Eco-Eroticism: Desire, Land, and the Colonial Body in Natalie Diaz’s “The First Water Is the Body” and Warsan Shire’s “For Women Who Are Difficult to Love”

Abstract

This research explores the relationship between land, body, and power in the contemporary postcolonial poetry and the ways in which eco-eroticism, the connection of the desire to nature, manifests. The research employs the theory of colonial desire by Robert Young and the ideas of transcorporeality and material feminisms presented by Stacy Alaimo in order to examine how women and landscapes have been eroticized and controlled in colonial discourse through the use of desire. The two poems used in the analysis, namely, from “The First Water Is the Body” and “For Women Who Are Difficult to Love”, address the concern of how the texts disrupt colonial and patriarchal fantasies of domination. The research identifies that both poems distort conventional erotic imagery into a form of resistance, kinship, and ecological interrelation. In the former poem, the river is a speaking, desiring subject whose association to the speaker breaks down divisions between human and nonhuman bodies. The second poem is the voice of the female who rejects the efforts to civilize or tame her down as she re-takes her fierceness as a decolonial self sovereignty. By integrating this theoretical method, the study establishes that eco-eroticism is an effective model to analyze the ways modern authors transform discourses of desire, land, and agency, expressing in the end a promotion of ethical, reciprocal, and decolonial relationships between bodies and environments.