The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Diaz, Natalie. When My Brother Was an Aztec. Copper Canyon Press, 2012.

Note that parenthetical citations with the guide refer to the line numbers of the poem from which the quotation is taken.

Natalie Diaz’s first collection of poetry, When My Brother Was an Aztec, broadly follows the emotional journey of a sister’s struggle with her brother’s meth addiction. The book has no linear narrative, but it is arranged into three separate sections, all prefaced by an initial poem which serves as an introduction to the collection. The three sections serve as a structure for the emotional progression of the collection. The poems are not necessarily all strictly autobiographical, but they are closely informed by Diaz’s culture and community. The “I” of the poems may not always be Diaz herself, and the “brother” may be Diaz’s literal brother or a broader representation of the indigenous American community she comes from. In either case, the collection reads as a personal and cohesive piece of work.

The titular, introductory poem of the collection, “When My Brother Was an Aztec,” and the second section of the collection tell a very specific story about a particular family, while Sections I and III provide a broader picture of the culture from which that story comes. Section I includes poems about different members of the native community, as well as poems which may be about the brother and sister in the narrative. In Section III, this poet offers poems about how someone, who may be the sister character of Section II or even an autobiographical representation of Diaz herself, exists in a larger, more global context.

After the titular introduction poem, “When My Brother Was an Aztec,” introduces the central emotional conflict of the collection, Section I introduces the world from which both sister and brother derive. The poems in Section I touch on growing up on a reservation, moving off the reservation in childhood and experiencing that contrast, poetic portraits of a series of people living on the reservation, and the uneasy relationship between the tribe’s traditional culture and the Christian symbology that pervades the poems. While Section I is a portrait of a specific experience of indigenous life, it also generously employs characters and allusions from American colonial culture, reinforcing the ever-echoing impact of a long history of subjugation. Despite being a vital part of laying the cultural groundwork for the following section, the brother-the-Aztec character introduced in the first poem of the collection is not specifically mentioned or alluded to in this section even once.

In Section II, the brother-sister relationship of the introduction poem reappears vividly, as does the relationship between the siblings and their parents. This section appears on the shoulders of the poems in Section I. As such, the symbolic roles of the sister, brother, and their parents diffuse some of this section’s particularity. Both the brother and sister come from the background established in the first section. Brother and sister are shaped by the parents who are trying so hard to hold onto the brother, and for whose pain the sister feels so much righteous anger. What they represent, on a more symbolic level, is two different ways of responding to that shared foundation. The brother is being destroyed by it; the sister, by contrast, is attempting to process and understand the obstacles and traumas she has faced in her life. The section ends with the sister’s imagined funeral for her brother.

Section III feels, at first, like a complete break from the earlier sections. In the first handful of poems, there is no brother, nor is there mention of the much-loved parents of the previous section. There is only our narrator, and her love affair with a white woman whom she both clearly adores and feels viscerally ambivalent about. “This blue world has never needed a woman / to eat an apple so badly,” she writes in “I Watch Her Eat the Apple,” the opening poem of the section, and this intensity about her lover carries through to the poems that follow (34-35).

But the cultural touchstones which pervaded the previous two sections — leaping horses, Borges and Lorca, animals in the zoo — also appear in Section III, and before long the poems return to the figure who haunts this collection, brother-the-Aztec. In addition to a series of memories and traumas that he and his sister share, the brother is also a combat veteran. The shadow of America’s imperialist influence over the rest of the world in the present joins the historical context of its imperialist past as established in Section I.