Jose Cando
ENGL-2327
April 26, 2014
Balcones Fiction and Poetry Winners Reading Event:
Natalie Diaz’s Reading of When My Brother Was an Aztec
Outside the ACC Theater on April 9th, the public was greeted by tables of refreshment including fruits cheeses and crackers which was a nice surprise. Although, I had expected a packed theater, only about forty people were waiting inside. The event started at 6:30 pm when Charlotte Gullick, the chair of the creative a writing department took the stage. After promoting some of creative writing classes at ACC, she described the significance of the Balcones prizes. A teacher from the English department took the stage next to talk a little more about the Balcones prize. He pointed out that Natalie Diaz was the sixteenth winner of this prize. He described Ms. Diaz as a woman with her foot “in three different worlds.” Her childhood was spent on the Mojave reservation in the California Desert. She attended college in Virginia on a basketball scholarship, and from there she played professional basketball in Europe and Asia. After injuring her knee, she left basketball to study poetry in graduate school. Therefore, he claimed, she has a foot in the worlds of the reservation, basketball and poetry. With that, he welcomed Nathalie to the stage.
Nathalie jumped into reading her poem, “When My Brother Was an Aztec.” I was shocked to hear the bitterness and resentment in her voice as she describe her brother as a nasty and careless force which had destroyed her parent lives. Her disgust with brother’s drug use, violence and fancy for prostitutes was a theme that permeated much of her poetry. For example, in another poem, she portrayed her brother knocking on her mother’s door, terrified that the devil was hiding just around the corner of a neighbor’s house.
Ms. Dias also mentioned that her brother had broken her parents’ windows and had stabbed a man six times, claiming that the man had fallen on his knife. Another recurring theme of Ms. Diaz’s poetry is the injustice of life in Mojave reservation. In her poem “Clouds,” she pointed out some common names of Mojave Indians like George and Martha Washington as well as
Rip Van Winkle. These names were given to many Native Americans to ridicule them during a mandatory United States census. In a different poem, Natalie shared her aversion to raisins. She explained that to get food in the reservation, families had to wait in long lines in the school gym. Food supply was limited. One day as a child, Diaz approached her mom with hunger and was given a box of raisins. After consuming the entire box of raisins too quickly, she suffered diarrhea and cursed the raisins in front of her mom. Nathalie explained that the reason why she did not like raisins was not the humiliating lines in the gym nor the diarrhea she suffered, but the fact that her mother had also been hungry and had given up the last bit of food in the house for her.
The audience sat quietly, surprised by Natalie’s raw account of the injustice and poverty endured by her Mojave community. The honesty with which she expressed the strife that her brother caused in her family also impacted her public. Sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes humorous, always poignant, Nathalie’s poetry burned itself in the memory of each person sitting in the theater.
The touching poetry of Diaz depicts the reality of the indigenous people, the suffering that they have on their reservations. The trouble that they have to face such as food scarcity, alcoholism and youth suicide are issues that they live with daily. Improving their lives is so difficult for most Indians. The lack of opportunity for them to go school makes them weaker than they already are, when facing the world outside of the reservation. Author, Natalie Diaz impacted me a lot because she showed this reality that for many people is unknown. Her works enrich the American literature.