How can I translate—not in words, but in belief—that a river is a body, as alive as you or I, that there can be no life without it? [1]



“The First Water is the Body” isn’t obviously a poem. Long, nonlineated, too tired for lyric consolidation, too urgent for adornment—it reads like an essay weighted down with silence, losing itself and getting heavier.

“The First Water is the Body” isn’t obviously “by” Natalie Diaz, i.e., a body partitioned into an author or a body partitioned into a body. Whatever “the poem” is comes from the parching Colorado river cutting through the writer’s body cutting through the parching Colorado river cutting through the Mojave people: all holding and held, loose and losing. “The poem” comes from the river’s growing ghost and its forceful lingering life, the current of thirst that keeps the sentences coming.

Diaz is tired of words that do nothing, empty of need, as settlers’ thirsty denial of thirst drains the Colorado River. And sinking exhausted into those English words, words stranded by itemizing settler grammars and cracked by the silences they’ve imposed, Diaz feels for a pulse in them—her pulse. The river’s pulse. Lamenting what words can’t replace, she writes the river she and the Mojave bear as a prolific longing breaking through words: “What is…this place that breaks a surface, if not the deep-cut and crooked bone bed where the Colorado River runs—a one-thousand-four-hundred-and-fifty-mile thirst—into and through a body?” The “First Water” and “the body” converge in the voice unsingled and stranded on the page, between words and the nearing river bottom. The first stanza lays out some unflattenable facts:

The Colorado River is the most endangered river in the United States—also, it is a part of my body.

I carry a river. It is who I am: ‘Aha Makav. This is not metaphor.

When a Mojave says, Inyech ‘Aha Makavch ithuum, we are saying our name. We are telling a story of our existence. The river runs through the middle of my body.

So far, I have said the word river in every stanza. I don’t want to waste water. I must preserve the river in my body.

In future stanzas, I will try to be more conservative.

Diaz’s short, thick sentences thirst; they carry the water’s exhaustion. Both cautiously conserving energy and hefting an intimacy too heavy for translation, they register rapacious invasion at breath-rate, swallow-feel scale. They also cut to the chase. I carry a river. It is who I am: ‘Aha Makav. This is not metaphor. Diaz is tired of avoidance, deflection, suggestion. Later in the poem, she will lampoon the consumer-friendly occular-centrism that packages river bodies into self-referential images, little negative infinities selling palliative, palatable Nativeness:

We carry the river, its body of water, in our body.

I do not mean to imply a visual relationship. Such as: a Native woman on her knees holding a box of Land O’ Lakes butter whose label has a picture of a Native woman on her knees…

I mean river as a verb. A happening. It is moving within me right now.

While metaphor provides an escape-hatch for readers protecting their autonomy (“I’m me! The river is figurative!”), the itemization endemic to visual juxtaposition secures Native people and their rivers into their proper packaging. The Mojave story, Inyech ‘Aha Makavch ithuum, meanwhile, lets the river verb over the confining edges of a name: The river runs through the middle of my body.

A poem, Diaz knows, isn’t the same as a river. But her wry apology for wasting water (“I have said the word river in every stanza”) conflates words with water in a startling literalism. She rouses the question, and with it, the felt possibility of a physical (if intangible) connective current between thing said and thing sensed. 

A name, as she sounds out in the second and third stanzas, amplifies life as it multiplies and drains life as it shores up sensory borders and pretends to suffice alone. As she explains, “The Spanish called us, Mojave. Colorado, the name they gave our river because it was silt-red-thick. / Natives have been called red forever.” Calling the river by mere color, the Spanish deploy a racial politics that would stain Native skin with essentialist earthiness: red, simple, savage. Diaz unlocks this single word, single-color name with a triple hyphen conjoining earth to the water it won’t stay separate from: “silt-red-thick.” But as she hints, settler infrastructure strains out mixture in a thirst for purity and kills current in an attempt to stabilize a future resource: “I live in the desert along a dammed blue river. The only red people I’ve seen are white tourists sunburned after staying out on the water too long.” The dams, maximalist carceral mastery exercised on the river’s body, mass-produce a blue-eyed river. But whiteness as a purity myth and pleasure trip, Diaz jokes, literally crisps and peels when exposed to the sun a bit too long. 

Reading river bodies and naming them simply “red” reduces incomprehensible intimacy to a consumable good, costuming land as landscape. Diaz continues: “Americans prefer a magical red Indian, or a shaman, or a fake Indian in a red dress, over a real Native. Even a real Native carrying the dangerous and heavy blues of a river in her body.” When the afterlives of genocide and geocide stay dammed up, fake treaties and absolving fantasies are all that remain to a settler imagination. These are, in one telling, safer than containing a river. A river’s path and living motion are written with risk. Riven.

Diaz writes, risks offering Mojave words in a language and nation bent on assimilation. The translation of Native languages, Diaz knows, hardly guarantees the proliferation of life:

Jacques Derrida says, Every text remains in mourning until it is translated.

When Mojaves say the word for tears, we return to our word for river, as if our river were flowing from our eyes. A great weeping is how you might translate it. Or a river of grief.

But who is this translation for and will they come to my language’s four-night funeral to grieve what has been lost in my efforts at translation? When they have drunk dry my river will they join the mourning procession across our bleached desert?

While Derrida knows no language is self-identical, always less and more than itself and thus conditioned by grief, Diaz insists that language is as prone to extractive violence as the river. Translation theoretically promises proliferation, but historically delivers assimilation—in this case, from Native river bodies and their stories into whiteness, desert, and aestheticized amnesia. A four-night funeral wedges open the gash of an eliminated river and land “bleached” white. The broken strings of sentences process across seven white pages. Diaz, holding out her word for grief, asks non-Native readers: will you risk being a body?

Silences punctuate within and between stanzas, each line left to sink in the quiet. The silence, in other words, is not empty. Where else could the small surges of energy come from? Diaz seems exhausted by words and their patrolled borders, but occasionally her sentences spill into anarchic rhythms: “Body and water are not two unlike things…They are the same—body, being, energy, prayer, current, motion, medicine.” The “watery, dazzling dialectic” that Bishop gleans everywhere splinters into full thrum. In the unfurling nouns, the lonely anthropocentric body is caught up and rolled in with the multitude it most needs and contains.

Straining in English words past English words, Diaz hopes to carry readers beyond the poem to the river itself. She calls this place of convergence the “preverbal”:

Pre-verbal is the place where the body was yet a green-blue energy greening, greened, and bluing the stone, red and floodwater, the razorback fish, the beetle, and the cottonwoods’ and willows’ shaded shadows.

In this place of potential, greens and blues blur into verbs that both hue and relinquish what they hold. Color is no nominalized adjective here; “identity” unspools into a flood of others, a polyrhythm already greened and still greening in a thirst for more and more life. This energy is both longing for and welcoming difference as the sound of one’s own future.

Though Diaz might seem nostalgic for communion preceding language, the “preverbal is” in the present—and the poem makes it so. Even the Mojave creation story Diaz summons doesn’t precede or evade writing. Indeed, tracing the preverbal body, Diaz draws her readers to a scene of primordial inscription:

We must go to the point of the lance entering the earth, and the river becoming the first body bursting from earth’s clay body into my sudden body…

We must go until we smell the black root-wet anchoring the river’s mud banks. We must go beyond beyond to a place where we have never been the center, where there is no center—beyond, toward what does not need us yet makes us.

Even as the lance unleashes life into living, the scene of creation spreads through and beyond writing, through and beyond the story, through and for bodies that thirst. Here, generosity smells and sounds. The preverbal lifts within words, muddy and thick-rooted.

The river bears and is borne in un-needing generosity. Yet by the end of the poem, the river thirsts. Diaz invoking Morrison, recalls,

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Back to the body of earth, of flesh, back to the mouth, the throat, back to the womb, back to the heart, to its blood, back to our grief, back back back.

The water longs, in fact, for human bodies, seeking their recovery. Can settlers let themselves be found, be remembered by the water as its own body? Diaz ends the poem wondering, “Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?” The river, she implies, isn’t simply where we’ve come from. If “the first water is the body” (our body drawn to creation’s cut), the river is also the “last water” present in any body, the current of remaining life that carries all we have done. [2] As the words leave off into white space, the silence grows heavy—the water in us will not forget.
 





Note

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[I] All quotations are from Natalie Diaz. Postcolonial Love Poem. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2020. pp. 46-52. Italics here are mine.