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Callaloo 27.4 (2004) 1022-1034



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Inscriptive Restorations

An Interview with Natasha Trethewey


Natasha Trethewey. Photo by Brett Gadsden.

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This interview was conducted on May 28, 2004, at Texas A&M University in College Station, where Natasha Trethewey was teaching poetry writing in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops, whose faculty also included Forrest Hamer (poetry), Helen Elaine Lee (fiction), and Percival Everett (fiction).

ROWELL: When I read your poetry, the first word that comes to my mind is restoration. Your project seems to be the restoration of what is not seen or is forgotten as a result of erasure from local and national memory. You tend to use poetry as a corrective; you interrogate and critique events and figures, past and present, and then inscribe them in our psyches via the U.S. American literary canon. It is this impulse, along with your close attention to artistry, which first enlists you among such poets as Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa—poets who deliberately directed African-American poetry away from the prescriptive pronouncements of the Black Arts Movement. For me, your poetry is, in part, inscriptive restoration.

TRETHEWEY: Yes, I think I've been concerned with what I have noticed to be the erasures of history for a very long time. Those stories often left to silence or oblivion, the gaps within the stories that we are told, both in the larger public historical records and in our family histories as well, the stories within families that people don't talk about, the things that are kept hushed. And so I've always been interested in those contentions between public and cultural memory, larger history and private or family memory and stories. And so I do seek to restore or to recover those subjugated narratives.

ROWELL: Are these efforts reflected in "Gesture of a Woman-in-Process," the opening poem in Domestic Work, your first collection of poems?

TRETHEWEY: Yes, I think it relates to "Gesture of a Woman-in-Process" in some ways. Let me tell you how that poem got made. I was standing in a gallery at the University of Massachusetts, where I did my graduate work, my MFA, and there was an exhibit on African Americans during the great migration, and, also, African Americans who settled in and around Amherst and other parts of New England. I was with a professor of mine, poet Margaret Gibson, and we were looking at these photographs of people who looked very familiar to me, the kind of people who were [End Page 1023] members of my own family or the community in my hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi. And what I noticed about this particular woman in the poem, and in the photograph, "Gesture of a Woman-in-Process," was that it was a very domestic kind of photograph: a couple of women standing out in a swept dirt yard with the kind of accoutrements of a domestic life—laundry they were doing, peas they were shelling, and it's a scene in which you imagine the photographer, Clifton Johnson, coming upon them and asking if them he might take their photograph. And so he does. And yet one of the women refuses actually to stand still for some reason, because, of course, you had to stand very still for photography in 1902. So, instead, she must have made some gesture with her hands that moves her apron, and thus you see her apron as if it's a swirl of white in the center of the photograph. It suggested to me something about the way people will not simply be confined to the frames into which we might put them, historically or in memory, and that, indeed, her gesture of continual movement enables her to resist being trapped in that particular historical framework; her gesture keeps moving on into our contemporary days, and suggests something to us about the continual process of her life, of history, and of the creation and revision of cultural memory. So, I wanted to begin Domestic Work with a poem that suggested...

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