Natasha Trethewey Speaks to Exeter Community

By Kaylee Chen, Sheala Iacobucci and Safira Schiowitz

From behind a computer screen former United States Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey captivated the Exeter community with her poetry and prose on Tuesday. Trethewey, who spoke at Assembly, read excerpts from her new memoir Memorial Drive, along with several poems. She followed her reading with a question-and-answer session with uppers, who read Trethewey’s anthology Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast for English class this term.

Seniors Zoë Barron and Emmanuelle Brindamour, who introduced Trethewey at the beginning of the webinar, noted the personal impacts of Trethewey’s poetry. 

Brindamour read from Trethewey’s poem, “Pilgrimage,” to explain how Trethewey empowered her to confront identity and legacy.  “In my dream, // the ghost of history lies down beside me, // rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm,” she said. “This quote helped me journey through time and explore my indigenous ancestry in relationship with my White French Canadian blood.”

“I stood with the ghost of history and watched one ancestor suppress the identity and livelihood of the other. Just as Trethewey traveled in Native guard from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi to the ghost-haunted Ship Island, I too journeyed through space, and found my connection to the lands home to the stewardship, trade, and burial of my ancestors. For the first time, I asked myself, ‘who and what am I monument to?’,” Brindamour continued. 

“[Trethewey’s Pulitzer-wining anthology] Native Guard intertwines U.S. history with Trethewey’s personal experiences growing up in the deep South as a biracial girl,” Barron said in her introduction. “Trethewey’s work encourages me to explore my own identity as a biracial girl, digging deeper into the racial legacies, struggles, and accomplishments I have inherited.”

Barron was particularly struck by Trethewey’s poem “Blond,” in which the poet grapples with her appearance. “Growing up, I disliked my hair very strongly because I had a white nanny who didn’t like African American hair and my dad had blond hair, so I missed that gene,” Barron said. “I can relate to Trethewey’s poem because that’s the same way that I felt when I was really young.”

As a daughter of a white father and Black mother, Trethewey realized the multiplicity of her racial identity from a young age. “So different was the treatment I received with each of them that I was unsure where or how I belonged. Only at home, the three of us together, did I feel profoundly theirs, and in that trinity of mother, father, and child, I would shut my eyes and fall asleep on the high bed between them,” Trethewey read from Memorial Drive.

Trethewey’s ability to weave personal with cultural garnered praise from English Instructor Courtney Marshall. “She talked about the image of her parents’ hands as Trethewey tries to see why her hands didn’t match either one, and she completely weaves scenes like that into the civil rights workers who were murdered, Mattel, Jet magazine and hot combs,” Marshall said.

Like Hurricane Katrina, Trethewey noted, the current pandemic disproportionately affects Black and Brown communities. “When we see people in the midst of civil unrest, in protest, to the larger injustices of society, we’re in a moment where we can push towards making things more just,” Trethewey said.

Marshall also questioned the pandemic in terms of Trethewey’s messages of memory and forgetting. “I wonder how the students today who will be writing about their experiences living through this can access their particular story; not the main narrative about what it was like in 2020 but those key moments and what kind of artifacts they would include,” she said.

During this period of change, recovery does not always look as we expect. Trethewey referred to her own hometown. “I can still see the palimpsest of what was before, what was underneath this new layer of both destruction and erasure and also recovery and rebuilding,” Trethewey said.

Part of this rebuilding is the acknowledgement of history, and for Trethewey, that began with her own history.

Having been born on Confederate Memorial Day, Trethewey understands that her writing carries with it her two “existential wounds.” Trethewey said that the first wound is the death of her mother and the second us the history of racism and oppression — “a national wound that is bigger than my personal wound.” This national wound is what “hurt” Trethewey into poetry.

This racism and hurt Trethewey felt, however, stemmed from more than just American history. “As much as my father loved me, he still could not unmute himself from the deeply ingrained and often unexamined notions of racial difference in racial hierarchy that are the bedrocks of contemporary white supremacy that was first codified during the enlightenment. When he read [Thrall], he said it’s a beautiful book but it’s sad. And I said, ‘Well daddy, I was sad when I was living it,’” Trethewey explained.

During the question and answer portion of the webinar, one student asked for her perspective on the removal of Confederate statues, specifically if their removal meant the erasure of American history. “Confederate monuments already erase history, they are inscribing the narrative of a lost cause, white supremacy, on the landscape.” Trethewey said. “How different would it be if we had monuments for the nearly two-hundred thousand African Americans who fought for the Union? We’re erasing the history of African Americans.”

Trethewey’s insights on the stories that aren’t told struck Barron, who was first taught about the civil war through a romanticized view. “They didn’t necessarily teach the really dark parts, refusing to acknowledge that slavery is cruel in every aspect. Instead, they spoke of slavery as if it were a necessity. We were taught to believe in “nice” slaveowners,” she said. “‘I admired most how Trethewey constantly brought up the South and a theme of rewriting history and changing narratives.”

Through her works, Trethewey brings voice to tragedies and a sort of honor and understanding to her family, as English Instructor Rebecca Moore notes. “She writes within the sphere of family, and she also asks, ‘look at the world that they lived in.’” Moore recalled Trethewey’s poem “Incident,” with its references to the Klu Klux Klan and the stories of Christmas that require knowledge of the world and its history.

Trethewey employs silences, such as line breaks and sharp descriptions, to amplify her works’ messages. English Instructor Kelly Flynn encourages her students to explore this method in their own writing. “I really love the way [Trethewey] often ends on an image without explaining it, which takes a lot of self-discipline,” Flynn said. “When you edit things out, it intensifies what’s left, and it makes space for the reader imaginatively to enter.”

One student inquired about Trethewey’s relationship to religion. “I don’t see myself as a religious person but the language of religious ceremony has always been compelling to me because I’m a poet,” Trethewey responded.

In respect to religion, upper Emma Lyle shared the connections she has made between Trethewey’s writing and her own life. “You either have a loss of faith or a surge of faith — and it feels like she’s very much on the line of that,” Lyle said. 

Lyle is from the Outer Banks of North Carolina. In her prep year, Hurricane Florence destroyed her bedroom at home. “Trethewey talked about the Gulf Coast’s relief efforts, and at least for me, the language around my community church’s relief efforts was always ‘we’re doing this for God’ rather than ‘we’re doing this for our community,’” Lyle said.

After students submitted three questions in a row all about the “Beyond” in Trethewey’s Beyond Katrina, she put the question back to the students, asking them to interact with the word. English Instructor Todd Hearon appreciated that invitation. “Once a writer has finished a book, the writer likes to allow the book to go out into the world and speak for itself,” he said. “It also ties into Trethewey’s discussion on the quality of restraint and the silences that lie between public history and private narratives. There’s a lot in her books that resonates because it’s not conclusive, because it’s ambiguous or because it opens a question that’s not answered. I think that the word ‘Beyond’ in the title is one of those.”

Barron was especially struck by Trethewey’s confidence in the Q&A session, where the author gave thoughtful responses to each question. “You could tell that quality comes from all the personal reflection that she’s done throughout the years, not just on herself but the world around her, this country, our history. She’s able to take these questions to speak her truth, and she doesn’t hold back,” Barron said.

Whether through prose or poetry, Trethewey masterfully highlights the intersection of not only her own “wounds,” but the aged wounds of our country. English Instructor Willie Perdomo commented on Trethewey’s dexterity. “There are single-note poets and then there are poets who operate on multiple frequencies and speak to our multitudes. Trethewey’s poetic radar captures the American experience in all its truth, beauty, and horror,” Perdomo said.

While her works cover themes such as loss and grief, Trethewey does not view any of her poetry as unlovely, so to speak. “Percy Bysshe Shelley once wrote that poems recorded the best and happiest of times,” Trethewey said. “Even when I’m writing a poem about something very traumatic or difficult, I am at my happiest. Even when I’m writing about difficult subjects, my poems say, ‘I am still here.’ My poems say, ‘I have not been defeated by this.’ My poems say, ‘I have the words to contend with this’— I can make it into something beautiful. That is the most optimistic thing there is.”