Waging Love and Worse: Natalie Diaz, the Colorado River, and the Poetics of Memory

This thesis investigates how Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem revives and reshapes the classical literary forms, especially by looking at the epic and the elegy, in service of an Indigenous identity, survivance, and ecological belonging. Through close reading of poems central to the work, “Postcolonial Love Poem” and “The First Water Is the Body,” this thesis considers how Diaz composes a lyric body in relation to Mojave geography and colonialism, addressing the ongoing violence present in settler narratives. Through comparative frameworks, such as Derek Walcott’s Omeros, and theories related to Gerald Vizenor’s “survivance,” this thesis argues that Diaz’s work disrupts the institutional authority of the western canon by revivifying classical forms in the service of Indigenous thinking. This thesis also considers how the Colorado River is the actual and metaphorical body discussed in Diaz’s poetics and transforms an ecological elegy into a process of political resistance and cultural continuity.