Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey

First published: 2006

Type of work: Poetry

The Poems

Natasha Trethewey’s third book of poems, Native Guard, is dedicated to her African American mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, a social worker who was murdered by a former husband when the poet was nineteen years old. Trethewey’s white father is Canadian-born poet Eric Trethewey, author of five collections of poetry, who teaches at Hollins College in Virginia. Biracial marriages were illegal in Mississippi, where Trethewey was born, in Gulfport, in 1966, so her parents were married in Ohio. They divorced when she was six, but Trethewey retained her birth name, a decision that she believes her stepfather resented.

Trethewey’s first collection of poems, Domestic Work (2000), was selected by Rita Dove as winner of the inaugural Cave Canem poetry prize for the best collection of poems submitted by an African American poet. Several of the thirty-four poems in that book concern her maternal grandmother and her life and work in Mississippi beginning in the 1930’s. In her introduction, Dove praises the poems for their “muscular luminosity.” In the twenty-nine poems of her second collection, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), Trethewey creates the persona of a prostitute who is the daughter of a white father. She based her character on a 1912 photograph by E. J. Bellocq collected in Storyville Portraits (1971), photographs of prostitutes from New Orleans’s red-light district, which operated between 1897 and 1917.

Like Trethewey’s first two books, Native Guard is a slender collection, or more aptly “book,” for as she told one interviewer, “I like to think of myself as a poet who writes not collections of poems, but books of poems.” Many if not most poets assemble collections after the fact from work accumulated over some months or years. As one poet has put it, “Books of verse are not deliberately planned—they grow.” Trethewey by contrast prefers to think of her work as an “integral whole,” and she enjoys doing the research that informs many of her poems, including those that concern the volume’s namesake, the Louisiana Native Guards unit, which was mustered into service in the fall of 1862. As she explains in her notes at the end of the book, the unit became “the first officially sanctioned regiment of black soldiers in the Union Army.”

Native Guard’s title poem comprises ten linked, free-form sonnets in a corona pattern (in the manner of John Donne’s La Corona devotional sonnets). Part of Trethewey’s intention in writing it and the other poems of the book was to create a monument of sorts to the African American soldiers who served on Ship Island, offshore from Gulfport. In some interviews, the poet has indicated her commitment to correcting episodes of what she calls “historic erasure” by remembering forgotten people and events. Several poems in Native Guard are more personal memorials, commemorating Trethewey’s murdered mother, to whom the book is dedicated. In an interview, Trethewey mentions that the “stone pillow” of her mother’s grave at the end of “Graveyard Blues” does not actually exist. She has also indicated that in her attempt to “create a monument for these lesser known soldiers” she ended up creating one for her own mother as well.

The thirty-eight poems of Native Guard (just twenty-nine if one counts the connected sonnets of the title poem as a single piece) are divided into three sections following the unrhymed couplets of the prefatory poem, “Theories of Time and Space,” which begins, “You can get there from here, though/ there’s no going home.” The poem directs readers down U.S. Interstate 49 in Mississippi to Trethewey’s hometown of Gulfport and on a tour of Ship Island. Significantly, the poem concludes with a photograph of “you” (a reader). Perhaps no other contemporary poet has demonstrated such consistent fascination with photography and with the poetry of ekphrasis (writing connected to a specific image, usually a painting or a photograph). In an interview, Trethewey suggests that her interest in photography began after her mother’s death, and she refers to Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977). In another interview she explains that her fascination with photographs does not simply concern memory or nostalgia, but their “narrative possibilities” as well: “I love how they both reveal a version of something, but also conceal countless other versions. They speak most to me about absence.”

The concluding section, comprising eleven poems, opens with “Pastoral,” one of Trethewey’s unrhymed syllabic sonnets (perhaps a more accurate term than “free-form” sonnet). In it, the autobiographical first-person speaker dreams she is gathered with the Fugitive Poets (she names Robert Penn Warren) for a photo shoot in Atlanta. The Fugitives, beginning in the 1930’s, called for a return to traditional agrarian, or pastoral, values in the South, so Trethewey’s dreamed connection with them is darkly humorous. She concludes with a play on the last lines of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), in which Quentin Compson exclaims to his Canadian roommate at Harvard that he does not hate the South. In “Pastoral,” the poets ask the speaker what could well be a rhetorical question: “You don’t hate the South?”

The final section—which includes examples of two strict poetic forms, the ghazal and the pantoum, additional reminders of Trethewey’s commitment to formalism—connects personal, familial, and cultural histories. In one interview, Trethewey notes that she has worked “to blend personal or family stories with collective history.” Although she has laid claim to a particular biracial perspective on life in the Deep South, Trethewey has also researched “casta paintings from eighteenth-century colonial Mexico,” which “depict the mixed blood unions and the children of such unions in the colony.” Thus, she has demonstrated interest in writing poems that would take her both outside “the muck of ancestry,” as she phrases it in “Southern Gothic,” and away from where “the old flag” of the Confederacy “still hangs,” as she writes near the end of “South,” the last poem in Native Guard.

Critical Context

Trethewey holds the Phillis Wheatley Chair in Poetry at Emory University and lives in Decatur, Georgia. Native Guard won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. Various reviewers and interviewers have observed how frequently Trethewey introduces dates into her poems, sometimes in the opening lines, as in “The Southern Crescent,” sometimes in the titles, as in “Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971” or in the villanelle “King Cotton, 1907.” The latter is the first poem in the four-poem series “Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi,” which appears as the second piece in the second section of Native Guard. Moreover, each of the ten sonnets in “Native Guard” is dated, from “November 1862” to “1865.” The imagined first-person speaker, a literate former slave who keeps a journal and writes letters for the prisoners of war he guards, begins, “Truth be told, I do not want to forget/ anything of my former life: the landscape’s/ song of bondage—dirge in the river’s throat.” The last sonnet in the sequence reflects on the massacre of black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow in the spring of 1864 by troops under the command of General Nathan Bedford Forrest among the “things which must be accounted for” at the war’s end. Trethewey’s keen ear is apparent in the assonant sounds of the final lines, which link the poem to its beginning: “Beneath battlefields, green again,/ the dead molder—a scaffolding of bone/ we tread upon, forgetting. Truth be told.” The lines also remind readers of the way in which certain events tend to get lost in the stream of history.

Bibliography

Mlinko, Ange. Review of Native Guard, by Natasha Trethewey. Poetry 191, no. 1 (October, 2007): 56-60. Reads Native Guard as following the Fichtean dialectical structure of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

Shipers, Carrie. Review of Native Guard, by Natasha Trethewey. Prairie Schooner 80, no. 4 (Winter, 2006). 199-201. Emphasizes the role of grief and mourning in Trethewey’s third book.

Trethewey, Natasha. “Inscriptive Restorations: An Interview with Natasha Trethewey.” Interview by Charles Henry Rowell. Callaloo 27, no. 4 (2004): 1022-1034. Rowell and Trethewey talk about the forgotten and invisible aspects of history and culture and Trethewey’s project of restoring lost memory through her poetry.

Trethewey, Natasha. “Interview: Natasha Trethewey on Facts, Photographs, and Loss.” Interview by Sara Kaplan. Fugue 32 (Winter/Spring, 2007): 66-74. Interview in a literary journal that also includes two poems by Trethewey.

Trethewey, Natasha. “An Interview with Natasha Trethewey.” Interview by Jill Petty. Callaloo 19, no. 2 (1996): 364-375. Trethewey discusses the role of photography in her work as the representation of absence, among other topics.

Trethewey, Natasha. “An Interview with Natasha Trethewey.” Interview by Pearl Amelia McHaney. Five Points 11, no. 3 (September, 2007): 96-115. Trethewey makes detailed remarks about history, poetry, and their place in her thoughts, in an interview conducted one month after she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Trethewey, Natasha. “Native Daughter: Questions for Natasha Trethewey.” Interview by Deborah Solomon. The New York Times, May 13, 2007, p. 15. Brief but suggestive question-and-answer session on Native Guard and some details of the poet’s life and craft.

Wojahn, David. “History Shaping Selves: Four Poets.” Southern Review 43, no. 1 (Winter, 2007): 218-231. Compares the representation of history in Trethewey’s work to its representation in the work of Major Jackson, David Rivard, and Rodney Jones.