“All my loves / are reparations loves”: Decolonizing Borders and Reparative Queerness in Natalie Diaz’s Poetry

Abstract

This article will analyze how the Mojave poet Natalie Diaz identifies decolonized queer and lesbian identities as potential modes of transgressive border-crossing and repair that can generate epistemological, ethical, and ontological disruptions in a world ravaged by colonial displacement. In her two poetry collections, When My Brother Was an Aztec and Postcolonial Love Poem, Diaz crafts a poetics specifically tailored to three intertwined goals: revisiting traumatic history on three different levels (individual/personal, family, community) in order to counter hegemonic erasures on which is founded an illegitimate national imaginary; questioning the legitimacy of all borders imposed by ongoing colonial rule –whether geographical, social, or sexual; and articulating lesbian Indigenous desire as a means to create new types of kinship and reopen a sense of futurity.

Keywords

• coloniality
• indigenous
• lesbian
• Natalie Diaz
• queerness