Content area
Full Text
"Tasha's name is really Nostalgia"-Leretta Dixon Tumbough1
History, memory, and nostalgia infuse Natasha Trethewey's writing with a holy trinity of power, meaning, and mercy. Her works are singularly important because they interrogate the past, insist on our remembering what some would just as soon forget or have already forgotten, and give meaning to poetic forms because form without significant content is insignificant. History, memory, and the emotional fire of nostalgia enliven poetry; but history, memory, and desire are not enough to make works extraordinary. Lucille Clifton's poem, "why some people be mad at me sometimes," says that people want her to remember but recall their memories instead of hers (Blessing the Boats 38). Trethewey digs deeply into the storehouse of her own memories; and memory and imagination, according to psychologist Daniel Schacter, "involve identical mental processes" ( 10) to put together (re-member) the fractured American past. One might ask what for, and to that question Trethewey joins the host of other Southern writers in addressing these topics. Faulkner insists, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." O'Connor understands "Where you came from is gone," which Trethewey quotes in the introduction to Beyond Katrina. Katherine Anne Porter believes, "The past is never where you think you left it"; Margaret and Alice Walker recover the black past by writing historical novels; and Richard Wright knows that to seize the historical past is to catch an image before it flashes by. The reason history matters is that memory saves lives. Indeed, the life Trethewey saves will be her own and perhaps others as well.
Even though no peace and reconciliation commission exists for the citizens of America's South, as it does in South Africa, where apartheid mirrored Jim Crow; and few efforts to remember, acknowledge, forgive injustice, and make peace with the past have occurred, Trethewey confronts this Southern history through the fabric of her own experience. One can only make peace with what is known, a convincing reason to excavate the past. Other equally compelling reasons to retrieve the past are power in the story and freedom in the telling. History is semantically ambiguous. Historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot observes that story can be fiction or non-fiction, with both based upon interpretation (5-6). (His) story, well documented...