They Don't Love You Like I Love You

“They Don’t Love You Like I Love You” is a contemporary 42-line poem written in unrhymed verse by the Mojave poet Natalie Diaz. Published as part of Diaz’s award-winning collection Postcolonial Love Poem (2020), the poem deals with powerful themes of Native American erasure and the violence wreaked by white settlers (in line with the poet’s preferred usage, this guide uses the term “Native American” for the Indigenous Peoples of the United States). Through the somber themes, it is the love between the poem’s speaker and her mother that keeps her grounded and focused. The poem’s overarching message is that the speaker knows she is good and fine even if white culture doesn’t love her. Taking its title from the song “Maps” by the Indie rock band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the poem contains many snippets from the song. The juxtaposition of song lyrics with poem lines shows that the poet is remaking American pop culture in her own idiom. Similarly, the poem is written as 14 three-line stanzas, a regular structure inspired by traditional European forms. Diaz deliberately uses this structure to claim it as part of her reality as a Native American person.

Poet Biography

Born in 1975 to a father of Mexican descent and a Mojave mother, Natalie Diaz identifies as Mojave. Diaz is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe and has published the poetry collections When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012) and Postcolonial Love Poem (2020). Postcolonial Love Poem won her the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2020.

Diaz grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California and earned a full basketball scholarship for a BA from Old Dominion University. After graduating from the university in 2001, Diaz competed internationally in Europe and Asia for four years. In 2006, she returned to Old Dominion for an MFA in Creative Writing, where she began to write and publish her poems. Diaz has likened the process of writing poems to playing sports since language is energetic and full of movement. Apart from sports and poetry, Diaz’s other abiding interest is languages, especially Native American languages. She now lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she is the director of the Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program. Diaz works with the last remaining speakers of Mojave to revive the language.

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Diaz has received the McArthur genius grant, the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, among other honors. Fellow poet Adrian Majetka has praised Diaz’s inventive writing and bold themes because “she takes her experiences, distills them into English, Mojave, or Spanish, then twists the resultant moment with wit and grace. In Diaz's hands, the narratives are not beholden to the original experience. Rather, the experience becomes a new machine for myth, one that is simultaneous specific to Indigenous cultures and universally American.”

Poem Text

Diaz, Natalie. “They Don’t Love You Like I Love You.” 2020. Academy of American Poets.

Summary

The speaker says her mother told her that “they” or other people and suitors don’t love her like she does, long before this expression was used in popular songs. The songs the speaker alludes to are “Maps” (2000) by the band Yeah Yeah Yeahs, with the refrain “they don’t love you like I do,” and “Hold Up” (2017) by pop singer Beyonce which uses the same refrain. Throughout the poem, the speaker uses italicized phrases from “Maps” to tie her commentary with the song of the same title. The speaker’s mother told her not to stray, like in the lyrics of “Maps,” but the mother had a different intent. The speaker’s mother asked her not to go astray or lose their way in the search for social approval, because she knew the pressures a woman of Native American origin feels to fit into mainstream white society. This pressure tells Native American people that the only love or validation that matters is from white people, those who are “not your kind” (Line 8).

The speaker’s kind has in any case been marginalized and diminished by colonization to make her feel she doesn’t matter. So many of the speaker’s kind have not lived, which refers to the systematic murder of Native Americans through North America by waves of white settlers. The speaker now uses a series of metaphors to describe American history, which is also the history of the oppression of non-white races. The history is like a “clot / of clouds,” (Line 15-16), spilled milk, and blood. The white elements of these metaphors refer to white dominance, while blood refers to the atrocities against Native people. Thus, American history is white with white majoritarianism and red with the massacre of Native Americans.

The speaker says America was a place where her kind was once in the millions, but is now a map of whites, alluding both to the song “Maps,” as well as the growth of white society at the cost of Native Americans. The maps of America are “ghosts” (Line 19) because they are haunted by the spirits of the many killed Native Americans through history. The maps are also ghost-like because they attempt to “ghost” or nullify the history and existence of the Native Americans.

Given the sinister nature of the continuing project of colonialism, the speaker’s wise mother knew her daughter would crave acceptance by white people. She would be like a lost child “begging” (Line 22) to lay their face in white laps. The speaker alludes to the fact that colonialism infantilizes the colonized, making them feel small and diminished, and thus hungry for acceptance by the colonizer. White society projects their “sepia / or blue” (Lines 26-27) image over the speaker’s body and self, thus making the speaker want to inhabit that image. However, the speaker’s mother always reassured her that her love was enough; the speaker did not need the love of mainstream America. Further, the mother asked the speaker to “wait” before she jumped into a relationship with white America and white people. The speaker thinks the mother also played on the word and meant “weight,” or the ability to bear the responsibilities of being Native American. The speaker would need to prepare herself for the weight of being Native American in the United States. Thus, she needed to arm herself with self-esteem and strength. The speaker is sure that when her mother repeatedly said they don’t love you like I do, she meant the speaker was perfect the way she was. Just because mainstream society may try to rob her of agency, that does not mean the speaker is not good. Thus, the poem ends on an affirmative, resilient, and hopeful note.