Natalina Trethewey's Poetry Essay Example

Natasha Trethewey was born in the year 1996 in Gulfport, Mississipi. She was the first African American poet to be the winner of the Inaugural poetry. Domestic work(2000) presents her as a youthful poet in control of her craft, prepared to testify. African American writers and poets are eager to be heard and to show their role in American society. However, they fail to view this current rejuvenation simply as a new, secluded occurrence; they appreciate their art as a tradition that has evolved after slavery times: the tradition that has its origin in the political and cultural state generated in the post-civil war times is where their art is derived. People who talk in Trethewey's volumes are from generations of the South's black unskilled laborers. Looking up for their lives, Domestic Work(2000), Ophelia(2002), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Native Guard(2006) regard a raised worth on their meek works. Even the most draining and lifeless profession in these poems can turn out to be strong drives of insight and self-expression.

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William Faulkner(P73) insists that the past is never dead and it is not even past. His presumption is that the poet is a diarist acquiring the importance of an entirely objective place, openly explaining the past to the outsiders that misunderstood it.

True to his words in the white lies poem, Trethewey's mother laid her hands on her and washed her mouth with ivory-coast soap to purify her and cleanse her untruthful mouth for associating with white folks and lying that she lived uptown. Her lies were compared with a black surface to bring out the brightness of the white deception. Trethewey (2006) reveals exactly the kind of well off area of reach where dissimilar people groups from all over history bringing about the details on the long and tangled history between the African American and the Irish people. This correlation has however been taken care of through the studies of black and green Atlantic. (Dooley,1998)

As Richard Gray says, the originated South is an "imagined community" as well as existent and given area., conflicted and ghost-haunted by the past memories, Faulkner viewed himself in the firm hold of a solid reality so palpable that he could not erase it away with time. But many societies, races, and genders lived well in that ancient and they motivate different approaches on it, therefore, bringing about the book don't hate the south by Houston Baker. Hayes and Trethewey, cross-examine the natural forces of the South with extra extraordinarily disclosing parables of the southern space and soil. They branch off from the familiar worry that the region is losing uniqueness and that its culture is approaching an end. Hostile to that fear of being taken from one's communal reminiscence by time and new cultural strains, southerners bring out the importance to take control of the soil and lay a firm ground so as to occupy new space instead of a fragile space apart. Their poetry, therefore, symbolizes the level-headed black writers born in the mid-1960's after the civil integrity gains.

The south is described to have some awful beauty, difficult past and too much brutality. But Trethewey still finds a way into her work to make a good picture of the south despite all its shortcomings; inspired by Heaney's work. Her father is an Irish and her mother an American brings her out as an impure racial origin child and this gave her an uneasy relationship growing up. Her fine art of poetry, however, has turned her own racial hybridity as a source of power, discarding its ancient abusive implication. This was inspired by Heaney: Nobel Prize winner (1995), who was born in Northern Ireland into a minority culture, most times referred as the black person who offers solutions for solving enmity in his poetry (Weiley 2009). Poets like those of Heaney and Boland and seeing the way they own Irish history, their relationship to their homeland and to the thoughts of exile encouraged me into my own material in Mississippi, in the deep South. Trethewey was determined to make an impact and to belong.

In Trethewey poems, she tries to make a correspondence between the ancient and the present. She tries to scrutinize how the social, political and moral features of a particular historical occurrence are intertwined with the present day situation (Russel 2014). Trethewey goes ahead and insists the need to remember and learn from our bygones and even tries to place her own personal past experience. She goes out of the way to go back to her roots to investigate more on her history and that of the south since wherever we go our personal history always seems to catch up with us at some point. The death of her mother seems to throw her back with pain and empty spaces left. She even tries to build a graveyard of words to the life lived by her mother. Trethewey mentions of the brutality her mother faced in her stepfather's hands. This shows the torture faced by black Americans. She is determined to know of the untold stories we never talk about our family histories.

The theme of photography stands out in Trethewey's poetry. Photography presents a moment that is yet to pass and also one that is already turned into a memory (Petty 364). She is mainly interested in the sense of absenteeism in the way that a photographs captions and produce an item out of a moment that will live to be a memory. This memory will either show you how she was at that moment or reveal something about her life history if studied closely. The poet has a token of a photograph from the past given to her by her father. She tries to look at it keenly to ensure she remembers his face since he has been absent from her life for a while. She tries to capture something about his father at least to make a good impression after many years of no contact. But it disappointing since she arrives the Los Angeles station yet no sign of her father.

Conclusion

Natalina Trethewey's poetry brings about a reveal of our growing up and the challenges we face every day for being different. If you are not from a wealthy family, you will go through most of these problems which are quite heartbreaking for a young person. Watching your birth mother get beaten every day is not the kind of trauma you forget easily. Having to lie about where you from due to insecurities and friends not associating with you is also not bearable.negelection from family and friends can be very devastating. we are living in a world where people do not care about hurting each other's feelings which is very obscene. The world would be very boring if we were all cut from the same cloth. Diversity is intriguing so let us embrace it and learn to live together and respect each other.

Works Cited

De Cenzo, Giorgia. "Natasha Trethewey: The Native Guard of Southern History." South Atlantic Review 73.1

Hall, Joan Wylie. "I shirk not": Domestic Labor, Sex Work, and Warfare in the Poetry of Natasha Trethewey1." The Mississippi Quarterly 62.1/2 (2009): 265. (2008): 20-49.

Leahy, Anna. "Natasha Trethewey's WHITE LIES." The Explicator 69.3 (2011): 113-116.

Russell, Richard Rankin. "The Black and Green Atlantic: Violence, History, and Memory in Natasha Trethewey's" South" and Seamus Heaney's" North"." The Southern Literary Journal (2014): 155-172.