Natasha Trethewey ReactionsPosted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2015-04-11 23:50Z by Steven |
The Arc of the Universe Bends Towards Justice
The College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio
2015-04-02
Caitlin Ziegert Mccombs
Natasha Trethewey, a Pulitzer prize winner and past Poet Laureate of the United States, came to visit and read some of her poetry for an audience much too large for Severance 09. After listening to some of her works read aloud, it seems she seamlessly weaves the topics of history, race, and personal narratives in the style of free verse. Before beginning each poem, Trethewey would provide some background of their origins. The first few poems she read were about her parents, in which she lingers on the issue of anti-miscegenation laws during the 1900’s as her mother and father were an interracial couple (her mother was African American and her father, white). This was a nice precursor to her readings of her new poetry collection, Thrall. Trethewey explained that ‘thrall’ was a name for someone born into servitude, which is quite fitting for a collection investigating the oppression of people of color and racial tensions over the past few hundred years. In her poem, Taxonomy, she deconstructs 18th century Casta paintings from colonial Mexico. She describes how race at this time was seen as an equation. There are whites and Mexicans, but more complexly: a white and an Amerindian mix equals a Mestizo, a Mestizo and an Amerindian mix equals a Cholo, a white and a Spaniard/African mix equals a Mulato, and so forth. These castas, or race/breed/lineage constructions dictated the lives of those so labeled. Trethewey describes the “weight of blood” as getting “heavier every year”, and the paintings of castas as “a last brush stroke [that] fixed him in his place”…
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