Native Guard: Southern Poetry, Unguarded [Book Review]
Natasha Trethewey's Pulitzer Prize-winning Native Guard offers a refreshing and intricately crafted collection of poems that expertly dovetails both American history and personal history. The contents are intertwining themes: grief; abuse; racial identity; history; interracial relations. The poems address Southern conflict and disillusionment.
Indeed, far from romanticizing the Southern childhood experience, Trethewey provides a biracial woman of color’s perspective, which offers necessary insight and a unique voice to a Southern narrative to the plights of the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, a Confederate militia regiment comprised of people of color. As well as that, Trethewey addresses the social injustices wrought on both the soldiers of color forced to serve and the contemporary, institutionalized struggles of Trethewey and her parents’ biracial union. The Southern identity, especially for people of color, is more than sweet tea, canned jam, and stringing green beans. When handling the struggles with racism and sorrow in a Mississippi setting, despite the topics Trethewey approaches, she avoids being moralistic or demoralizing.
Trethewey organizes Native Guard into three sections and, as the collection progresses, there’s balanced poetry in the sense that it can be personal in terms of loss and discovery, but it also connects to a broader scheme. In “Myth,” as Trethewey recalls “I was asleep while you were dying. / It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow / I make between my slumber and my waking” (14), the rhythm of the words and the repetition of the lines are almost soft, even when the subject is dark and Trethewey is apt at exact diction, though it is not pointed because the poem almost rests like an uneasy lullaby that encapsulates both the mother-daughter relationship and the authentic mourning. Just as with the current of Trethewey’s identity (and, on a broader scale, the identities of native Southerners of color), Trethewey engages the subject of her mother’s life with resounding emotional authenticity.
Trethewey approaches the personal tragedy of her mother’s murder in poems that contain a poignancy similar to “What Is Evidence,” especially in regards to "Myth.” Nothing is overstated. Many poems are indeed individual-centric, but Trethewey conveys everything concisely. In “What Is Evidence,” the poem only states the actions of the subject—a woman and her injuries: “splintered / clavicle, pierced temporal--her thin bones / settling a bit by day, the way all things do” (11). The prosody does not demand emotion, and the compelling images speak just enough.
There’s power in words, especially when a society attempts to dampen or stifle the relaying of marginalized experiences and with “Elegy for the Native Guards,” Trethewey gives voice those who were silenced. Trethewey gifts each speaker and each story with a respectable agency and shows a regard for external plights rather than focusing solely on the self; in addition, Trethewey elicits empathy without being forced. She is succinct and precise while wielding accessible language; indeed, the language is simple, though not necessarily simplistic. She experiments with forms such as the ghazal (“Graveyard Blues”) and the sonnet (“Southern History”), and the form does not impede the subject, which is, in this case, Trethewey burying her mother. When posed, the rhyme, repetition, and added musicality consummately construct engaging, vivid narratives.
In “My Mother Dreams Another Country,” the speaker states, “maternal impression--the shape, like an unknown / country, marking the back of the newborn’s thigh” (37). Such as here, a good many of Trethewey’s poems establish tactile imagery, and, later in the collection, “Southern Gothic” evokes a macabre sense of unease and captures the sense of dilapidation so prominent in Southern Gothic literature, as well as the bittersweet nostalgia and mystery. Often in Southern Gothic literature, harsh secrets are obscured, and this unguarded uneasiness carries throughout like revenants hidden under molding floorboards.
“Southern Gothic,” one of my favorites in this spectacular collection, is especially a sapphire in a jagged, gem-littered forest floor. shining, yet painful to tread—and painful to experience, since the sense of discontent stems from the sinister Southern experiences with prejudice from a woman of color’s perspective: the slurs; the taboo and outright lawful condemnation of interracial marriages and, therefore, the children who come from that union.
Ultimately, Trethewey’s Native Guard presents many somber themes with precision. Her images are direct and haunting like an elegy with all the chances possible to be caustic, but Trethewey writes with both precision and maturity.