Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard

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Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard

In this issue, we turn our attention to a profound and Pulitzer Prize-winning collection: Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard. This guide is designed to unravel the intricate layers of Trethewey's work, providing you with a clear, detailed, and academically sound framework for understanding her exploration of history, race, and personal memory. We will delve into the critical lens of New Historicism, break down her poetic techniques, and illuminate the central themes that make this collection a cornerstone of contemporary American poetry.

About the Author: Natasha Trethewey (b. 1966)

Natasha Trethewey is a distinguished American poet and academic, whose work is deeply rooted in the complex history and personal narratives of the American South.

Key Biographical Points:

• A Complex Heritage: Born in Gulfport, Mississippi, to a Black mother and a white father, Trethewey's very existence was illegal under Mississippi's anti-miscegenation laws at the time. This personal history of being biracial in the segregated South is a foundational element that permeates all her work, forcing a constant interrogation of identity, belonging, and societal law.

• Personal Tragedy: Her mother was tragically murdered by her stepfather when Trethewey was 19. This profound loss deeply informs the themes of grief, memory, and elegy in her poetry and her later memoir, Memorial Drive.

• Poetic Accolades: Her collection Native Guard (2006) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She served as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States from 2012 to 2014, using the position to champion the role of poetry in national discourse.

• https://giggleinsinuate.com/qmze13wz?key=8d2be7a0e3f26cd2be6a8e5469a9e563The Historian-Poet: Trethewey is often described as a poet-historian. She meticulously researches historical events, particularly those involving marginalised figures, and weaves them together with her own autobiographical material, challenging official historical records.

Critical Appreciation

Native Guard is not merely a collection of poems; it is a deliberate act of historical and personal recovery. It exemplifies a key critical approach in literary studies.

• A New Historicist Masterpiece:
  As highlighted in the research by S. Sangeetha, Native Guard is a prime text for New Historicist analysis. This theory rejects the idea that literature exists in a vacuum. Instead, it argues that we must read literary and non-literary texts (like diaries, laws, or military records) from the same period alongside each other to understand the complex power dynamics of that era. Trethewey does this masterfully by placing her mother's story and her own beside the forgotten history of the Louisiana Native Guards.

• Excavating Silenced Histories:
  The collection gives voice to the "subaltern"—a term for populations outside the structures of political power whose voices are systematically silenced. The Black soldiers of the Native Guard and Trethewey's own mother are subaltern figures whose stories traditional history has overlooked or erased. Trethewey's poetry becomes the medium through which they can finally "speak."

• The Palimpsest of the South:
  Trethewey treats the Southern landscape as a palimpsest—a surface on which original writing has been erased to make room for new text, but where traces of the old remain. Her poems reveal the hidden, often violent, histories that lie just beneath the surface of the modern American South, from the legacy of slavery to the personal trauma of racial prejudice.

Summary

Native Guard is a meticulously structured collection in three sections, creating a powerful dialogue between the personal and the political.

• Part One: The Personal Elegy
  This section is deeply autobiographical, focusing on the poet's grief following her mother's death. Poems like "Graveyard Blues" establish themes of mourning, memory, and the struggle to preserve the past against the erosion of time. It grounds the collection in a raw, emotional reality.

• Part Two: The Historical Core - The "Native Guard" Sequence
  The central sequence of the collection is a crown of sonnets titled "Native Guard." This sequence gives the book its name and its historical weight. It is written from the perspective of a fictional, yet historically-grounded, Black soldier in the Louisiana Native Guards, one of the first official Black regiments in the Union Army during the American Civil War. These poems document his duty to guard Confederate prisoners, a deeply ironic task that highlights the complex racial politics of the war.

• Part Three: The Fusion of Personal and Public History
  The final section braids the threads from the first two parts together. Trethewey reflects on her own biracial identity and her relationship with her white father alongside continued meditations on the South's racial history. The collection concludes by affirming the poet's role as a guardian of memory, much like the historical Native Guard soldiers.

Major Themes

• Memory, History, and Forgetting:
  The collection is a sustained meditation on what we choose to remember as a society and what we force ourselves to forget. Trethewey insists on remembering the uncomfortable truths—the forgotten Black soldiers, the violence against her mother, the pain of her own marginalisation.

• The Legacy of Slavery and Racism:
  Trethewey explores the enduring impact of America's original sin. This is not just historical but deeply personal, as seen in poems about her parents' illegal marriage and the everyday microaggressions she faced.

• Grief and Elegy:
  The collection is, at its heart, an elegy for Trethewey's mother. It explores the long, complex process of grieving and how memory can be both a source of pain and a tool for preservation.

• Biracial Identity and "Between-ness":
  Trethewey consistently explores her position as a person caught between two racial identities, fully accepted by neither the Black nor the white community. This state of "between-ness" mirrors the position of the Native Guard soldiers, who were fighting for a Union that still viewed them as second-class citizens.

• The Role of the Poet as Witness:
  The poet positions herself as a modern-day "native guard," a sentinel whose duty is to bear witness to the forgotten and to inscribe their stories into the historical record, ensuring they are not lost.

Character Sketch 

• The Poet's Persona:
  The voice in the autobiographical poems is one of a grieving daughter and a thoughtful observer. She is introspective, grappling with the weight of the past and her own complex identity. She is determined and resilient, using language as her tool for survival and truth-telling.

• The Native Guard Soldier:
  The fictional soldier in the central sequence is literate, observant, and deeply aware of the ironies of his position. He is a historian in his own right, keeping a diary of his experiences. He embodies dignity and duty in the face of profound injustice, representing the often-overlooked agency of Black people in American history.

• The Mother (Gwen):
  Though absent, the figure of Trethewey's mother is a powerful presence. She represents love, loss, and the specific vulnerabilities of Black womanhood. Her story is a private tragedy that echoes the public tragedies of racial violence.

• The Father (Eric Trethewey):
  The poet's white father, also a poet, represents a more complicated personal history. Their relationship explores themes of love, racial difference, and the ways in which personal connections can both bridge and highlight societal divides.

Famous Excerpt 

From the poem "Native Guard":

"I recall now the chain-link / gate, the field of horses, / their tracks like coins in the hard mud. / I know better than to believe / in memory, yet I can't help / but recall the weight of things / unknown, the history that lies / buried, even now, in the soft earth."

• Analysis: This excerpt perfectly encapsulates the collection's core themes. The "chain-link gate" suggests imprisonment and division. The "history that lies buried" is a direct reference to the South's hidden, violent past. The speaker's scepticism—"I know better than to believe in memory"—highlights the New Historicist concern with the unreliability of historical narratives. Yet, the compulsion to "recall the weight of things unknown" defines the poet's mission: to dig up and examine these buried truths, regardless of the difficulty.

Literary Techniques 

Trethewey's power as a poet lies in her masterful use of form and language.

• New Historicism

• Definition: A literary theory that argues a work of literature cannot be understood outside of the historical context in which it was created. It insists on reading literary texts alongside non-literary texts (e.g., diaries, laws, medical records) from the same period to reveal the period's competing power structures and ideologies.

• Trethewey's Use: She places her mother's story (a personal, "non-literary" history) and the diary of the Black soldier (a fictionalised historical document) alongside the official narrative of the Civil War, challenging and expanding that narrative.

• Crown of Sonnets

• Definition: A sequence of sonnets (usually seven) where the last line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the next. The final, fifteenth line is often comprised of the first lines of the preceding fourteen sonnets, creating a tightly interlocked structure.

• Trethewey's Use: The "Native Guard" sequence is a crown of sonnets. This traditional, rigid form contrasts powerfully with the revolutionary and marginalised content. It symbolises the act of preserving and structuring a history that was once chaotic and suppressed, imposing order on memory.

• Elegy

• Definition: A poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead.

• Trethewey's Use: The entire collection functions as an extended elegy, mourning not only her mother but also the forgotten soldiers and a lost, more honest version of American history.

• Persona

• Definition: A voice or character assumed by a poet or author. It is a dramatic speaker who is not the author, though they may share similarities.

• Trethewey's Use: In the "Native Guard" sequence, she adopts the persona of a Black Union soldier. This allows her to give a direct, first-person voice to a historical figure who was denied one, creating an intimate and powerful connection with the past.

• Imagery

• Definition: Visually descriptive or figurative language used to create mental pictures for the reader.

• Trethewey's Use: Her imagery is often stark and grounded in the physical world: "the field of horses," "the hard mud," "the ghost of history." She uses concrete images to make abstract concepts like memory and history tangible and visceral.

• Palimpsest

• Definition: A manuscript page that has been written on, scraped off, and used again, but where traces of the original writing remain visible. Metaphorically, it refers to a place or object where layers of history coexist.

• Trethewey's Use: The American South, particularly Mississippi, is treated as a palimpsest in her work. Her poems reveal the contemporary landscape while simultaneously showing the traces of its violent, racist past just beneath the surface.

 Important Key Points

• Native Guard is a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection that intertwines personal memoir with public history.

• It is a key text for New Historicist analysis, demonstrating how literature can challenge and expand official historical narratives.

• The collection is structured in three parts, moving from personal grief, to historical witness, and finally to a synthesis of the two.

• Central themes include memory versus forgetting, biracial identity, grief, and the legacy of racism.

• Trethewey uses traditional forms, like the crown of sonnets, to contain and give structure to marginalised and traumatic histories.

• The poet creates a powerful persona for a Black Civil War soldier, giving voice to the historically silenced.

• Understanding terms like elegy, persona, and palimpsest is crucial for analysing Trethewey's techniques.

• Ultimately, the collection positions the poet as a "native guard"—a guardian of forgotten stories and a witness against historical amnesia.

Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard is a profound and essential work for understanding the complexities of American history and identity. It proves that poetry is not an escape from the world, but a powerful tool for engaging with it more deeply and truthfully. We hope this guide serves as a valuable companion on your journey through this remarkable collection.

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