Black Poetry Month: Natasha Trethewey

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I have dedicated my column to Black poets this month. This week, I reflect on the work of Natasha Trethewey, poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winner.

Trethewey was born in Mississippi to a Black mother and white father. Her parents had to marry in Ohio because their interracial marriage was illegal throughout the South in the 1960s. Their daughter was born on the centennial of the Confederate Memorial Day, a cultural holiday in former slave states.

Trethewey’s award-winning poetry explores this personal and national history with race. “Enlightenment” is a poem about looking at the portrait of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello with her white father. The clever title evokes both this Founding Father’s role in the 18th century philosophical movement as well as the poet’s own epiphany: “this history that links us — white father, Black daughter — even as it renders us other to each other.”

The poem “Southern History” describes the myth taught to schoolchildren that “the slaves were clothed, fed, and better off under a master’s care.” This was “our textbook’s grinning proof — a lie / my teacher guarded. Silent, so did I.”

You might surmise by that rhyming couplet that “Southern History” is a formal poem, meaning the verses have a meter and rhyming pattern. Trethewey often writes in traditional or “inherited forms” of poetry, so-called because they have been handed down from the past. Certain sonnet forms are named after white men like Shakespeare and Spencer.

Trethewey uses these inherited forms to give voice to the very people Black theologian Howard Thurman termed “the disinherited” or historically oppressed. For example, Trethewey wrote a sonnet cycle in the imagined voice of a regiment of Black soldiers in the Union Army who were assigned to guard Confederate prisoners of war.

Use of inherited forms can be subversive of the very culture that created them. Black activist Audre Lorde imagined that the master’s tools could be used to tear down the master’s house. Yet, Trethewey is intent on humanizing all of her subjects. The Black soldiers understand they are “jailors to those who still would have us slaves.” But they have pity on the suffering Confederates: “The hot air carries the stench of limbs, rotten in the bone pit.”

What I admire most about Trethewey’s work is that, while unflinchingly describing “the dark foil in this American story,” she understands the hope of literature to heal — “To survive trauma one must be able to tell a story about it.”

As accomplished and credentialed as she truly is, Trethewey also looks to the wisdom of other voices, including ones very close to her. Her memoir quotes her daughter: “Mommy, do you know how, when you love someone and you know they are hurting, it hurts you, too?”

Seems likely that we will be gifted with more outstanding Trethewey poets.

Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church. His newly-published book is a collection of his columns for the Chatham News + Record titled “Hope Matters: Churchless Sermons.”