Natasha Trethewey Quotes

You can get there from here, though there's no going home. Everywhere you go will be somewhere you've never been. "Theories of Time and Space

I read the line over and over as if I might discern the little fires set the flames of an idea licking the page how knowledge burns

What matters is the transformative power of metaphor and the stories we tell ourselves about the arc and meaning of our lives.

To survive trauma one must be able to tell a story about it.

There are indeed all sorts of men/ who visit here: those who want/ nothing but to talk or hear the soft tones/ of a woman's voice; others prefer/ simply to gaze upon me, my face/ turned from them as they touch/ only themselves. And then there are those,/ of course, whose desires I cannot commit/ to paper.

what knowledge haunts each body, what history, what phantom ache?

I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to "fix" a poem.

A man's pursuit of knowledge is greater than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.

What's left is palimpsest—one memory bleeding into another, overwriting it.

Of course, we’re made up of what we’ve forgotten too, what we’ve tried to bury or suppress. Some forgetting is necessary and the mind works to shield us from things that are too painful; even so, some aspect of trauma lives on in the body, from which it can reemerge unexpectedly

Goodbye is the waving map of your palm, is a stone on my tongue.

Memory knows before knowing remembers,” William Faulkner wrote.

I think poets are people who are like this; for whatever reason you feel psychological exile because you’re always an outsider...

I have always loved the feel of books, the way they give a literal weight to words and make of them a sacred object.

Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?

In every family, at some point, there must be someone who feels like an outsider: the one always standing or sitting a little farther from the group in pictures; the older sibling when a new baby comes along; the child from a previous marriage, sometimes with a different last name. Suddenly, I was all of those.

Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions?

I returned to a field of cotton, hallowed ground — as slave legend goes — each boll holding the ghosts of generations: those who measured their days by the heft of sacks and lengths of rows, whose sweat flecked the cotton plants still sewn into our clothes.

Mommy," you say quietly, so as not to be overheard. "Do you know how, when you love someone and you know they are hurting, it hurts you, too?

That morning, awkward and heavy...

The yoke of my birth

the dark foil in this American story

For as long as I can remember, my father had been telling me that one day I would have to become a writer, that because of the nature of my experience I would have something necessary to say.

After Your Death First, I emptied the closets of your clothes, threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised from your touch, left empty the jars you bought for preserves. The next morning, birds rustled the fruit trees, and later when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem, I found it half eaten, the other side already rotting, or—like another I plucked and split open—being taken from the inside: a swarm of insects hollowing it. I’m too late, again, another space emptied by loss. Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.

This is how the past interrupts our lives, all of it entering the same doorway--like the hole in the trunk of my neighbor's tree: at once a natural shelter, haven for small creatures, but also evidence of injury, an entrance for decay.

In the narrative of my life, which is the look backward rather than forward into the unknown and unstoried future, I emerged from the pool as from a baptismal font—changed, reborn—as if I had been shown what would be my calling even then. This is how the past fits into the narrative of our lives, gives meaning and purpose. Even my mother’s death is redeemed in the story of my calling, made meaningful rather than merely senseless. It is the story I tell myself to survive.

Frost wrote, “is that unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. . .

In Poetry as Survival, Gregory Orr asks the survivor’s questions about violence: How could I have been that close and not been destroyed by it? Why was I spared?—questions that can initiate in a writer the quest for meaning and purpose. “But this quest born out of trauma doesn’t simply lead the survivor forward,” he writes. “First it leads him or her backward, back to the scene of the trauma where the struggle must take place with the demon or angel who incarnates the mystery of violence and the mystery of rebirth and transformation.” He is referring to Lorca’s idea of duende: a demon that drives an artist, causing trouble or pain and an acute awareness of death. Of the demon’s effect on an artist’s work, Lorca wrote: “In trying to heal the wound that never heals lies the strangeness.

In my dream, the ghost of history lies down beside me, rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.

I know now that if we choose to keep any part of what is behind us, we must take all of it, hold each moment up to the light like a photograph.

the wages of empire is myopia

Here is the threshold I do not cross: a sliver of light through the doorway finds his tattoo, the anchor on his forearm tangled in its chain.

He is dark as history, origin of the word native: the weight of blood

Of course, we're made up of what we've forgotten too, what we've tried to bury or suppress.

you learned from a Korean poet in Seoul: that one does not bury the mother's body in the ground but in the chest, or--like you-- you carry her corpse on your back.

Waking, I am freighted with memory: my mother's last words spoken--after her death--in a dream: Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?

The way you got sideswiped was by going back. —JOAN DIDION

The servant, still a child, cranes his neck, turns his face up toward all of them. He is dark as history, origin of the word native: the weight of blood, a pale mistress on his back, heavier every year.

We take those things we need from the Confederates’ abandoned homes: salt, sugar, even this journal, near full with someone else’s words, overlapped now, crosshatched beneath mine. On every page, his story intersecting with my own.

Although I had intended to consider the impossibility of returning to those places we’ve come from—not because the places are gone or substantially different but because we are—by August of 2005, the poem had become quite literal: so much of what I’d known of my home was either gone or forever changed. Trethewey, Natasha (2010-09-15). Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication) (Kindle Locations 79-81). University of Georgia Press. Kindle Edition.

Illumination Always there is something more to know what lingers at the edge of thought awaiting illumination as in this second-hand book full of annotations daring the margins in pencil a light stroke as if the writer of these small replies meant not to leave them forever meant to erase evidence of this private interaction Here a passage underlined there a single star on the page as in a night sky cloud-swept and hazy where only the brightest appears a tiny spark I follow its coded message try to read in it the direction of the solitary mind that thought to pencil in a jagged arrow It is a bolt of lightning where it strikes I read the line over and over as if I might discern the little fires set the flames of an idea licking the page how knowledge burns Beyond the exclamation point its thin agreement angle of surprise there are questions the word why So much is left untold Between the printed words and the self-conscious scrawl between what is said and not white space framing the story the way the past unwritten eludes us So much is implication the afterimage of measured syntax always there ghosting the margins that words their black-lined authority do not cross Even as they rise up to meet us the white page hovers beneath silent incendiary waiting

For my father, the myth of Cassandra had been just another way he sought to guide me toward what he thought I needed to know. In some versions, Cassandra's fate is that she is merely misunderstood--not unlike what my father imagined to be the obvious fate of a mixed-race child born in a place like Mississippi. "She was a prophet," he told me, "but no one would believe her." Over the years, though, this second naming would come to weigh heavily on me. It was as if, in giving me that name, he had given me not only the burden of foresight but also the notion of causation--that whatever it was, if I could imagine it, see it in my mind's eye, it would happen because I had envisioned it. As if I had willed it into being.

My whole life people have wondered "what" I am, what race or nationality. ... It's happened again and again: someone looking at me furtively, or calling me "exotic" and asking me "What's your heritage?" Once when I was making a purchase in a department store, the white salesman behind the counter was too nervous or too polite to ask--most likely not wanting to offend a white woman by assuming that she was anything but white. He needed to write on the back of my check the additional identifying information required back then: race and gender. Hesitating, his pen hovering, he tried to look at me without my notice. I watched his face as he deliberated after a second and third glance at my features, my straight, fine hair, my skin color and clothing. He must have considered, too, how I had spoken and whether any of those factors matched his notions of certain people--black people. I stood there and said nothing as he scribbled the letters WF, the designation for white female. In the same week, with a different clerk, I had been given the designation BF. That time I had not been alone: I had been standing in line at the grocery store with a friend who is black.

If not immanence, the soul's bright anchor--blood passed from one to the other--what knowledge haunts each body, what history, what phantom ache? One man always low, in a grave or on the ground, the other up high, closer to heaven; one man always diseased, the other a body in service, plundered.

Geography is fate.

Now the house is a museum of everything she can't let go

Always there is something more to know

the little fires set the flames of an idea licking the page how knowledge burns

In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned: his forehead white with illumination-- a lit bulb--the rest of his face in shadow, darkened as if the artist meant to contrast his bright knowledge, its dark subtext.

When I think of this now, I see how the past holds us captive, its beautiful ruin etched on the mind's eye

How not to think of loss, how it takes hold and grows: like lacuna snails, slow and deliberate, on a reed? Why is everything I see the past I've tried to forget?

How can I see anything but this: how trauma lives in the sea of my body, awash in the waters of forgetting.

What does it mean to be safe in the world?

Before the war, they were happy, he said, quoting our textbook. (This was senior-year history class.) The slaves were clothed, fed, and better off under a master's care. I watched the words blur on the page. No one raised a hand, disagreed. Not even me.

Artifact As long as I can remember you kept the rifle-- your grandfather's an antique you called it- in your study, propped against the tall shelves that held your many books. Upright, beside those hard-worn spins, it was another backbone of your pas, a remnant I studied as if it might unlock-- like the skeleton key its long body resembled-- some door i had yet to find. Peering into the dark muzzle, I imagined a bullet as you described: spiraling through the bore and spinning straight for its target. It did not hit me then: the rifle I'd inherited showing me how one life is bound to another, that hardship endures. For years I admired its slender profile, until-- late one night, somber with drink--you told me it still worked, that you kept it loaded just in case, and I saw the rifle for what it is; a relic sharp as sorrow, the barrel hollow as regret.

I begin to see our lives are like this--we take what we need of light.

I'd follow my father from book to book, gathering citations, listen as he named--like a field guide to Virginia-- each flower and tree and bird as if to prove a man's pursuit of knowledge is greater than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.

But the photograph hints, too, at another story. I can see it in the tall grass brushing her ankles, the blades bent as if moved by wind.

The act of writing is a way to create another world in language, a dwelling place for the psyche wherein the chaos of the external world is transformed, shaped into a made thing, and ordered. It is an act of reclamation. And resistance: the soul sings for justice and the song is poetry.

To have dominion over oneself, to be the sovereign of the nation of the self, one must be the writer of the story.

Writing is a way of creating order out of chaos, of taking charge of one's own story, being the sovereign of the self by pushing back against received knowledge and guarding the sanctity of the dwelling place of the imagination, that place of first permission.

As the smoke rose from the car toward the skyline, I couldn’t help thinking that, at any moment, everything we had would be consumed by flames.

It's as if what was to come was already laid out before us, that our fate lay in the geography toward which we were blithely driving.