Reading Natasha Trethewey – Living Monuments

Natasha Trethewey’s works display an intense, powerful and intimate connection with the recent history of the South, and also a strong determination in understanding her own existence and relation with her life events. Her poetry and prose are revealing of those relationships. Knowing little fragments of her personal life feels distressing and at the same time encouraging of how the power of words can provide, not just consolation, but even rehabilitation and healing of one’s own life.

Anguish and suffering have been in many cases a catalyst of creativity and art. Rimbaud’s or Hölderlin’s works are the saviors of their own mental sanity; at least until certain moment in their lives. Martin Heidegger in his essays Existence and Being (1936) said about Hölderlin’s poetry: “Poetry is the establishment of Being by means of the word.” Natasha can certainly be represented by this line as she is what her words do: show us how the rivers of oppression, conflict and despair flow through meandering ravines and valleys to reach at the end an ocean of peace. 

Poetry in its intention to decipher, enlighten and think thought, depicts the intimacy of words. Set in perspective to history, poetry shows us the intimacy of those historical moments that historians in their work try to elucidate. Poetry inquires and asks ourselves from a position of self reflection, giving the reader and the writer the ability to understand each other, interpret each other and have a conversation to seek truth. Poetry becomes then a testimony for the reader and a testament for the writer, both in search of understanding. 

Understanding and truth is what historians, poets and readers try to piece together. Conflict, power struggle, repression are constants in the history of nations and peoples. Some historical events across the world disseminate monuments that sow discord and leave a legacy of suffering that accomplishes the opposite to what monuments should leave us thinking. Natasha in the Epigraph of Native Guards uses a thoughtful quote to start the conversation of monuments and history.

“If this war is to be forgotten, I ask in the name of all 

things sacred what shall men remember” ?

– Frederick Douglass

Hence, what are we learning from our monuments? what do we remember of what our monuments are telling us? What are monuments testimony of?

I think monuments represent tiny fragments of history, likely one side of the historical outcome, and therefore, rarely seek truth but just exaltation of certain qualities and historical ends. We see that perpetuating this single view of history through monuments, in many or most occasions, produces divisiveness rather than unity and understanding of historical conflicts.

My perception of monuments has always been an aseptic one. A concept of monuments that has helped me understand their symbolism as the vestiges that history leaves for us to look at, to understand what is behind and what we have ahead as time progresses. When reading Native Guards I realized that mine is the convenient stance towards what monuments tell us. Especially towards certain kinds of monuments. Without the correct historical context, monuments can be considered anything the viewer conveniently sees. Natasha’s poetry came to me to enlighten what these monuments mean to others; others like Caroline Randall Williams; others that do not have a voice; others that are ignorant of their own history and blind to what those monuments are telling us:

“Weathered monument to some of the dead”.

“What is monument to their legacy?” 

– Elegy for the Native Guards.

This exclusive, one sided and crippled use of use of historical monuments helps Natasha’s work not just to unearth the horrors of slavery, but through their (her) poetry, she leaves the reader other traces of historical analysis worth to investigate, as they appear to me as universal reflections on history.

For the Native Guards, joining the Union did not change their situation much. In December 1862 they where free men doing a “nigger work”, to whom their “half rations made their work familiar still”. The things they needed where taken from the confederates abandoned homes, like the used journals. In these journals the poems are written overlapping others writers words. From the journal it reads: “On every page his story is intersecting with my own”. Looking at this line as real a historical event, there is his story (history) and there is my own story (history), both intersecting visions of history. Like in life and history, those two trajectories, despite being the same history, have a different outcome for one person and the other. Successful for the one that writes it, dreadful for the one the suffers it (Natasha). In an almost existential way, the third part of the poem, January 1863, poses the question of freedom and emancipation in a way that it becomes a permanent one throughout the history of nations and peoples: “and are we not the same, slaves in the hands of the master, destiny?”.

Natasha’s poetry makes me think that history is maybe not just what we see written in the books, but is more what it does to the people that experienced it first hand. Hence history is a living thing. As monuments are erected by the ones that shape history, the powerful, history becomes something denied to all others, the weak, the abandoned, the helpless, and therefore turning it into a source of suffering and disagreement. Natasha gives us the opportunity to see history from the eyes of the oppressed, not as a matter of historical accuracy, but as an intimate and delicate historical poem. Her work is a powerful testament of how the humble and poor live and experience in a format that is not in the historical accounts. Inviting us to reflect first hand, and dialogue about what we are going to do to avoid it to happen again in any other way or form. If not we can look back at the beginning of the book in Charles Wright words: 

“Memory is a cemetery

I’ve visited once or twice, white

                                   ubiquitous and the set aside

Everywhere underfoot”

– Charles Wright.

“What is the use and purpose of poets in an age of darkness?” thinks Hölderlin in part seven of his Bread and Wine poem.What are poets for when we most need them? To my heart Natasha elegantly and formidably reached the high purpose a poet aims to accomplish. She moved me into the intimacy of the sufferings of many Afroamerican people in these dark times of History.