In Natalie Diaz’s essay “A Lexicon of the Indigenous Body: Images of Autonomy and Desire” for LA Review of Books she writes, “Language is a physical energy, a force gifted by the creators so that we might pray to our gods, cry out for our dead, and beckon our beloveds home.”

Her poem, “I, Minotaur” from her collection Postcolonial Love Poem, is just such a beckoning, and a cry. “But you called to here by me come softly,” she writes, intermixed with references to ancient Greek gods and monsters, battleaxes and stones, all as images of an intense physical intimacy. This poem is a presentation of all the narrator is, an offering up of all their flaws, desires, complicated mixed-up emotions, history– everything.

Diaz equates desire with autonomy, “…we will hold the indigenous body toward the light, in its imperfections, in its potential, and offer it the autonomy of desire.” But what does this mean? Within the pages of Postcolonial Love Poem, we can begin to find the answer. “I, Minotaur” starts in immediately with the title.

To inhabit the space of “Minotaur” the narrator has placed themselves in a complex identity of conflicting halves: half human, half bull, half monster, half man, half legend, half history, half son, half symbol of bestial infidelity and the wrath of the gods.

The narrator of “I, Minotaur” takes both of these equations into account. They desire the “you” of the poem, and have seized the autonomy of that desire to create an offering of their self. As a poem written by Diaz – a queer, female, native writer – that offering holds a particular sort of power. This is a poem from a narrator inhabiting the conflicting, violent turmoil of the Minotaur, by an author inhabiting identities of similar nature.

While there are two subjects of the poem – the “I” and the “you” – it is a love letter to the self of the narrator, and therefore everyone else that inhabits those tumultuous spaces of identity. “You’ve heard me churn and lather, yet knock and enter.” 

But how is a love letter an act of love? In her essay, Diaz writes, “To create is an act of love.” How is “I, Minotaur” one of these acts of love? It is an unapologetic confession.

“I know what it’s like to be an appetite of your own appetite,

    citizen of what savages you,

to dare to bloom pleasure from your wounds–

    and to bleed out from that bouquet.”

Natalie Diaz

It is a making peace with oneself, and that takes loving oneself. It is an act of love, because it is a narrator saying look at me, me who is a woman, and a native, and a lover, a survivor, a queer, and who has self-harmed and harmed others and had successes and failures and been seen as nothing more than a beast by people who have abused and belittled myself and my people. Look at me for what I am, can you love me like I do?