“Tretheway strives to make her students 'see beyond their selves' and 'explore areas about their own lives and families that they want to investigate by placing them in a historical context.' ”

THE WORK OF NATASHA TRETHEWEY

Associate Professor of Creative Writing, Emory University

74th U.S. Colored Infantry, Ship Island, Mississippi Photographer unknown Jpg. image from albumen photoprint Circa 1864 Courtesy of Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery Special Collections University of Maryland, Baltimore County

In her class at Emory, Poetry and the Muse of History, Natasha Trethewey strives to make her students “see beyond their selves” and “explore areas about their own lives and families that they want to investigate by placing them in a historical context.” This expansion of vision is essential, she believes, “to remove some of the navel gazing young poets are so often guilty of.”

Trethewey’s third poetry collection, Native Guard, is newly released from Houghton Mifflin. As with her past two collections—Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000) and Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf Press, 2002)—Trethewey conjures history through her “envelope of form,” poetry.

The cover of Trethewey’s new collection pictures Colonel Nathan Daniels’s actual diary. “He confiscated it from the home of a Confederate and cross-wrote over his entries in order to conserve paper,” Tretheway says. “I think it is a perfect metaphor for the way our own stories intersect and overlap.”

For Native Guard, Trethewey returned to her native Mississippi to research the lives of the first sanctioned regiment of black soldiers in the Union Army, who were stationed at Ship Island, Mississippi. Growing up in Gulfport, Mississippi, Trethewey recalls a landscape speckled with monuments and memorials for the fallen Confederate soldiers, yet nothing reflected the lives of the Louisiana Native Guards. She acquired the diary of one of the regiment's officers, Francis E. Dumas—the son of a white Creole father and a mulatto mother—who had inherited slaves when his father died. “He then freed them,” she says, “and encouraged them to enlist as well.” While writing the collection, she “imagined one of Major Dumas's former slaves, who takes on the Army's task of writing letters to the families of dead soldiers and of composing letters for invalid or illiterate Confederate soldiers.”

Trethewey is currently on sabbatical and is the Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor of Documentary and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill for the 2005–2006 academic year. She already has begun work on her next collection, tentatively titled Thrall, In which she explores the history behind the naming and classifying of mixed- blood people. Her main focus is on the Mexican casta paintings of the eighteenth century, but she is expanding her research to literature, maps, and botany, while also looking at eighteenth- century travel literature and captivity narratives.        

Miscegenation

In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name
begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong – mis in Mississippi.

A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same
as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi.

Faulkner's Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name
for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi.

My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name.
I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi.

When I turned 33 my father said, It's your Jesus year – you're the same
age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.

I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name –
though I'm not; it means Christmas child, even in Mississippi.

Natasha Trethewey

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