Native Guard

"I love Native Guard . Natasha says that poetry is “necessary utterance.” Native Guard is “necessary utterance.” It captures a story of Mississippi that had been effectively silenced: The story of African American soldiers who guarded captured Confederates. This is a story that complicates narratives about the South. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The poems are not only about this native guard. Many of them are very personal, like the poem ‘Miscegenation.’ Trethewey talks about how in Mississippi, where she grew up, her birth was a crime because interracial unions were forbidden by law. One of Natasha’s great themes is memory. It’s not only personal memory, but what we choose to remember about our cultural landscape as well as what we choose to forget. The ‘lost cause’ is a body of pathology, a pack of myths. Myths help us deal with complex aspects of our culture. They can be helpful until they obscure reality and keep us from seeing the truth. The myth of the “lost cause” really obscured reality. The reality is that the South did not secede for noble reasons. The Confederacy’s cause was slavery. As I said, a myth is problematic when it obscures reality; the cult of the ‘lost cause’ is problematic. It was a way for Southerners to avoid the ignominy of their loss and the immorality of their aims."

"The title refers to one of the first Black units in the Civil War . They’d been stationed at a fort not far from where Trethewey grew up, but their memory had been effaced, as so often happens with Black history. Some of the poems center specifically on that unit. There’s one in which a former slave, among the Guard the title refers to, says, “I’ve reached thirty-three with history of one younger inscribed upon my back. I now use ink to keep record, a closed book, not the lure of memory – flawed, changeful – that dulls the lash for the master, sharpens it for the slave.” “You don’t want to have a warrior caste separate from the rest of American society” Even the poems that are not directly about the war revolve around grief, around memory or around what can be recovered and reconsecrated. In the opening of a poem in the collection called “Theories of Time and Space” Trethewey writes, “you can get there from here, but there’s no going home everywhere you go will be somewhere you’ve never been.” So Tretheway is balancing the weight of history with the need to go forward. It’s an exceptional collection about the intersection of personal and public history. And it’s just a wonderful book of poems. All of these books are about how violence, memory, history, and trauma can haunt us. So, yes."