REPRESENTATION AND NATASHA TRETHEWEY’S
POETRY
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
ABSTRACT:
One remarkable feature of Natasha Trethewey’s poetry is the hegemony of
the visual, the dominance of photography and other forms of pictorial
representation as she seeks to make sense of the burden of history. Trethewey does not passively accept that
hegemony. She uses experiential memory
and memory acquired from reading to challenge the visual, to ask what is
absent, what the visual often successfully conceals if it is not subjected to
scrutiny. In these remarks I use a few
of Trethewey’s ideas about
representation in Beyond Katrina: A
Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010) to sketch briefly how she
investigates history by way of analysis of visual representation as text.
Key Words: identity, representation, history, ekphrasis
Natasha Trethewey’s memoir Beyond Katrina: A Mediation on the
Mississippi Gulf Coast must compete with numerous other books on the specialized
traumas caused by Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005.. The similar bid for
attention among hundreds of books of contemporary poetry is mild when compared
with the ferocity that swirls among the multiple forms of commentary on the
Storm (Hurricane Katrina) as that tragic event is referred to in New Orleans.
The cause of such ferocity is not malice enacted by any of the artists or
survivors who articulate feelings and insights about the Storm. It is, on the
contrary, the result of the depth and magnitude of pain attached to the event
that calls into question the legitimacy of one’s speaking about or for
or of giving aesthetic form to something that resists
representation. It is the possibility of succeeding in realizing a truth that
is the question, for negotiating the facts and the myths surrounding August 29,
2005 and the landfall of a hurricane involves exposure of the material and the
immaterial. The problem is truly more philosophical than poetic. As Elaine
Scarry noted in a very pointed way in Resisting Representation (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1994), some entities defy representation. The
abstract may be “beyond the reach of speech and writing,” and the concrete
might be left “outside the reflexes of language.” In matters pertaining to the
abstract and the concrete in our lives, “what is overtly at issue is the
knowability of the world, and that knowability depends on its susceptibility to
representation” (3).
In her dealing with what is made
knowable and what remains unknown by virtue of representation, Trethewey’s
poems necessitate our dealing with complex issues of literary representation.[i] She is
to be commended for achieving a resolution of poetic and philosophical issues,
albeit a contingent resolution, in Beyond Katrina. The book resolves, by
virtue of its lucidity, some problems of evaluating works about Hurricane
Katrina and literary works which have strong investments in American social and
cultural history. In addition, Beyond Katrina clarifies some matters
germane to the interpretation of Trethewey’s poetry to date, because she
meditates intensely on memory, history, and the act of writing. Any doubts
regarding the legitimacy of speaking by a person who was not there during and
in the immediate aftermath of the Storm are set to rest by (1) the fact that
Trethewey had kin, family, who were survivors of Katrina’s ravaging and (2) the
fact that she seeks to fully historicize hurricanes in general and to put
certain storms of family life into perspective. The family storms are microcosms of the
collective ethnic storms that prevail in America.
Moreover, the value of Beyond
Katrina is increased by her incorporating portions of her earlier writing
and family photographs as evidence of authenticity. The photographs make the
references to Son Dixon, Sugar, and the Owl Club, North Gulfport in Domestic
Work visual as well as verbal. Trethewey’s critique of the photograph as a
means of objectifying what ought perhaps be left human and finite in Bellocq’s
Ophelia and of paintings in Thrall becomes poignant irony
when she explains in Beyond Katrina why she is at peace with the fact
that a certain snapshot of herself and her brother is lost. The deep reasons
for the necessity of reconstructing the history of the South and of Mississippi
so carefully researched in Native Guard are further illuminated in
Trethewey’s reconstructing a personal and public history of Gulfport,
Mississippi.
Trethewey thoroughly domesticates her reconstruction of representation in the “Prologue” for Beyond
Katrina by noting that she “like many people from the Mississippi Gulf
Coast, are haunted -- even at the edges of consciousness -- by the possibility
of a natural disaster” (1). The confession about being haunted provides a
special clue about her meditation and her growing body of poetry , about where
it might fit in the long history of Southern literature and African American
poetry. Although Mississippi writers
have no monopoly on being haunted, we do
share with other Southern writers a preoccupation with dimensions of being
haunted; indeed, we might argue that Southern writers respond with greater
alacrity than do other American writers to the ineluctable demands that one’s
location in time, one’s “history,” can
make on human consciousness; we are perhaps more sensitive to the onus of
acknowledging and recording how we, to echo the phrasing of William Faulkner,
endure and prevail. Haunting is the bite of both conscience and consciousness. Literary
and visual representations as does the blues intensify and provide catharsis
for human agonies.
Contemporary writers and their
readers (at least those who have not been undone by the glamour of ahistorical
identity) are forcefully reminded that literature may seem to ensure
universality and transcendence, but they are not blinded to the fact that
appearance delivers a most imperfect and treacherous image of reality. In the
regions of human cognition, which Americans in general so freely and subconsciously
attempt to manipulate as “race,” what
seems to be is most often in actuality what
does not exist.
In Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1983), Fred Hobson theorized that
…the act of telling about the South (particularly when shame
and guilt motivate the telling)
can be among other things an act of confession, even
catharsis -- of purging oneself of haunting
memories and fears in the hope that they will haunt no more,
but always with the dangerous
possibility that to explore and reveal is to dredge up
painful memories which without confession
would not be brought o the surface (7-8).
Hobson’s astute observation is nicely complicated in Dorothy
Stringer’s “Not Even Past”: Race, Historical Trauma, and Subjectivity in
Faulkner, Larsen and Van Vechten (New York: Fordham University Press,
2010). Stringer contends that overlapping of time and text can produce a
mapping “between writing and the writing process, between traumatic symptom and
critical recognition of trauma, between historical events of extreme violence
and subsequent, quotidian psychic life” (2-3). Stringer’s claim applies as well to visual
texts as a species of writing.
As a poet endowed with a very clear sense of historical
obligations and the contextual powers of memory and history, Trethewey orients
us to meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and hurricanes and the lives of
ordinary people by drawing attention to a contemporary function of poetry. The
rage to speak is an existential imperative.
Insofar as Beyond Katrina and her four collections of poetry are quests for psychic balance in the aftermath of
devastation, Trethewey seeks to articulate how poetry assists us to answer how
we are going to live in the prisonhouses of nature and language.
She recognizes the centrality of poetics in the act of
writing about disasters, both the natural ones and those resulting from
man-made actions.
The prologue of her book informs us
that the poems “Providence” and “Theories of Time and Space,” which were
published in Native Guard, acquired special significance in the act of
writing Beyond Katrina. “Providence” had its origins in family
stories about Hurricane Camille’s devastation of the Gulf Coast in 1969, and
the closing lines of the poem are carefully worded to indicate how the visual
disappears:
In
the water, our reflection,
trembled,
disappeared
when I bent to touch it (42)
The word “providence” has
particular meaning in Early American literature and in American historiography,
and it is crucial that Trethewey alludes to that meaning.
“Providence” has religion-oriented
currency in discussions of tragedy, but its secular denotation reminds us that
to be provident or to secure a future can include the uses of photography, a
subject that is exploited in the poetics of Michael S. Harper and Trethewey.
The pre-Katrina poem “Theories of Time and Space,” which
resonates Einstein’s theory of relativity and the Heisenberg principle of
uncertainty, opens with the compelling assertion
You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.
Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been…. (Beyond Katrina 5)
became after August 2005, Trethewey
confesses, “quite literal: so much of what I’d known of my home was either gone
or forever changed” (Beyond Katrina 2). At the end of this poem which
initiates the meditation as a “tome of memory,” the couplet “The photograph
---who you were --/ will be waiting when you return” alerts us that photography
can be a mode of “writing” and that the poet’s use of family photographs, her
brother’s letters, and memory to reconstruct that which has been hidden or
invisible is a method of self-conscious interpretation in the effort to create
history as a site of memory (lieux de mémoire). This poem and Beyond Katrina echo at once the representational ironies of Bellocq’s
Ophelia and the objectives of Domestic Work and Native Guard.
As an item in Trethewey’s evolving oeuvre, Beyond
Katrina is a fascinating addition to the American literary landscape which
Philip C. Kolin and Susan Swartwout describe in the editors’ introduction for Hurricane
Blues: Poems about Katrina and Rita (Cape Girardeau: Southeast Missouri
State University Press, 2006):
Katrina has given poets a unique anatomy lesson about the
body politic and the American character of that body. The hurricane gave its
name, its terrors, and its anger to a new canon of American poetry and a new
sense of national responsibility for rebuilding and restoring (16).
What Kolin and Swartwout mention about change in poetry is a
concise gloss on the body of Trethewey’s poetry.
Focusing on the past and present in
Gulfport, Beyond Katrina brings the autobiographical act to the
foreground. As is the case with American literature in general, much of what we
think about Southern literature is influenced by autobiographical writing or
writing based on autobiographical experiences. Like such writers as Ellen
Douglas, William Faulkner, Sterling D. Plumpp, Willie Morris, Richard Wright,
and Eudora Welty –Mississippians who sought to tell a story always untold ,
Trethewey uses her personal voice to account for aspects of continuity, change,
and reconfiguration. Rather than imposing a strict chronological pattern upon
the struggles of her mother’s African American family and its negotiations with
hurricanes in a racialized and multiracial space, she chooses to be the pilgrim
who must gather threads of public history and swatches of family memory in
order to quilt a story.
Trethewey does not begin with the migration of her maternal ,
working-class ancestors from the Mississippi Delta to the Gulf Coast in the
early part of the twentieth century but with her own return in 2007 to Gulfport
from Atlanta, the place where her grandmother lived in yearning to return
“home” after “riding out” and surviving Hurricane Katrina. At ninety-one, her
grandmother , upon whose life several of the poems in Domestic Work had
been based, “tries to piece together the events of the previous two years. She
has layered on the old story of Camille the new story of Katrina. Between the
two, there is the suggestion of both a narrative and a metanarrative -- the way
she both remembers and forgets, the erasures, and how intricately intertwined
memory and forgetting always are” (Beyond Katrina 11). Rita Dove noted
in her introduction for Domestic Work that Trethewey had resisted the
lure of autobiography; in Beyond Katrina, that lure is necessary to
endow the story with authenticity, and Trethewey embraces it with verve.
Through the perspectives afforded by the windows of autobiography , she
accomplishes the yoking of narrative and metanarrative and explores the
devastated but recovering “physical landscape as well as the landscape of our
cultural memory”(11).
By attending to the specifics of
form and content in Trethewey’s autobiographical efforts to discover the human
interiority of suffering hurricanes, we are made aware of what distinguishes
her poetry. [ii]Trethewey’s
disciplined recycling of the historicizing possibilities implicit in her
earlier books of poetry and her brave, honest confrontation of how her brother
Joe’s life unraveled along with historic neighborhoods in the years after
Hurricane Katrina, in the midst of Gulfport’s becoming again a site for
Mississippi’s thriving casino enterprises . The latter aligns a major thread of
concern in the book with the sibling tragedy so poignantly documented in John
Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers (1984), adding significantly to a
tradition of history and memory in African American culture. The restorative
recycling links the book to the urgency of remembering forgotten portions of
Mississippi and Civil War history that was dealt with in Native Guard. The urgency of historical research in telling
how the objectification of the photograph, whether innocent or malicious,
functions in cultural memory serves to magnify the kind of critique
accomplished in Bellocq’s Ophelia.
The urgency of the family stories rescued in Domestic Work
resonate in the direct and indirect ways Trethewey employs visual evidence to
deal with her biracial origins and the problematic representation of racial
mixing that has enormous import in the twenty-first century.
For Trethewey, writing Beyond Katrina marked an
obligatory stage in her growth as a poet, as a contributor to American
literature and national memory. Her meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast is
certainly a “pointing to a destination, some place not far up the road” (123),
a poetic and visualized space where in time her readers can recognize,
theorize, and fulfill their diverse obligations in the making of history.
In the very recent Thrall (Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), an aptly titled collection, Trethewey makes a partial
analysis of bondage. Unlike their synonym “slavery,” thrall and bondage
provoke images of the exotic, the gendered and sexist perversity we can
easily confuse with “love,” and what is plainly erotic. Trethewey is extending
inquiry about the hegemony of the visual begun in her second collection Bellocq’s
Ophelia and placing even greater
stress on ekphrasis, on literary
commentary about the visual image as text. The emphasis in Bellocq’s Ophelia
was on use of the persona and restoration of voice to the person reduced to
visual silence by the use of invasive, stereotyping of the body in photography.
Thrall directs attention toward the aesthetic and blatant uses in painting
of visual classification, particularly in the casta paintings of Juan
Rodríguez Juárez and other artists fascinated by the body, the evidence of race in the social constructions of biology. The
aesthetic is brought into intimate connection with what the making of class and
caste represents. For Trethewey, the use
of poetic self-portraits is necessary rather than arbitrary. She must represent
the many layers of relationship with her father who could be the biological
Other and the dual agent of bonding and bondage. The paradox is stunning.
Ekphrasis is not uncommon in poetry, and in African American poetry its
touchstone is Clarence Major’s masterpiece “The Slave Trade: View from the
Middle Passage,” a redoubling painterly text which Linda Ferguson Selzer
brilliantly explicated in African American Review.[iii] There
is much to grain from reading Trethewey’s poems about paintings in tandem with Major’s
use of paintings to secure historical and poetic consciousness.
Aware of how verbal imagery has special manipulative power in
lyric and narrative poetry, one is obliged to regard Trethewey’s use of
profound ekphrasis in those poems in Thrall that allude to her historical relationship with her poet
father Eric Trethewey, who is white. The final stanza of “Enlightenment” (71),
for example, is a devastating self-interpretation of Thrall as a book
and thrall as a category of human experience:
I’ve made a joke of it, this history
that links us ---white father, black daughter ---
even as it renders us other to each other.
Trethewey plainly “outs” or exposes the painful black humor
of history. Just as the seventeenth and eighteenth century casta paintings expose certain perversities of enslavement, Thrall reveals how germane is W. J. T. Mitchell’s observation that
“representation is exactly the place where ‘life,’ in all its social and
subjective complexity, gets into the literary work” (15). [iv] And the
great question to which one may choose to respond is “Why should we have just
this kind of poetry at just this point in the early years of the twenty-first
century?
One might make some progress toward
an answer from reading Arthé A. Anthony’s Picturing Black New Orleans: A
Creole Photographer’s View of the Early Twentieth Century (University Press
of Florida, 2012), a study of Florestine Perrault Collins, a woman who learned
photographic techniques while passing for white. And more progress can be made
from reading Michele Elam’s The Souls of
Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and
Aesthetics in the New Millennium (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2011). The surest answer to the great question is in Natasha Trethewey’s
motives for representing in the total body of her poetry to date. Despite change, much in the nation she currently
serves as Poet Laureate remains unchanged.
All people are held in thrall by someone’s camera, by someone’s paint
brush, by someone’s hegemonic eye. Representation does not allow us to think
otherwise.[v]
NOTES
[i]
In this essay, I refer to the following works by Natasha Trethewey ---
Domestic Work.
Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2000.
Bellocq’s Ophelia.
Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2002.
Native Guard.
New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
Beyond Katrina: A
Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2010.
Thrall. New
York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
[ii]
For astute commentaries on Trethewey’s first three collections of poetry, see
Thadious M. Davis. Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2011.
[iii]
Selzer’s article “Reading the Painterly Text: Clarence Major’s ‘The Slave
Trade: View from the Middle Passage” originally appeared in African American Review 33.2 (1999):
209-229. It is reprinted in Clarence
Major and His Art: Portraits of an
African American Postmodernist. Ed. Bernard W. Bell. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2001.101-131.
[iv]
Mitchell, W. J. T. “Representation.” Critical
Terms for Literary Study. 2nd ed. Ed. Frank Lentricchia and
Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 11-22.
[v]
For considerations of representation and consequences, see John Ernest. Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2009;
Gene Andrew Jarrett. Representing
the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2011;
Harryette Mullen. The Cracks Between What
We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012.
WORKS CITED
Anthony,
Arthé A. Picturing Black New Orleans:
A Creole Photographer’s View of the Early Twentieth Century . Gainesville. University Press of Florida,
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Davis,
Thadious M. Southscapes: Geographies of
Race, Region and Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
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Elam,
Michele. The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race,
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University Press, 2011.
Ernest,
John. Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African
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Hobson,
Fred. Tell About the South: The
Southern Rage to Explain .Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
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Jarrett,
Gene Andrew. Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American
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Kolin, Philip C. and
Susan Swartwout, eds. Hurricane
Blues: Poems about Katrina and Rita. Cape Girardeau: Southeast Missouri
State University Press, 2006.
Mitchell,
W. J. T. “Representation.” Critical Terms
for Literary Study. 2nd ed. Ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas
McLaughlin. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995. 11-22.
Mullen,
Harryette. The Cracks Between What We Are
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University of Alabama Press, 2012.
Scarry,
Elaine. Resisting Representation.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Selzer,
Linda Ferguson. “Reading the Painterly Text: Clarence Major’s ‘The Slave Trade:
View from the Middle Passage.” African
American Review 33.2 (1999): 209-229.
Stringer,
Dorothy . “Not Even Past”: Race, Historical Trauma, and Subjectivity in
Faulkner, Larsen and Van Vechten. New
York: Fordham University Press, 2010.
Trethewey,
Natasha. Bellocq’s Ophelia. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2002.
_________________.
Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the
Mississippi Gulf Coast. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2010.
_________________.
Domestic Work. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2000.
_________________.
Native Guard. New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 2006.
_________________.
Thrall. New York: Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 2012.
