’m reminded here of “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” a paper by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. 

Thus, the hope of the poem may be to haunt us via the feelings attributed to mythological spirits and ghosts—a sense of loss, grief, lingering, and fear—in a way that convinces: “If I could convince you, would our brown bodies and our blue rivers be more loved and less ruined?” We know that the body remembers trauma spatially. So, too, does the water. If you’re curious about Indigenous ghost/horror stories, I recommend Never Whistle At Night, expanded on here. 

Alongside Berger, Diaz brings in Toni Morrison’s quote: “All water has perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” Other voices in the poems, alongside Diaz, work formally to help us see and feel plurality: If “We think of our bodies as being all that we are: I am my body [, t]his thinking helps us disrespect water, air, land, one another. But water is not external from our body, our self.”

Lastly, Diaz uses questions throughout the poem—something that’s tricky to get right. To a few, she responds:

“Will we remember from where we’ve come? The water.”

Others, she asks rhetorically, the answer implied:

“Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?”

And some, she leaves, necessarily, for all of us:

“And once remembered, will we return to that first water, and in doing so return to ourselves, to each other?”

This poem is full of life, as a river is—as a body is. Please continue spending time with it beyond this brief, surely inadequate introduction. And perhaps ask: What river am I?