The Multiracial Poet? The Multiracial Advocacy Blog

The Multiracial Poet?

I am not a published poet, but my husband is, which is how I came to read an article—the cover story—in Poets & Writers magazine about our new poet laureate, the very multiracial Natasha Trethewey. I was looking forward to reading the piece on many levels.

Oh my! The angst! The tragic mulatto syndrome all over again! The piece is totally focused on race. I know our previous fantastic US poet laureate, Phil Levine, and we have talked about the fact that we are both Jewish and from Detroit. We’ve traded stories and I think I’ve read just about everything he’s written. I can tell you firsthand that not all of his poems are about religion, race, or Detroit. Thank goodness. My husband is Portuguese, and of course he’s had books published that contain some poems about some of his background, but not every single one.

The writer of the Trethewey article, Kevin Nance, has framed Natasha in heartrending struggles. Yes, she did not have the greatest childhood, her parents divorced, her mother was later murdered, and she was asked the “What are you?” question a lot. This is what Nance writes about her new book, due out soon:

     “Formally freer and less emotionally restrained than her previous collection, Thrall lays bare

     the ambiguities and ambivalences one might expect between two people at once bound and

     separated by blood, those exponentially complicated by the fact of their shared vocation as

     poets, ones who’ve written about each other for years.”

Huh? He seesaws back and forth between Trethewey’s statements like, “The complexity of race in America still really does mean that for a lot of people, you can’t really be both, white and black. There are a lot of practical reasons for that…” and terminology like “mulato” and “crossbreed” and (I think) saying that Natasha Trethewey self-identifies as black. Below is one of her poems:

PASTORAL
In the dream, I am with the Fugitive
Poets. We’re gathered for a photograph.
Behind us, the skyline of Atlanta
hidden by the photographer’s backdrop —
a lush pasture, green, full of soft-eyed cows
lowing, a chant that sounds like no, no. Yes,
I say to the glass of bourbon I’m offered.
We’re lining up now — Robert Penn Warren,
his voice just audible above the drone
of bulldozers, telling us where to stand.
Say “race,” the photographer croons. I’m in
blackface again when the flash freezes us.
My father’s white, I tell them, and rural.
You don’t hate the South? they ask. You don’t hate it? 

I really want to give this new poet laureate the benefit of the doubt. I love reading great poetry. I’m tired of reading about poor, confused multiracial people. I’ll probably buy her new book, but then I’ll decide whether to blame the reviewer, the poet, or none of the above. 

Trethewey admits in the article that she wants to “be an ‘activist,’ and not a potted plant” in her new post. Perhaps she can also find a way to embrace her entire heritage at the same time and join in our advocacy.
Susan Graham

Next Poet Laureate is Multiracial

The Library of Congress is to announce Thursday that the next poet laureate is Natasha Trethewey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of three collections and a professor of creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta. Ms. Trethewey, 46, was born in Gulfport, Miss., and is the first Southerner to hold the post since Robert Penn Warren, the original laureate, and the first African-American since Rita Dove in 1993. 

“I’m still a little in disbelief,” Ms. Trethewey said on Monday. 

Unlike the recent laureates W. S. Merwin and her immediate predecessor, Philip Levine, both in their 80s when appointed, Ms. Trethewey, who will officially take up her duties in September, is still in midcareer and not well-known outside poetry circles. Her work combines free verse with more traditional forms like the sonnet and the villanelle to explore memory and the racial legacy of America. Her fourth collection, “Thrall,” is scheduled to appear in the fall. She is also the author of a 2010 nonfiction book, “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.”

 

In a phone interview from her home in Decatur, Ga., where she lives with her husband, Brett Gadsden, a history professor at Emory, Ms. Trethewey explained that the Civil War has fascinated her since childhood, and that she eventually came to feel that she embodied some of its contradictions. “My birthday is April 26th, Confederate Memorial Day,” she said. “I was born 100 years to the day after that holiday was invented. I don’t think I could have escaped learning about the Civil War and what it represented.” 

As one of her poems explains, Ms. Trethewey is the product of a union that was still a crime in Mississippi when her parents married: her mother was black and her father was white. Years later, after her mother’s death, she came across her own birth certificate and saw that the line for the race of her mother says, “colored,” the race of her father, “Canadian.”

“That’s how language works — how we change and rewrite ourselves,” she said. 

Source: NY Times, Charles McGrath