The Radical Intimacy of Natalie Diaz’s Translingual Poetics

Abstract

Natalie Diaz’s poetry is distinguished by its attunement to language as a cultural, historical, and mythological vehicle of meaning-making—remodeling and evolving meaning with every translingual contact. Thus far, the scholarship on her work has underexamined the role of her trilingual poetics. While there is some analysis on Diaz’s incorporation of Mojave words and phrases—for a poet from the U.S./Mexico borderlands who identifies as Latina and Mexican in addition to Native—surprisingly little has been written about her use of untranslated Spanish. This paper argues that Diaz’s use of Spanish is a depiction of the conversations, histories, and mythologies that shape her family’s use of language. Through the refashioning of foundational cultural myths, their symbols, and the language born from them, Diaz’s poetics pursues a feminist translingual politics that highlights how borderland language carries the values of its violent, colonial history and translates those values to the formative myths that loom over intimate, personal relationships. Through inventive use of peritextual and paratextual elements, Diaz’s collection offers a pedagogy of its own practice and theory of translingual poetics—a practice and theory located in the specific politics of the tri-colonized landscape of the Southwest. While written primarily in English, Diaz’s incorporation of Spanish and Mojave textures her work with layered, reflexive meaning that comments on and transforms the experience of family and culture in the borderlands.