Claiming the Property of History in Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard

Eric Foner's question "Who Owns History?" has become particularly significant with passionate public debates about the meaning of Civil War monuments and with academic fields from economics to history rethinking slavery's role in building the modern capitalist world.¹ That we would be so conflicted about a war waged a century and a half ago points to the myriad ways in which the American narrative of freedom cannot contain the vast impact of three and a half centuries of New World slavery. The struggle over who tells this history and how is understandable. Underlying Foner's question, however, is a yet more fundamental one: how can history be owned? In order for something to be owned, it must be property subject to a claim. Though history is grounded in the tangible entities of numbers and bodies, in the end it is a construct built with words and shaped by language. Ownership therefore cannot be established by a bill of sale but must be claimed through that same medium of language. For literary writers, the language of the Gothic has proven particularly powerful in approaching history, as specters often haunt to claim title. Avery F. Gordon explains that "Haunting is a constituent element of modern social life" because "The ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us" (7, 8).² Haunting thus suggests that history is not over and settled but available for a new telling and perhaps new ownership.

In her 2006 poetry collection Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey depicts hauntings, both personal and national, as she explores memories of her mother and the forgotten history of black Union soldiers stationed at Ship Island, Mississippi, during the Civil War. Several critics have focused on how Trethewey examines history, with Daniel Cross Turner discussing "undeadness" ("Lyric" 103), Elizabeth Bradford Frye and Coleman Hutchison labeling her poetry "Haunted" (37), and William M. Ramsey describing it as "ghost-haunted" (122).³ These readings of how the past affects the present in Trethewey's poetry align with what Allan Lloyd-Smith describes as the commonly-held view of the Gothic's focus on "the return of the past, of the repressed and denied, the buried secret that subverts and corrodes the present" (1). Those "buried secrets" come back to haunt because of a desire for justice, according to Jacques Derrida, who explains that haunting fulfills the need for "responsibility" for "victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations" (xix). For all of these critics, haunting is a way for the past to continue to exist into the present moment, to be "undead" or ghostly. I argue, however, that Trethewey's poetry does not just show how slavery haunts us; it also reveals how we haunt slavery. The collection uses point of view and photography as portals in a kind of poetic time travel allowing Trethewey to flip the temporal direction of haunting and show the present haunting the past. This different conception of Gothic haunting not only provides a new way to see that "something lost, or barely visible," but it more significantly allows the poet to claim the past as property.⁴

This property claim crucially disrupts the paradigm of property and power that undergirds slavery in the nineteenth century and persists in racial discrimination in the twentieth and the twenty-first. In examining the legal history of race in the United States, Cheryl I. Harris observes that "it was not the concept of race alone" that oppressed African Americans: "it was the interaction between conceptions of race and property that played a critical role in establishing and maintaining racial and economic subordination." The "hyper-exploitation of Black labor" relied on a "form of property contingent on race—only Blacks were subjugated as slaves and treated as property" (1716). In Trethewey's depiction, people become literal property as unclaimed soldiers' bodies molder under the...