The language of the mother

The latest print issue of Rattle (Winter 2008) has a conversation with Natasha Trethewey in which she says, in answer to the question of how her work has evolved:

I feel like I’m maybe a little bit more daring. I think I’ve always had a kind of restraint that maybe in earlier work bordered on perhaps what some people might see as a distance from the emotional material of the poem. I think that in Native Guard, there’s not a lot of distance between me, or the voice in the poem, and the emotional level of the poem. I gave a reading once and Ellen Voigt came up to me afterwards and said — and I loved when she told me this — that she could just hear the anger seething beneath the surface of those poems. I think it is particularly evident when I started talking about Mississippi. I wouldn’t have allowed myself to be angry in a poem a couple of books back.

Having read that, I revisited my post on Native Guard and sure enough, I make this statement:

Trethewey�s poems confront these violent contradictions with a formal restraint that for me gives them great power.

I may have to re-consider that statement in light of what Trethewey herself says, though I was talking about a different set of poems in the collection.

This morning, reading in Alicia Ostriker’s Stealing the Language. The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America (Beacon Press, 1986), I came upon this passage that she quotes for Cherríe Moraga from a piece called “La Guera:”

I went to a concert where Ntozake Shange was reading. There, everything exploded in me. She was speaking language that I knew—in the deepest parts of me—existed, and that I had ignored in my own feminist studies and even in my own writing. What Ntozake caught in me is the realization that in my own development as a poet, I have, in many ways, denied the voice of my brown mother—the brown in me. I have acclimated to the sound of a white language which, as my father represents it, does not speak to the emotions in my poems—emotions which stem from the love of my mother . . . Sitting in that auditorium chair was the first time I had realized to the core of me that for years I had disowned the language I knew best—ignored the words and rhythms that were closest to me. [pp.197-198]

Ostriker herself comments:

For a woman of color, it is clear that the return to the mother makes possible the freeing of the poet’s voice and her ability to speak on behalf of a community which has given her substance as she gives it voice. [p. 198]

It’s tempting to think Trethewey may have had, may be having the same kind of epiphany, given what she said earlier this year at the Women Writers Conference about having to write through some of her issues with the anti-miscegenation laws in Mississippi before she could put a stone on her mother’s grave. It’s tempting to postulate that, her mother having died and Trethewey having followed her father and become a poet, that what you might call the white paternalistic and the brown maternalistic influences were out of balance.

Tempting, but I fear, bordering on stereotype.

Still.

In this Rattle interview Trethewey says:

When I first set out to write [Native Guard], I thought that it was only going to be about the Native Guards, because that’s the thing that struck me, that this was a lesser known history that doesn’t get mentioned when you go out to Ship Island, that you wouldn’t know anything about because there’s no monument out there or anything that tells you this part of the story. And so, historical erasure and historical memory are things that I think probably undergird just about everything I write; I mean, I can’t imagine ever turning away from that as one of my obsessions. And so, this became a good way to investigate that again but specifically with the Native Guards.

But Mark Doty says that our metaphors go out ahead of us, and what I didn’t find out until much later on, was that the book was very much also about my mother, and that what my mother had in common with the Native Guards was that she has no monument on her grave, that I had not yet properly done the work of memorialization that is my responsibility as daughter, as native guardian of her memory. That’s the point at which I realized that all this belonged in the same book . . .

Ideas to play with but reductive. Trethewey’s poetry is complex. It contains multitudes.

She is a poet of great empathy and she credits her father for developing that in her.

Formalism can sometimes help a poet control great emotion, can push her into language and realizations that she would not otherwise find if she let emotions roll out in full spate. Some poets can open the floodgates, others can’t.

I think I appreciate that which is restrained in Trethewey because it gives me room to find my own empathy.

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Here is sad news. Odetta has died.