REVIEW
In the poem “When My Brother Was an Aztec,” the narrator tells the story of contemporary typical American history. The book foregrounds family subtleties and individual passion against the milieu of the mythical intensity of tribal life coupled with deeply ingrained cultural history. Diaz distinctively voiced out her brother’s struggles with drug addiction. The author’s poems gather similes and language that illuminate the native’s culture myth and history. Diaz references the ancient kingdom of Persephone in Greece, where the king’s palace was set on fire due to love for ladies to reinforce the native Indian culture and history and how the white men’s arrival destroyed it.
The poem is divided into three sections. In the story of more than 100 pages, you encounter Native Americans whose self-esteem, values, and traditions have changed due to government laws and policies. These regulations that took both the land and tradition away from the native Americans started many years ago. The time “some white God arrived floating across the ocean,” as the author narrates in the poem “Abecedarian demanding more examination of Anglian Seraphym Suppression of a Wild Indian Reservation.”
In the first section of the book, one encounters people living a typical Indian life. The narrator (Diaz) knows them since she grew up on a reservation. These people are poor, ill drug addicts, and physically hungry. We get to know that these Native Americans waited for USDA stamped raising in line for hours to receive the donation (Diaz, L. 6). The protagonist in the poem Reservation Mary” is a single lady who dropped out of school (Diaz, L. 3). Mary sells tortillas from the trunk of an old brown Buick with a cracked windshield while her little child sleeps in the back seat to sustain herself.
To make matters worse, Mary has diabetes and has a permanent disability. We understand that she has no legs and hopes one day, she will get assistance from a white man known as “diabetes.” In the story, white people are considered selfish in the story “The Gospel of Guy without House,” the foreigner (white women) dances with a disabled person on a chair. The white woman is drunken and seems not to bother about the disabled fellow. This shows that whites have no reservation.
There is an element of history and culture in the poem “the Facts of Art” the natives are employed by the United States Transport Department to participate in a road construction program where they destroyed sacred lands to construct roads. It can be seen that the natives refused to go back to work after the destruction of burial grounds where skulls of babies were excavated.
“Elders understood that BIA roads were a bad Medicine” (Diaz, ST. 3, L.1)
“That night, all the native workers got sick.
While elderly sank to their kivas to pray” (Diaz, ST.8, L.1/2).
The native’s actions in natives resemble Gat’s (2012) “mindful of both cultural and political heritage of the nation founders and years of experience from struggles for our statehood and democracy the nation strives to protect its independence. The government tried to bribe the natives to resume work; however, that did not work. The government, in retaliation, called the workers (native Indians) lazy. The grief of the destruction of sacred places is intense in this poem, where the government officials had no respect for Native Indian culture, using them as laborers since they needed work.
In the book, there is a culture of alcoholism and drug abuse. This culture is well portrayed in the second section, where we encounter the author’s blood brother with meth addiction, which brought prodigious suffering to his family. The book’s cover image is likely to be her brother- a guy with a tattoo on his arm and clothed in a headdress of a native Aztec God, Huitzilopochtli. The Huitzilopochtli was a Mexican god war who was a half-man and half hummingbird. All poems in this section reveal the parent were experiencing eternal suffering and unending love for their children and the uncanny character interruption of family life and illusions the brother exhibits due to his drug addiction.
Whenever one meets the author’s brother, “he resides in our basement and sacrifices our parents/every morning.” This statement shows why the author represents her brother as the old Aztec God of war. In other poems in this section, he is referred to as the god of war, the god of damage, and in other as Judas or Borges bestiary, which is a zoo of symbolic beings. In the poem “Sisyphus and My Brother,” we get to understand that Diaz’s father is heavily disturbed by his son’s drug addiction. Our father, our Sisyphus, pushes his old blue heart to custody. This refers to the police custody where his son is detained. Similarly, in the poem “to God Lionel Ritchie and My Brother” and The third poem in this section, the author shows how his brother is a serial menace to the law enforcement officers and an emotional roller coaster of her family.
In conclusion, the book is a rich source of American history and native Indian culture, revealing the story and heartache of these people in reminiscent narratives. Moreover, these poems capture the history and culture of the native Indians who occupied the United States before the white men’s arrival.