Stratgey Response, Week 8

What I found interesting in Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard is the underlying current of travel that remains implied with memory, history, and even a parent’s death. The whole collection situates itself as a visitation, even the book’s opening epigraph from Charles Wright implies a nostalgic voyage: “Memory is a cemetery / I’ve visited once or twice, white / ubiquitous and the set-aside /Everywhere under foot…” What also becomes doubly fascinating is the content of which Trethewey writes, death, is in fact everywhere literally underfoot in the collection. History is behind us, death is under us, and memory is located in a long mental plane that must be sought out and arrived at. The speakers of the collection are constantly mobile: “my mother is boarding a train,” “the old Crescent makes its last run” (The Southern Crescent”), “when I turned to walk away” (Graveyard Blues), “Every spring- / Pilgrimage-the living come to mingle” (Pilgrimage), “We leave Gulfport at noon” (Elegy for the Native Guards), and etc. What this collection seems to present is not just a memorial to the dead, but an overwhelming sense of displacement or a dissatisfaction of remaining stationary for the speakers within. Arguably, Trethewey uses the tropes of history, memory, and death as venues to explore personal issues of a bi-racial upbringing. It would make sense that the collection and its speakers experience tension with stationary existence because inhabiting a bi-racial identity entails lifelong transition. I think Trethewey really taps into this particular exploration in "Southern Gothic." Not only does to bring in the language of mixed race: peckerwood, nigger lover, half-breed, zebra; but she also the idea of an unfixed identity. In "Southern Gothic" the speaker comments on how her family "huddled on the tiny island of bed, quiet / in language of blood: the house, unsteady / on its cinderblock haunches, sinking deeper / into the much of ancestry (lines 15-18). The house, which typical represents foundation, is unsteady; the house itself is not the typical safe haven of identity. Even the ancestry itself is mucked and unclear in its lineage. All this leads me to question what really is meant by "native" in this text? Does "native" even exist in the sense of sole owner or rightful inhabitant?