Title: Natasha Trethewey.

Native Guard
Author(s):Carrie Shipers
Source:Prairie Schooner. 80.4 (Winter 2006): p199. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type:Book review
Bookmark:Bookmark this Document

Natasha Trethewey. Native Guard. Houghton Mifflin.

"Why the rough edge of beauty?" asks the poem "Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971," in the first section of Native
Guard, Natasha Trethewey's third collection. The answer offered throughout the book is grief, an emotion
explored in permutations ranging from the intensely personal to the historical. The first section of the book
takes bereavement, specifically the speaker's loss of her mother, as its subject. In "What the Body Can Say,"
the speaker considers several familiar gestures--the posture of grief or prayer as well as "the raised thumb /
that is both a symbol of agreement and the request / for a ride," the raised fingers of the peace sign--and
concludes:
What matters is context--

the side of the road, or that my mother wanted

something I still can't name: what, kneeling,

my face behind my hands, I might ask of God.

Intertwined with grief for the loss of the mother is grief for loss of an integral part of the self, of one's history,
and of the opportunity to better understand who and what we have lost. As in "Theories of Time and Space,"
the poem that acts as the book's preface, the meditations on grief in the first third of Native Guard ask what
home means after we have left, as well as what happens when our home leaves us or refuses to acknowledge
our claim to it.

The question of home is also central to the book's second section, which takes as its epigraph a quote from
Nina Simone: "Everybody knows about Mississippi." What the speaker in these poems knows, however, is
necessarily partial and subjective. In the poem "Pilgrimage," the speaker spends the night in Vicksburg, a city,
like many in the South, that uses Civil War history as a tourist attraction. Tretheweywrites, "In my dream, / the
ghost of history lies down beside me, // rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm." The subtlety of the speaker's
claims resonates throughout this collection: it is the ghost of history, not history itself, that torments her, and it
does so in dreams, which speaks to the difficulty of vanquishing such ghosts in waking hours. The specificity
with which Trethewey approaches the question of Mississippi history, particularly with regard to race, allows
these poems to make claims that might otherwise--and that arguably have been--ignored for many years.
Also contained within this second section is a crown of free-verse sonnets from which the collection takes its
title and which commemorates the Louisiana Native Guards, one of the first black regiments to fight for the
Union during the Civil War. Notes in the back of the book offer more specific historical information about the
experiences of these soldiers, but what matters most in Trethewey's poem is the muscular eloquence of its
first-person speaker, a man who records what he sees and thinks in a used journal stolen from a Confederate
home, a man who relies on ink rather than "the lure / of memory--flawed, changeful--that dulls the lash / for the
master, sharpens it for the slave." In another section of the poem, the speaker recounts how he uses his skill at
writing to serve the Union and the other men in his regiment:
I record names,

send home simple notes, not much more than how

and when--an official duty. I'm told

it's best to spare most detail, but I know

there are things which must be accounted for.

In lesser hands, this poem might have allowed the historical information to become a burden instead of an
incentive, but Trethewey's poetic restraint allows us to experience the speaker's consciousness rather than
merely to imagine it. The poem's final sentence, "Truth be told" encapsulates the speaker's earnest desire to
preserve his understanding of the war, but it also speaks to what Tretheweyaccomplishes in this poem--she
tells a story that matters as only the truth can. To speak of these things--or to write of them, as
 doTrethewey and this speaker--does not mitigate the harm of slavery or the hardships suffered by black
soldiers at the hands of their white superiors, but it does give voice to an overlooked portion of the historical
record.
Many of Trethewey's poems insist that our history is inescapable, even--perhaps especially when--we most
want to escape it. The third section of Native Guard examines the paradoxical complexities of Mississippi's
racial history and how it intertwines with the speaker's personal experiences. In "My Mother Dreams Another
Country," Trethewey writes:
Already the words are changing. She is changing

from colored to negro, black still years ahead.

This is 1966--she is married to a white man--and

there are more names for what grows inside her.

It is enough to worry about words like mongrel

and the infertility of mules and mulattoes

while flipping through a book of baby names.

The major strength of these poems is the compelling connections Trethewey makes between personal
experience and cultural memory. If these poems are confessional--and I mean that without the implied
pejorative often attached to the term--their success lies not only in their specificity but in the enormous control
evidenced in their lines. This control extends not only to the poet's use of language, her insistence on using the
right word even when it is an ugly one, but also to the variety of forms that are used in the
book. Trethewey employs, among others, the pantoum, the villanelle, the ghazal, the blues lyric, and the
traditional rhyming quatrain, and she does so while maintaining a sense of precision in every line.

The book's final poem, "South," draws together the book in a poem that is both an elegy for Mississippi's
troubled racial history and a personal declaration of defiance. The poem ends with these lines:

Where the roads, buildings, and monuments

are named to honor the Confederacy,

where that old flag still hangs, I return

to Mississippi, state that made a crime

of me--mulatto, half-breed--native

in my native land, this place they'll bury me.

Trethewey's speaker cannot look away from a place that has tried to bury its past without fully admitting to it,
and she also cannot deny that this place, with all its difficulties, is where she feels she belongs.

Shipers, Carrie

Source Citation

Shipers, Carrie. "Natasha Trethewey. Native Guard." Prairie Schooner 80.4 (2006): 199+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 13 May 2010.
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