In a recent talk given at Emory University entitled, “Why I Write,” Natasha Trethewey expresses that one her greatest priorities has always been exposing the holes in our national history—giving voice to the groups and individuals blotted out of public memory.[i] This concern has created a sense of progression in her career as poet, which she herself acknowledges:
I began with the historical impulse and the impetus to recover from the margins the stories of those people who often get left out of public histories. In [Domestic Work], I explored the life of my maternal grandmother, placing the narratives that she told me, the stories of her life, within larger historical contexts: American history, the history of the American South, the history of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement. Her own history is firmly set in those broader cultural moments. Transitioning from there to Bellocq’s Ophelia, we hear again a woman’s story that is infused with a particular time and space. The character Ophelia represents that kind of person who would have been ignored in official public histories, who may not have left records for us to know her individual narrative. I continue to be attentive to matters of historical memory and historical erasure, questions that are central to Native Guard. (Turner, 2011)
In Native Guard a large part of her focus remains historic, as she vocalizes the story largely undocumented story of Louisiana’s all black regiment called to serve in the civil war. But for the first time she also turns her attention inward, towards her painful personal history involving the loss of her mother. In this process she exposes the intersections between personal and public memory, examining memory itself for its powers and limitations. The poems of Native Guard that address Trethewey’s personal experience document her effort to reclaim yet another silenced voice. Within this series, “Graveyard Blues” and “What the Body Can Say” function not only as tribute to her mother, but as a significant deepening of her discussion of the importance of memorial.
The first poem I will analyze through this lens is “Graveyard Blues”, Trethewey’s fourteen-line recollection of her mother’s funeral. Her mother was murdered by her stepfather when she was seventeen years old, but Trethewey struggled to directly address the issue in her poetry until she began her work on Native Guard. In her explanation of the factors that converged to inspire her to really start writing about her mother, she emphasizes her interest in the way that memory functions especially as it dictates the intersection between personal and public history:
My more personal poems, about me and my place in the South, started to enter into [Native Guard]. I saw that connection. I started thinking abut my place as a southerner, and as a biracial, and as a black southerner and what gets left out of history and who’s responsible for remembering, recording, those things that are left out -- the native duty of many of us.
I was jogging in the graveyard near my house one day, and there’s an old part where a lot of Confederate soldiers are buried. I’m one of those people who can’t not read every tombstone -- they scream at me for their names to be heard. I was thinking about that when I came home and planned to write about that. When I sat down to write “Graveyard Blues,” what I recalled was burying my mother. That was when I came to understand what was going on in my subconscious. (Anderson, 2008)
Trethewey recognizes that if she is going to honor her “native duty” of recording “those things that are left out,” she must be a witness to her own story. She begins with the controlled, yet elegiac verse of “Graveyard Blues.”
Graveyard Blues
It rained the whole time we were laying her down;
Rained from church to grave when we put her down.
The suck of mud at our feet was a hollow sound.
When the preacher called out I held up my hand;
When he called for a witness I raised my hand—
Death stops the body’s work, the soul’s a journeyman.
The sun came out when I turned to walk away,
Glared down on me as I turned and walked away —
My back to my mother, leaving her where she lay.
The road going home was pocked with holes,
That home-going road’s always full of holes;
Though we slow down, time’s wheel still rolls.
I wander now among the names of the dead;
My mother’s name, stone pillow for my head.
One of the first and most notable elements of this poem is its structure. Possessing fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, and a final offset rhyming couplet, it follows the format of a Shakespearean sonnet. Working within traditional poetic structures is characteristic of Trethewey, but it might seem a surprising choice for a poem recounting an intensely emotional experience. One might assume that such grief would call for an outpouring of language, much more easily achieved in free verse. But Trethewey opts for the restraint mandated by a set rhyme scheme and meter. The constraints of traditional structure may be one reason why the grief of “Graveyard Blues” is not expressed explicitly. However, perhaps putting limits on what can be said makes a powerful statement in its own sense. In a recent interview Trethewey stated:
A poem that is restrained by form, where something is being held back, suggests the absolute struggle to say what is being said. In the struggle to be able to get out even the one thing that is being said, so much has been pared away. (Turner, 2011)
The idea of struggling to express something seems especially relevant to “Graveyard Blues” in which themes of guilt and abandonment might work to impede the speaker’s attempt to transform memory into narrative—the personal into the public.
Trethewey’s choice of poetic form impacts the poem in additional ways. Despite its respect for the constraints of a traditional form, “Graveyard Blues” deviates slightly from a conventional Shakespearean rhyme scheme, as Trethewey opts for a rhyme scheme of aaa/bbb/ccc/ddd/ee. This creates an effect of “flashes” of memory, as the grouping of the first twelve lines into triplet stanzas creates a set of four distinct images. Instead of a fluid progression through the funeral scene, the action is presented in snapshots. The audience gets the sense that the speaker is working through her memories internally. Though it is presented chronologically, the audience is not offered a flowing, step-by-step narrative. This might suggest that while she is in the process of coming to terms with her past, the speaker is not yet ready to share her memories through a public storytelling. This idea speaks to Trethewey’s interest in historical genesis. She is very much interested in attaining the entire story of a place or historical event, but recognizes that rich and necessary details are left out not only by bigoted institutions but individuals who never find the strength or courage to testify. As the speaker in “Graveyard Blues” she finally begins the process of bearing public witness to her painful past, ensuring that the story of her mother’s death, with so many details already lost, is as close to the entire picture as she can make it.
Trethewey provides a second meditation on her mother’s death and memory itself in “What the Body Can Say”, which also explores the theme of communication and the nature of her own grief:
What the Body Can Say
Even in stone the gesture is unmistakable—
the man upright, though on his knees, spine
arched, head flung back, and, covering his eyes,
his fingers spread across his face. I think
grief, and since he’s here, in the courtyard
of the divinity school, what he might ask of God.
How easy it is to read this body’s language,
Or those gestures we’ve come to know—the raised thumb
That is both a symbol of agreement and the request
For a ride, the two fingers help up that once meant
Victory, then peace. But what was my mother saying
That day not long before her death –her face tilted up
At me, her mouth falling open, wordless, just as
We open our mouths in church to take in the wafer,
Meaning communion? What matters is context—
The side of the road, or that my mother wanted
Something I still can’t name: what kneeling,
My face behind my hands, I might ask of God.
This poem makes powerful use of enjambment, illustrated right away in the first stanza. The initial, easily envisioned image of an “upright” man” is quickly distorted as the enjambment of the second line in the stanza creates an unnatural juxtaposition of body parts. The audience is thrown off balance by a representation of a contorted human body. Our first natural inclination is to look for added meaning in the final phrases of each line, where the spoken emphasis is placed, but with only one end-stopped line in the poem, these phrases are often just the first piece of larger idea. In many instances this is a powerful aesthetic tool. For example, in lines 7-8, when the speaker remarks, “How easy it is to read this body’s language / or those gestures we’ve come to know—the raised thumb” the audience stops and considers the image of a “thumbs up” before having the speakers’ own commentary of the image imparted on them. Because a theme of the poem is communication through body language—images as opposed to words, the enjambment contributes to the metaphorical level of the poem. Additionally, whereas “Graveyard Blues” presented the poetic action as independent episodes, the continuity of this poem is more indicative of a flowing thought process; it implies a personal struggle not only to recount, but understand.
Memory, as it applies to history, does not always provide us with all of the answers we seek. In “What the Body Can Say,” the speaker’s grief is not only rooted in the loss of her beloved mother but in her frustration that her understanding of her mother’s history contains holes that will never be filled. The speaker has preserved a detailed image of her mother in her memory, and but the image alone—her mother’s body language, is not enough for her to understand the full significance of the moment. She never understood what her mother was trying to tell her on “that day not long before her death” (12), but the fact the she still can’t understand brings her to her knees in grief, her only option now to appeal to God for understanding. The poem explores the theme of the communicability of body language, but the larger idea of the poem is what the body can’t say, especially when death silences its ability to speak. The speaker reflects, “What matters is context” (15). When all a person or society has left as testament to a life are memories, even the best-preserved recollections will be missing part of the complete picture.
As an American Ethnic Poet, one of Natasha Trethewey’s central roles is to provide testimony to the men and women whose stories have been left out of the public history records. In Native Guard she realizes that her mother is one such voice, but she also recognizes that the “truth” of her untold stories are deeply impacted by her own emotions and experience. In “Graveyard Blues” and “What the Body Can Say,” Trethewey makes the choice to document these stories anyway, preferring an imperfect picture to an invisible one. These poems are not only a monument of a silenced life, but an examination of memory itself and the ways that memory shapes both personal and national identity.
[i] Emory University. Why I Write: Natasha Trethewey on Poetry, History, and Social Justice. 2010. Online. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zfzs6zqDsw.
Work Cited
Anderson, Wendy. An Interview With Natasha Trethewey. Bookslut.com. February 2008. Web. 4 March, 2012. http://www.bookslut.com/features/2008_02_012353.php.
Turner, Daniel Cross. Southern Crossings: An Interview with Natasha Trethewey. Waccamaw: A journal of contemporary literature. Fall 2011. Web. 3 March, 2012.http://www.waccamawjournal.com/pages.html?x=324.
