19 pages • 38 minutes read
Natalie DiazA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The tone of the poem is intimate, with the speaker drawing the reader into something important her mother used to say to her. Yet, within the first few lines it becomes clear that the personal, intimate world of the speaker, her mother, and the reader includes the North American history of racial oppression of Native Americans. Thus, the poet demolishes the notion of what is considered personal, highlighting the fact that every personal interaction or decision is influenced by history. Just as the poet collapses the boundary between the intimate and the political, she also brings together seemingly disparate elements of playful pop culture and serious historical reality. The reference to Beyonce and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs seamlessly gives way to themes of white dominance and the violent process of colonization. In fixing all these diverse elements in a continuum, the poet makes the important point that everyone (including the reader) and everything is complicit in the marginalization of minorities.
The mother’s seemingly generic advice to the daughter “They Don’t Love You Like I Love You” can be read initially as notes on dating, especially since the speaker mentions it alongside the song “Maps,” which was written by lead singer Karen O for a boyfriend who showed up late to a shoot. The refrain to the song is “Wait, they don’t love you like I love you.” For the speaker, her mother’s similar words denote that the men she dates or will be dating may not love her as much as the mother, therefore she must wait for the right person to come along. As the poem progresses, these potential suitors come to mean, first, white men, and then white culture itself. The poet uses a series of metaphors to describe why the mother mistrusts white culture and how the speaker – the colonized – may want to be loved or validated by colonizing white culture.
In the second stanza, the speaker recalls her mother’s warning “Don’t stray” (Line 6). The verb “stray” conjures up associations of straying into the wild, into danger, into temptation, and into harm. It also implies losing one’s awareness of their surroundings. Thus, it introduces a note of caution into the poem. Straying may have grave consequences for the Native American speaker. Unlike a white person, she must always be aware of her context, both literal and symbolic.
The additional associations of “stray” (Line 6) become clearer when the speaker notes that the mother knows the temptation of wanting the love of “someone white” (Line 8). However, the mother and the speaker do not attribute it merely to internalized racism. Rather, the speaker is aware this temptation is tied in with the deliberate cultural and physical erasure of her people. The temptation of dating a white man or white culture is strong simply because there are so many white people around. And these people are around because they have eradicated the speaker’s kind, replacing and outgrowing them. This “some one” (Line 9; white suitor) is “some many” (Line 9; white colonizers) and has become so many at the cost of “so many of mine” (Line 10; Native Americans). Further, the white colonizers “live on top of/ those of ours who don’t” (Lines 11-12), which implies that white America is build atop the graves of those whom they eradicated.
In Stanzas 5-7, the speaker further investigates the complex relationship between colonized and colonizer with a series of metaphors. America is first described as a “clot / of clouds” (Lines 16-17), the odd metaphor yoking something frothy as clouds with the denseness of a clot. Thus, white and light clouds (symbolizing colonizer culture) are associated with an intent to smother. America is also likened to “spilled milk” (Line 17), the spilling of the milk again mimicking the splashing of white paint over American history. The speaker then likens America to a literal blood clot, symbolizing the spilled blood of Native Americans. This blood is clotted, rather than fresh, since it has been spilled and left to dry many times. Alternatively, the speaker implies that no amount of spilled milk or amnesia can whitewash the violence colonizers carried out against Native Americans in the settling of America. Today’s America of frothy clouds and milk (symbolizing plenty) is built on blood. The blood will show itself. Finally, the white and red imagery of this passage also evokes the red and white of the American flag.
Tying the poem further to the song “Maps,” the speaker compares America to maps. Maps are an important metaphor for America, because they involve the reconfiguring and renaming of territories. Colonizers often map territories to mark them as their own, thus appropriating land. Nowhere is this process clearer than in the colonization of America, where land where Native American tribes once lived was mapped and appropriated by the settlers. The maps of America now limit Native American tribes to reservations. Thus, maps act as confining structures. Further, the speaker likens maps to ghosts, evoking the image of a white sheet of paper flapping ghostlike, as well as the idea of whiteness. Ghost-like, the maps are “layered with people and places I see through” (Line 20). These lines convey the idea that maps have been redrawn and reconfigured to ghost out Native Americans. However, the speaker can see through the lies of the maps, down to the reality.
The knowing phrase “I can see through” (Line 20) asserts the speaker’s agency. Her knowledge of history is sure and implacable and cannot be papered over and whitewashed. This knowledge is linked with what her mother has always known and prepared her for: that white culture will try to make the speaker crave its love, like an abusive, toxic lover. The mother’s purer love and her pride in her heritage has helped inoculate the speaker against the desire to be comforted in “their / white laps” (Lines 23-24). Why should the speaker be tempted to seek the white laps of the oppressor? The next set of lines answer this implicit question. It is because white people have projected their own image on the speaker’s self. Because they want to program her to believe this is the desired image, and because it is the one image she can never replicate, she may always feel she lacks something. If whiteness is what she lacks, she can possibly always be stuck in the cycle of chasing white approval. However, the mother has made sure none of these potential outcomes materialize.
As the poem draws to a close, the speaker returns to the refrain “Wait, they don’t love you like I do.” The speaker used to think her mother was asking her to wait because one day the white people would love her back or love her as she is. However, she now knows the mother was using the homonym “weight,” to fortify the speaker against racial injustice. The mother knew the speaker would need “weight” or fortitude and a deep sense of self not to stray and lose herself. She would also need weight to bear the “yoke” (Line 34) or burden of historical reality; as a Native American she should not forget the violence against her people, white people often don’t have to bear this burden. Racism and the awareness of racial violence are likened to “the beast of my country’s burdens” (Line 35), a phrase which returns to the idea that America’s history and its crimes are the same. However next comes the somewhat puzzling line that this burden is “less worse than my country’s plow” (Line 37). Perhaps the speaker is alluding to the fact that even though it is easier to forget, for a plow to run through memory and overturn its soil, forgetting is much worse than remembering. The lightness of forgetting is far worse than the weight or burden of memory. Perhaps, she means being a beast of burden is preferable to being a plow of destruction, with the plow symbolizing something that digs up the earth and is both forceful and masculine in its inherent penetration.
Finally, the protective mantra at the heart of the mother’s advice rings true for the speaker: “Natalie, that doesn’t mean / you aren’t good” (Lines 41-42). What the mother has always meant is that just because white people don’t love the speaker the way she is, doesn’t mean she is not good and lovable. By using her name in these lines, the speaker clearly identifies herself as the poet, thus tightening the circle of intimacy created by the poem’s opening lines. The real love song here is from the poet to her mother.
By Natalie Diaz