History haunts Natasha Trethewey’s Pulitizer Prize winning poetry collection, Native Guard. Memory, and the potential loss of memory, is a recurring subject in many of this piece’s poems. This collection focuses on Trethewey’s hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi, and the Louisiana Native Guard, a collection of black soldiers charged with protecting a Union prison full of Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. Trethewey weaves her personal history with the soldiers’, and the result is a collection that links collective and personal histories.
These poems are haunting; they shed light on history that has been lost and unburies the ghosts from the past, and with each carefully constructed line, Trethewey reminds herself that “truth be told, I do not want to forget anything of my former life.”
Trethewey isn’t afraid to state the emotional terrain of her speakers, nor is she afraid to discuss her own experiences. In fact, the title poem speaks not only to the black soldiers, but to Trethewey’s own life. “Native Guard” examines the life of a former slave working at the fort whose duty was to write letters for the illiterate or injured POWs and fellow soldiers. Ultimately, this person was charged with translating the perspectives and experiences of other people just as Trethewey has taken on the charge of speaking about this regiment.
The bodies of Trethewey’s poems also echo the past: this collection is filled with many traditional or received forms (i.e. sonnets, pantoums). In fact, fittingly enough, the title poem is written as a strand of linked sonnets. Again, subject matter and sound are intertwined; again, poems are linked just like people are linked or affected by history and by their own pasts. Trethewey reinvents or subverts the forms she uses: though sonnets are generally perceived to be linked to love, Trethewey’s sonnets, like “What is evidence,” discuss the physical abuse her mother withstood. In fact, much of this book references her mother, a woman who was killed by her second husband.
The collection’s closing lines discuss the complicated relationship she has not only to her past and to history, but to her hometown of Mississippi. She writes how, “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.”
Ultimately, this collection links Trethewey to her heritage: ghosts never stay hidden for long, and Trethewey is standing guard while shoveling her way through history’s rubble.
