Merging the Bodies of Water in Contemporary American Poetry: A Hydrofeminist Reading of Three Poems by Natalie Diaz

Abstract

The article first introduces the Native American literature tradition, then it addresses the themes of Native poetry before focusing upon Natalie Diaz, a major contemporary Native American poet of the Southwest whose work explores the relationship of the body, landscape, and language to indigenous history. In her three poems, “The First Water Is the Body,” “How the Milky Way Was Made,” and “exhibits from The American Water Museum,” Diaz frames the river as a mythic body of water that permeates and defines her own body and being. Drawing on recent approaches such as hydropoetics and hydrofeminism, the article examines the unique relationship of the poems’ speaker to the river, her beloved, and her people. Through looking at Diaz’s language-switching between English, Mojave, and Spanish, the article shows how the in-poem translation of crucial concepts of identity exposes the limits of colonization by language and articulates a “rivered” lyrical subject of rare power. The analysis concludes that Diaz’s poetry offers a decolonizing ontology in which the river and the poet’s body are mutually constitutive while suggesting a sustainable, erotically charged practice of caring that links the history of indigenous survival strategies to future-oriented definitions of desire and environmental responsibility.