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• 1 2025-04-23T18:04:55+00:00 "I mean river as a verb" 37 plain 2025-06-08T04:29:08+00:00 One kind of answer to Amitav Ghosh is Natalie Diaz's cascading poetry about the Colorado river, which responds to water in a literary and lyrical mode, centering indigenous history in counterdistinction to American instrumental conceptions of bodies of water.
  
  Diaz starts with what she posits is an untranslatable, but deeply felt, and deeply embodied mode of knowing that the Western understanding of water as a resource is all wrong; a river is a body. She asks:

  How can I translate—not in words but in belief—that a river is a body, as alive as you or I, that there can be no life without it?

  While the word river might bring a picture of a river to our mind's eye, or pictures of all the rivers we've stood by and photographed, Diaz insists that she means river in a different way--"as a verb," as a "happening": 

  We carry the river, its body of water, in our body. I do not mean to invoke the Droste effect—this is not a picture of a river within a picture of a river.
  I mean river as a verb. A happening. It is moving within me right now.
  
  ↠
  
  This is not juxtaposition. Body and water are not two unlike things—they are more than close together or side by side. They are same—body, being, energy, prayer, current, motion, medicine. (Diaz, "The First Water")

  
  
  Rivers are bodies, she writes, with heads, shoulders, feet, and they are like our bodies, bringers of energy, motion, and medicine.
  But, Diaz notes, not all cultures treat the body and/of water with the reference we/they require.
  
  Diaz compares the cultures that grant rivers the same rights of human beings to America's approach to bodies of water (America which has just dissolved all environmental legislation including the Clean Water Act and the Safe Water Drinking Act):

  ↞
  The Whanganui River in New Zealand now has the same legal rights of a human being. In India, the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers now have the same legal status of a human being. Slovenia’s constitution now declares access to clean drinking water to be a national human right. While in the United States, we are teargassing and rubber-bulleting and kenneling Natives trying to protect their water from pollution and contamination at Standing Rock in North Dakota. We have yet to discover what the effects of lead-contaminated water will be on the children of Flint, Michigan, who have been drinking it for years.
  ↠
  America is a land of bad math and science. The Right believes Rapture will save them from the violence they are delivering upon the earth and water; the Left believes technology, the same technology wrecking the earth and water, will save them from the wreckage or help them build a new world on Mars.

  
  This bad dream of a rapturous escape to Mars is the favorite dream of the billionaire class. Last month, I met a Canadian earth scientist who collaborates with NASA, looking three kilometers into the Canadian shield--rocks the same age as Mars--for signs of water that might have been sequestered for 1.6 million years. Indeed, she has found water that is replete with astonishing life forms, including nematodes and bacteria that live on chemicals instead of light. Maybe it's her discipline, expressly designed to find resources to exploit, but there was no sense of awe, no sense of reverence, no sense that she's invaded zones that do not belong to humans. The nematodes, protected from contact with light for 1.6 million years, don't matter. I feel angry on their behalf.
  
  It took 140 years of dispute and dialogue before the  New Zealand’s Parliament enacted the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act, conferring legal personhood on the Whanganui River—endowing it, in its entirety “from the mountains to the sea,” with the rights, responsibilities, powers, and liabilities of a person. This act embeds in law the sacred Māori principle “Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au” which translates loosely as “I am the river and the river is me” (O’Donnell 2018, 164, Luisetti, 2023, p. 26). But we don't treat persons well in this country.
  
  - MT
  
  Sources:
  Diaz, Natalie. “The First Water Is the Body.” Emergence Magazine, May 18, 2023. https://emergencemagazine.org/poem/the-first-water-is-the-body/.
  Luisetti, Federico. 2023. Nonhuman Subjects: An Ecology of Earth-Beings. 1st ed. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009442770.