Natalie Diaz and Nathalie Handal: Map of the Next World

“Land, like poetry, exists out of time, beyond time, though we are always trying to measure it or read it like a clock,” says Natalie Diaz in this conversation with Nathalie Handal. During the last decade of their friendship—from Arizona to New Jersey to Palestine and beyond—these poets have reflected on language and borders, which are at the core of their latest collections. Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf, 2020) was recently named a finalist for the National Book Award, and Handal’s Life in a Country Album (University of Pittsburgh, 2019; flipped eye publishing, 2020) is a finalist for the Palestine Book Award. 

In this exchange, they consider where borders begin. What does freedom mean in the United States, and in its numerous war zones? What does freedom mean on a Native reservation or in Palestine? How do we tend or subvert the borders in our body, or on our pages? These two important voices consider these questions as well as desire, translation, and language as “destruction and divinity.”

Handal: In your new poetry collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, you sing bodies unsung, and carry us through the body of the river and the desert, to that of the stars and the spirits. I keep returning to “the first water is the body” for breath, keep reaching out for the line “to read a body is to break that body a little” as if it’s a raft. In the first stanza of “These Hands, If Not Gods,” you write:

Haven’t they moved like rivers— 
like glory, like light
over the seven days of your body. 

Where are the borders in your body? Have you crossed them? Can you recreate your body borderless?

Diaz: Many of us are born toward or against a border. Our own bodies have become both borders and bordered. I was born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village, which is Mojave reservation land—the Colorado River borders one side and the desert railroad town of Needles, California borders its other side. Our land and our bodies were re-drawn as physical borders designated and imposed by the United States—not to mention the myriad affective borders resulting from my existence as a Native in this country.

I cross borders hourly, daily—I must in order to exist.