By Parker Thomas Staff writer
The Creative Writing Department had poet Natalie Diaz visit Susquehanna for a question session and a reading session in Isaacs Auditorium as part of the Raji-Syman Visiting Writers Series on Feb 7.
Diaz is a Mojave-American poet from Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She attended Old Dominion as an undergraduate on an athletic scholarship and went on to play basketball professionally in Europe and Asia. Following her basketball career, Diaz returned to Old Dominion to earn a master’s degree in the fine arts.
In 2012, she wrote “When My Brother Was an Aztec,” a collection of her poems reflecting back on her family life on the reservation. She is currently in the process of putting together a second collection.
Beyond poetry, Diaz directs the Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program, which works to teach and revitalize the Mojave language. In 2012, she was interviewed by PBS on both her work in this department and her poetry.
Starting off the reading on Tuesday night, Diaz was introduced by junior Arden Lee, whom Diaz thanked for giving a “very generous introduction.” Diaz then went on to thank the staff of the Creative Writing Department for having her that evening and said that she had previously heard of Susquehanna from a former graduate student.
Giving a bit of perspective into the Native American way of life in the modern world, Diaz went on to name several statistics, including the fact that Native Americans only make up about 0.8 percent of the nation’s demographic and are, at the same time, the highest per capita of any race to be killed at the hands of police and to volunteer for the military. Further expanding on where she comes from, Diaz explained that she has both a brother on the police force in the reservation and a brother who has committed crimes and was in jail.
“My father jokes that his kids are both the cops and the robbers, so this is an interesting point,” Diaz said before elaborating on the first poem she read titled “Catching Copper,” a poem reflecting on both her brothers’ use of guns.
“I say the word bullet 29 times and I say the word brothers 28 times, but every time people reference this poem they never call it the brothers’ poem,” she added. “They always call it the bullet poem, which I find striking. It is easier for me to hear a poem about bullets versus a poem about brothers. So that is interesting.”
Diaz went on to read four other poems, which included “The Mustangs,” “When My Brother Was an Aztec,” “Cranes, Mafioso’s, and a Polaroid Camera” and “The Elephants,” all of which were either in her former collection or recently written. While not giving a background into all of them, Diaz did explain that she obtained the imaging of her family in “The Mustangs,” which focused on one of her brothers’ high school basketball career by reflecting back on the ACDC song “Thunderstruck.”
She also elaborated on “Cranes, Mafioso’s, and a Polaroid Camera,” stating that she went to a crane trust in Nebraska in order to develop poetry not centralized on her family and brothers and instead ended up writing exactly that when one of her brothers called her in the middle of the night during her stay there.
Following the reading, a short question and answer session was conducted, during which Diaz answered three questions given by the audience considering if she ever intends on writing about her basketball career, the difficulty in looking back and returning to old work and how she feels publishing material about her brothers. Diaz said that she does not feel guilty or wrong for writing any of her work, even with her brother out of jail and clean now, because it is all true.
“It’s the moments where I feel super vulnerable to myself that I trust the most,” she explained about her writing. “Sometimes when I write about my brothers, it gets to me and feels like language. I can enjoy that language and sometimes I get choked up. The emotional truth is what I kind of bank on and can trust later.”
