“You don’t hate the South? they ask. You don’t hate it
Native Guard, a work that can be described as a graceful reconciliation of history and emotion. Natasha Trethewey, the author, uses her talent of writing poetry to rewrite her life history and honor her mother. Tretheway divides the book into three sections, the first is about the life and death of her mother,the second involves the history of the south and the third is about Trethewey’s life growing up in the south. Throughout the book many themes are introduced to the reader,death,war,abuse as well as change,but the most important component to all of these themes is the importance of remembering your past. Remembrance of how it feels to be exiled(expulsion from one’s native land by authoritative decree)from your home.Despite the psychological and geographical exile Tretheway and blacks faced in the South, she uses poetry as a way to preserve not only her history but often unspoken history of black civil war soldiers.
Throughout Native Guard, the poem “Native guard” is styled as a reflection of memories from black soldiers in the Civil War. Many of the black soldiers in the south were under the impression that their service would be remembered, marked on their tombstones or decked in the page of history(28). The speaker in the poem(Tretheway), as a attribution to his life he writes “ I do not want to forget anything of my former life…..I thought to carry with me want of freedom though I had been freed, remembrance not constant recollection(25)”. This quote is powerful because it shows that even though the cultural status of black people in the south, with pride, the black soldiers still want to fight for the confederacy in hopes of having a monument in their names. Despite the cultural exile that they have to face the freed southern blacks are still full of pride. So many blacks get left out of their homelands history,their lives aren’t memorialized and Tretheway in this quote wanted to add to the restoration of the lives of her people.
Another poem that encapsulates the theme of exile is “Pastoral”. Trethewey grapples with the complexity of her relationship with the South in this poem. For Tretheway,It’s not as simple as hating the south, her family background complicates her feelings. In “Pastoral” she is asked a question that makes it even more difficult for her to have solid emotion toward the south. Quoted from the poem the question was “ You don’t hate the south? they ask. You don’t hate it?” (14.) This question is hard for Tretheway because in most of her younger life she struggles with how to reconcile living in the South, knowing about the past history, and being a mixed race female. The question here reassures her psychological and geographical exile from the south. Pastoral is a poem where Tretheway tries to reconcile her place in southern history.
In the final poem “South” of Native Guard, Tretheway compiles her emotions,southern history, exile and remembrance of the past into one conglomerate. Throughout many of the poems Tretheway expresses her feelings, agony and pain, toward the south but in the poem “South” it suggests that she has come to a sense of peace with her feelings.The poem proposes that despite Mississippi’s troubled history and the psychological toll it has had on her, she still wants to go back and reclaim her native land. “South” demonstrates that Trethewey sees the complexity clearly and now comes to the realization that she has been exiled. Tretheway,with pride, reclaims the south as her own. In the process of reclaiming the south, she says “I return to Mississippi, state that made a crime of me”(46). Growing up as a bi-racial women in the south during the time of the Civil Rights Movement and Jim Crow was not easy for Tretheway or for any people of color at the time. Many lives including Trethewey’s have been hidden and not properly acknowledged in our history, and the fact that Tretheway refused to let those stories remain silent in her poems is what makes her story powerful.
In Conclusion, Tretheway demonstrates a great amount of strength, to know the history of the south, along with her personal experiences, to say that you want to go back to a place that made a crime of her existence ,reclaim it as her own and state want to be buried there that, demonstrates what real pride is. Tretheway quotes E.O Wilson in the beginning of the poem,it says “Homo sapiens is the only species to suffer psychological exile” (45). In relation to the bigger picture, racial exile is a real thing in America. It brings grief, pain and isolation. Many years have gone by since the peaking of this horrible phenomena,and we have witnessed a change in our society through acceptance with living in multiracial communities. This problem is still at the center of discussion and debate in public culture Trethewey’s work in this book continues to teach us that it will always be difficult to know the past but it is important for us to take that knowledge,make something positive out of it and grow as a person and in this society.
Works Cited
- Trethewey, Natasha D. Native Guard. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Print.