Natasha Trethewey

Other Literary Forms

Natasha Trethewey is known primarily for her poetry.

Achievements

Natasha Trethewey was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 2007 for the collection Native Guard (2006). In 2012, she was named the state poet laureate of Mississippi, and from 2012 to 2014, the Library of Congress named her poet laureate of the United States. Her works Domestic Work (2000), Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), and Native Guard all won Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prizes (2001, 2003, and 2007, respectively). In 2017, she won the Heinz Award in Arts and Humanities. Trethewey received various honors in 2019—she became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The following year, she received a lifetime achievement award from the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize. In 2022, she was inducted into the American Philosophical Society.

Domestic Work was selected by Rita Dove, herself a former poet laureate of the United States, as the winner of the 1999 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Trethewey twice received the Lillian Smith Book Award for Poetry (2001, 2007). She was awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (the Bunting Fellowship), the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2008, she received the Mississippi Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence and was also named Georgia Woman of the Year. She has also been inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Trethewey has been recognized for her blending of autobiography and history. She is also noted for examining the complexity of biracial identity.

Biography

Natasha Trethewey was born on April 26, 1966, in Gulfport, Mississippi, the daughter of Eric Trethewey, a White Canadian immigrant and poet, and his wife, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, a Black social worker. Her parents met as students in Kentucky, but because interracial marriage was illegal in the state at that time, her parents had to go to Ohio to marry. Trethewey spent her early years in Mississippi, but when her parents divorced when she was six, she moved with her mother to Atlanta. She then spent summers with her mother’s family in Mississippi and visited with her father, who was at Tulane University in New Orleans. With her father’s encouragement, she began to write both poetry and fiction.

While Trethewey was a student at the University of Georgia in 1985, her mother was murdered by her former second husband, whom she had divorced a year earlier. Trethewey persevered at the university and earned her bachelor’s degree in English in 1989. She spent several months as a social worker in Augusta, Georgia, before entering Hollins College (now University), where her father was teaching English. She studied English and creative writing and was awarded an MA in 1991. She then enrolled at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she earned an MFA in poetry in 1995.

Around this time, Trethewey became associated with the Dark Room Collective, a group of young Black writers founded by Thomas Sayers Ellis and Sharan Strange. Their purpose was to bring together established and young Black writers. Trethewey’s work started to appear in literary journals, and her poems began to be selected for anthologies. Her first book of poetry, Domestic Work, was published in 2000.

In 1998, she married Brett Gadsden, a professor of African American studies. Trethewey began her teaching career at Auburn University in Alabama in 1997. In 2001, she became a member of the faculty at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where she became a professor of English and the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry. Named the nineteenth poet laureate of the United States by the Library of Congress's James Billington in 2012, she served in the position for two terms, concluding in 2014. She also published her fourth major poetry collection, Thrall, in 2012.

Analysis

Natasha Trethewey often writes of the intersection of her personal and family history with public history. Her themes include the exploration of dichotomies such as that of insider and outsider, physical rootedness and psychological estrangement, memory, and forgetting. Because of her background, she often examines the significance of racial identity, especially multiracial identity, with a focus on the personal and social questions that arise from racial categorization. She is also interested in recovering the stories of those who have been overlooked in history. Conscious of form, she skillfully uses stanza patterns and rhyme as well as free verse.

Domestic Work

The title of Domestic Work, which also serves as the title of part 2 of the collection, indicates the overall theme. In general, it refers to the many ordinary jobs or duties that help a society or a family run smoothly but that are often overlooked. Most of the poems feature strong imagery. In part 2, dedicated to Trethewey’s maternal grandmother, poems explore the various jobs open to an African American woman of the mid-twentieth centuryhousekeeper, elevator operator, hair stylist, factory seamstress, and self-employed seamstress. Some poems describe the personal work of maintaining a marriage and raising a child. In a September 2007 interview in Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art, Trethewey says that in this early work, she "was already, by using dates or other historical events within the poems, working to blend personal or family stories with collective history." This subject, she realizes, is a "long-term obsession" of hers.

Parts 3 and 4 relate to Trethewey’s childhood and her parents. "White Lies," "Microscope," and "Saturday Matinee" consider Trethewey’s feelings about her biracial identity. In "White Lies," the speaker allows a White classmate to assume that she, too, is White. When her mother discovers this lie, she washes out her mouth with, ironically, Ivory soap, telling her that this will clean her and her lying tongue. The daughter swallows the soap, believing that it will make her "ivory" from the inside out.

The final poem of the volume, "Limen," was selected for the compilation The Best American Poetry 2000. The word "limen" comes from the Latin word meaning "threshold." In the poem, the insistent knocking of a woodpecker on a catalpa tree becomes for Trethewey ". . . a door knocker/ to the cluttered house of memory . . . ," and she imagines she sees her mother again, hanging sheets on a clothesline. This experience sums up the theme of several poems in the collection: the sense of being on the boundary of two worlds. In "Limen," the boundary could be the line between the present world and memory or between reality and imagination.

Bellocq’s Ophelia

Bellocq’s Ophelia, named a notable book by the American Library Association in 2003, centers on the life of Ophelia, a New Orleans prostitute of the early twentieth century. Ophelia tells her story in verse letters to a former teacher and in diary entries, which are a free-verse sonnet sequence. She traces her growth from someone who is an object for others to one who asserts control in her own life. Trethewey’s character was inspired by the historical photographs of E. J. Bellocq, who photographed New Orleans prostitutes in the early twentieth century.

The child of a White man and a Black woman, Ophelia is pale enough to pass for White. Intrigued by photography when Bellocq takes her picture, Ophelia buys herself a Kodak camera and begins framing her world herself ("Letters from Storyville. September 1911"). The last poem in the book, "Vignette," completes the photography metaphor. In it, Bellocq carefully arranges the objects in the camera’s frame, including Ophelia, but after the flash, she steps out of the frame to live her life, free of the constricting frames imposed by others. Her last note to her friend reveals that she is leaving New Orleans and heading west.

Native Guard

In Native Guard, dedicated to her mother, Trethewey memorializes those who have no monument (on a personal level, her mother, and in history, the Louisiana Native Guard). When asked about the significance of the title beyond its literal meaning, Trethewey responded, in the Five Points interview, that she thinks that a "native guardian" takes care of "not only personal memory but also of collective memory—and that is certainly what poets are often charged with doing, representing the collective memory of a people." She continues, "And as a native daughter, a native guardian, that is my charge. To my mother and her memory, preservation." In this volume, she also claims her own place in Southern literature.

The poems of part 1 contain memories of Trethewey’s mother and emotions about her loss. "Graveyard Blues" is a haunting blues sonnet that describes the day her mother was buried. The sonnet uses four triplets following the blues format rather than three quatrains, with a final couplet. "After Your Death," selected for The Best American Poetry 2003, meditates on the emptiness in the speaker’s life after her mother’s death. When she thinks of tomorrow, she imagines it as an empty bowl that must somehow be filled.

Focusing on Mississippi, part 2 contains some freestanding poems, a section of poems inspired by old photographs ("Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi"), and the sonnet sequence "Native Guard." The subject of "Native Guard" is the Louisiana Native Guard, an African American regiment of the Union Army assigned to guard Confederate prisoners at Fort Massachusetts on Ship Island in Louisiana during the Civil War. Trethewey’s family often went to Ship Island for vacations when she was younger, and she observed the plaque placed to honor Confederate prisoners who were held there, but there was no monument to commemorate the guards. Not until she was an adult did she learn that the guards there were members of one of the first Black units in the Union Army. She was inspired to investigate their story.

The persona of the sonnets is a formerly enslaved person who was taught to read and write by his former master. Irony abounds in the poems. For example, the formerly enslaved people guard those who would enslave them, and the literate Black narrator writes letters for the illiterate White prisoners. Another irony is found in the colonel’s words after the guards are fired on by their own side in an engagement. The colonel coldly comforts the troops with the idea that their names will be remembered. The narrator, more realistically and accurately, thinks, "Some names shall deck the page of history/ as it is written on stone. Some will not." The sonnet sequence begins with "Truth be told" as the first words, and these are also the last words of the last sonnet, reminding the reader to seek the truth in history. The form of "Native Guard" is an adaptation of the sonnet sequence known as a crown of sonnets, or corona sonnet, a series of sonnets with repeating lines. In Trethewey’s sequence, the last line of the previous sonnet becomes the first line of the next sonnet, and "Truth be told," the last three words of the last sonnet, repeats the first three words of the first sonnet to complete the sequence.

In part 3, poems allude to poet Walt Whitman, specific Southern writers (Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner, Allen Tate, and the Vanderbilt University-associated Fugitive poets), and Gone with the Wind (1939), as Trethewey asserts her place in Southern literature as a Black female poet. In "Pastoral," a free-verse sonnet, she imagines herself being photographed with the Fugitive poets (all dead now), who championed Southern traditionalism and regionalism, as though taking her place as a modern representative of the Southern literary tradition. The poem also acknowledges her mixed emotions about the South. "My Mother Dreams Another Country" describes her mother’s dream of a country where no hurtful words will be addressed to her biracial child. The poem ends with a television image of the American flag waving as the national anthem plays, an ironic but hopeful symbol of what the country could be. The final poem in this section, "South," weaves together many of the themes from throughout the book. The repeated phrase "I returned" emphasizes Trethewey’s connection to the South, claimed as her "native land" in the final line, despite her continuing ambivalence about it.

Thrall

Reviewers saw Trethewey's fourth major collection, released in 2012, as a worthy follow-up to her other acclaimed works and proof that her appointment as the US poet laureate that same year was wholly justified, though she was still in the midst of her career. The volume continued to explore her signature themes, especially race relations—historical and in her own life. Moments of tension and optimism are expressed as historical subjects and personal experience are woven together in a rich journey of identity and meaning. This multi-layered process is exemplified in the poem "The Americans," in which she writes of viewing an image of a Black woman with a White baby, triggering her own memories of being a child accompanied by her mother, who "was mistaken again and again / for my maid."

Thrall not only examines Trethewey's own point of view and the realms of history, but also forces the reader to consider their own perspectives and think critically rather than take anything for granted. Many reviewers pointed to the poem "Enlightenment" as an eloquent note of how viewpoints can evolve and deeper understanding can be reached. Without being sentimental, the work acknowledges that difficult issues can be grounds for powerful relationships and self-defining experiences.

Monument: Poems New and Selected

Published in 2018, Trethewey's fifth major collection of poetry addresses difficult topics like racial inequality, gender discrimination, trauma, and experiencing loss. The poems included are from new and previous work, allowing the narrative to be fluid and diverse.

Further Works

In Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010), Trethewey recalls the devastation experienced in her hometown of Gulfport in 2005. Similarly, the author tells the story of her mother's life and death in Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (2020). Her other works include Imperatives for Carrying On in the Aftermath (2016), My Father as Cartographer (2018), and Quotidian (2021).

Bibliography

Debo, Annette. "Ophelia Speaks: Resurrecting Lives in Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia." African American Review, vol. 42, no. 2, June 2008, pp. 201-215.

McFarland, Ron. "Native Guard." In Masterplots II: African American Literature, edited by Tyrone Williams. Rev. ed. Salem Press, 2009.

Milne, Ira Mark, ed. Poetry for Students, vol. 27. Thomson/Gale Group, 2008.

Mlinko, Ange. "More than Meets the I." Review of Native Guard. Poetry, vol. 191, no. 1, Oct. 2007, pp. 56-59.

"Natasha Trethewey." Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, poets.org/poet/natasha-trethewey. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Shipers, Carrie. Review of Native Guard. Prairie Schooner, vol. 80, no. 4, Winter 2006, pp. 199-201. muse.jhu.edu/article/210814/pdf. Accessed 26 Apr. 2023.

Solomon, Deborah. "Native Daughter." The New York Times Magazine, 13 May 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/magazine/13wwln-Q4-t.html. Accessed 26 Apr. 2023.

Trethewey, Natasha. "An Interview with Natasha Trethewey." Interview by Pearl Amelia McHaney. Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art, vol. 11, no. 3, Sept. 2007, pp. 96-116.

Trethewey, Natasha. "Q&A/Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet and Emory Professor: ’Poems Captivate Me in a Way that Nothing Else Does.’" Interview by Teresa Weaver. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 29, 2007, pp. 1B, B4.

Wilson, Mindy. "Natasha Trethewey (b. 1966)." New Georgia Encyclopedia, 14 Apr. 2021, www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/natasha-trethewey-b-1966. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Wojahn, David. "History Shaping Selves: Four Poets." Southern Review 43, no. 1, Winter 2007, pp. 218-231, www.majorjackson.com/2/PDF/Hoops--The%20Southern%20Review--Book%20Review.pdf. Accessed 27 Apr. 2023.

Young, Kevin. Review of Domestic Work. Ploughshares, vol. 26, no. 4, Winter 2000, p. 205, www.pshares.org/issues/winter-2000/rev-domestic-work-natasha-trethewey. Accessed 27 Apr. 2023.