Reframing Exposure: Natasha Trethewey’s Forms of Enclosure

I. form: captivating looks and enclosures of vision

“Form” is a capacious and charged term; it has elicited lively debates concerning its ability to identify distinct or hybrid genres or texts.¹ Like “genre” and “text,” “form” harbors a multitude of meanings, commonly including shape, what can be seen or felt, as in the body of something natural, mechanical, artistic—or even artificial. “Form’s” artifice can be paradoxical. “Form made by humans is a distinct phenomenon,” T. J. Clark observed in the treatise that served as a core English Institute text in the 2013 forum on “Form.” Yet Clark also notes, “human forms seem to take off from … the kinds of complex symmetry and patterning found in the mineral, animal, and vegetable world.² Within music, literature, and the visual or plastic arts, the pattern and repetition that signals “form” as holding distinct sounds, scenes, or shapes also renders “form” as structure, form as style.³ The style, styling, or stylin’ and profilin’ of these elements also points to “form” as an artist’s unique signature, her profile—with the attendant connotations of portraiture, visuality and policing “profile” procures. When an artist exhibits her singularity of style, or when he executes his personal best, the colloquial phrase she or he “is in rare form” is often uttered.

Historically, “form” also connoted natural beauty, or the body beautiful.⁴ Unlike “text,” which has the potential to become “an ideal, immaterial object, a conceptual site,” form tends to stabilize in materiality.⁵ As such, “form” signals what holds shape and what holds, or captivates, our visual attention. Surely it is fitting, then, that the contemporary poet Natasha Trethewey, hailed as a consummate formalist, emphasizes in her verse the “lovely” possibilities of “captivation,” of being “enthralled by beauty.”⁶ She also explores the problems of being held captive by—or “in thrall to”—“language.” Readers have been enthralled by the beauty of Trethewey’s sculpted language, her scrupulous attention to visual and historical details and her finesse with poetic forms.

A brief survey of Trethewey’s meteoric, and metrical, rise to literary acclaim indicates the phrase, she “is in rare form” is apt for her oeuvre. A recent two-term poet laureate of the United States, and simultaneous poet laureate of Mississippi, Trethewey has authored four award-winning poetry collections: Domestic Work (2000)—which won the inaugural Cave Canem Prize; Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002) a verse-novella that was designated a notable book by the American Library Association and that serves as the essay’s primary focal point; Native Guard (2007), which won the Pulitzer; and Thrall (2012). She also published a work of creative nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010). A Mississippi native—and “native guardian” of her mother’s memory, and of Southern history, Trethewey’s poetry and prose maps the emotional, racial and gendered geographies of the present and the past, particularly in Deep South terrains across deep time.⁷ Each of her books stage literary and biographical encounters with the photograph, in Thadious Davis’ terms, “as the site of memory and of the regionality of a black subjectivity.”⁸ Trethewey’s aesthetic engagements with the photographic image showcase the visual medium’s formal and representational possibilities and problems. Her work further develops “competing legacies of formalism and activism” and an “aesthetics of witnessing” evident in, for example, James Baldwin’s use of documentary photography as well as the photographic practices of other African American writers such as Lucille Clifton, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison.⁹

In Bellocq’s Ophelia, Trethewey explores—or more precisely, “sightsees,” terms of racial inscription that seek to deform the humanity and distort the history of African Americans or mixed-race persons. She articulates a complex understanding of linguistic, racial, and familial inheritance. Words are the bricks in the house of language; and language is form. As a “white father’s black daughter,” her poetry decries words “that shadow us;” it criticizes “words that take shape / outside us” such as “mongrel,” “mulattoes,” “half-breed,” and “zebra” that “name us as other or different and less...