Throwaway Bodies in the Poetry of Natasha Trethewey

In Dirt and Desire, Patricia Yaeger notes that critics tend to see southern literature as a “route to the dead, to the embarrassing, disavowed American past” (61) that scholars seek to transcend because the traumas and tragedies of southern history feel too familiar. In effect, critics have seen southern literature as comprised of trite tropes that offer no rich ground for theoretical exploration. Yaeger argues, however, that turning away from southern literature means shunning what we actually do not understand: a place of brutal racism that “produces extraordinary works of art” (61). Where the writing of white women about the South is theoretically “domesticated” (Yaeger 62) with its racial violence appearing commonplace, black women writing about the South are marginalized. Thus, their work requires theoretical attention beyond that which is needed for white southern women writers.

In chapter three, Yaeger argues that one literary trope in need of analysis outside the lens of southern literary truisms is the “cast-off, discarded body” that has “become a repeated figure for angry meditation” (64) in the writing by black women about the South because that body represents violence and neglect perpetrated by white culture. The discarded body, “a pollution outside pollution” (66), falls outside the dirty-clean paradigm of southern literature that has oft en categorized white bodies as clean and black bodies as unclean, thus intimating the long-held southern social order. Yaeger contends that southern literature “provokes the uncanny presence of disposable bodies” (67); embodying the complex qualities of dirt, throwaway bodies have an abject presence and are easily seen over and through. Southern women’s writing allows us to think about “the exceeding strangeness of the figures of thought this literature invents to think about race and gender,” how current criticism cannot account for throwaway bodies, and “what happens to the body within a culture of neglect” (67). Though Yaeger argues that southern women’s fiction attempts to give discarded bodies a history, we have yet to critically analyze these bodies; therefore, we must focus on the throwaway body that despite not being “symbolically central” endures harm so unimportant it is not “registered or repressed” and elicits indifference (68).

Placing Yaeger’s work next to poet Natasha Trethewey’s allows us to discern how Trethewey’s work features overlooked or unacknowledged figures in history, invoking discarded bodies such as soldiers, sharecroppers, and domestic workers. Trethewey often references photographs to comment on broader public issues and complicate perceptions of southern history. Poems in her collections Native Guard and Domestic Work tell the stories of those individuals depicted in photographs Trethewey found while examining her family’s albums, and Trethewey uses these images to explore “gaps in history” beyond the photographic frame (Kaplan 37). As Katherine Henninger notes, “Using photographs and photography as their organizing metaphor, Trethewey’s poems offer a … model for how we might reread the ‘evidence’ of southern history for the unheard and unseen, and how once acknowledged, this evidence leads to new mappings of the past and future South” (170). By examining what photographs of discarded bodies both hide and reveal, Trethewey explores the influence of the past on the collective southern identity. Nagueyalti Warren says of Domestic Work, “[it] depicts the hidden life of ordinary people that history texts do not include” (80), a sentiment equally evident in Native Guard. Trethewey’s work elucidates the alliance of black bodies with the titular dirt of Yaeger’s Dirt and Desire; according to dominant ideology, throwaway black bodies are part of the landscape yet are symbolic of abjection, something to be discarded. They are there and not there, materially present yet transparent. Having fallen into gaps in history, these bodies demand attention.

Because the throwaway bodies in Trethewey’s works are largely the subjects of photographs, Yaeger’s theory of the symbolism of disposable bodies can be supplemented by Roland Barthes’s theories of photography. In Camera Lucida, Barthes defines the noeme, the essence of photography that is “that-has-been,” since the photograph speaks to something no longer there, something only partially presented by the photograph (115). Barthes defines the...