The Black and Green Atlantic: Violence, History, and Memory in Natasha Trethewey’s “South” and Seamus Heaney’s “North”

Heaney’s work. . . . showed me . . . a way into my own work, the calling to make sense of my South with its terrible beauty, its violent and troubled past.

—Natasha Trethewey, “How Seamus Heaney Influenced Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey”

[C]ircum-Atlantic memory retains its consequences, one of which is that the unspeakable cannot be rendered forever inexpressible: the most persistent mode of forgetting is memory imperfectly deferred.

—JosephRoach,Cities of the Dead

In Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature, Thadious Davis argues that Mississippi and Louisiana form a region of the South where the local and the global interpenetrate, and this “collision zone” forms the context of this essay. Davis further holds that “Lousiana, with its more complicated [than the rest of the South] founding, settling, and colonization, may be considered in retrospect as a space that offered the potential for a different racial paradigm to develop in the nineteenth century. With its geographic proximity to the Caribbean Islands and Latin and South America, Louisiana early symbolized difference from the American mainland norm along with racial and linguistic mixtures unfamiliar in much of the rest of the American South” (8). And yet nowhere in her excellent study does she admit of the presence, for example, of the Irish in the American South, even in cities like New Orleans, where they have long lived. In the present essay, I argue that we should admit, recognize, and delineate the intertextual echoes of the Northern Ireland-born poet Seamus Heaney in the work of Mississippi-born Natasha Trethewey in order to complicate the emerging picture of the Global South that traffics with the Caribbean, Central, and South America, and to show how this historically troubled region has become porous and amenable —in the best kind of way —to the influence of writers from outside the Americas like Heaney. In particular, I show that Trethewey’s poem “South” from her Pulitzer-Prize-winning volume Native Guard (2006) signifies precisely the sort of rich contact zone where disparate people groups from throughout history —Louisiana Native Guard members from the Civil War on Ship Island off the southern Mississippi coast and at Port Hudson, Louisiana —and authors of literary texts such as Heaney and his poem “North” and Trethewey herself —meet and commingle, enriching each other with their ongoing conversation about their respective regions’ violent past. Some of the best and most interesting work done on the literature of the U.S. South is currently poised on the threshold of the permeable Gulf of Mexico with its watery flows connecting diasporic people and literatures.

The Irish and African-Americans have a long and tangled history. At a crucial time in the recent history of Northern Ireland —two years after ten Irish Republican Army hunger strikers died in The Maze prison —this relationship was recognized in Harlem-born St. Clair Bourne’s 1983 documentary, The Black and the Green, which chronicles a fact-finding trip to Belfast, Northern Ireland, by five black American activists who found that many Catholics there had been influenced by the American Civil Rights Movement.¹ More recently, this relationship has been treated in studies of the so-called “Black and Green Atlantic,” in books carrying that title and versions of it, such as Brian Dooley’s 1998 study, Black and Green: the Fight for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland and Black America; Nini Rodgers’s 2007 work, Ireland, Slavery, and Anti-Slavery: 1612–1865; Maria McGarrity’s 2008 book, Washed by the Gulf Stream: The Historic and Geographic Relation of Irish and Caribbean Literature; Michael Malouf’s 2009 study, Transatlantic Solidarities: Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics; John Brannigan’s 2009 monograph, Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture; Peter D. O’Neill’s and David Lloyd’s 2009 collection, The Black and Green Atlantic; Michael J. Monahan’s 2011 work, The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity; George Bornstein’s 2011 monograph, The Colors of Zion: Blacks, Jews, and Irish from 1845 to 1945, and Sinéad Moynihan’s...