A POETICS OF RESILIENCE

IN DAUGHTER’S HER NEW BOOK, MEMOIR, MEMORIAL FORMER DRIVE: POET A LAUREATE AND PULITZER PRIZE WINNER NATASHA TRETHEWEY CONTENDS WITH PERSISTENT TRAUMA, BOTH PERSONAL AND CULTURAL, GOING BEYOND WITNESSING TO SEEK TRUTH IN ALL ITS COMPLEXITY.

In her new book, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, former poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey contends with persistent trauma, both personal and cultural, going beyond witnessing to seek truth in all its complexity.

IN METALLURGY, the word resilience describes a material’s ability to withstand fire, to be set loose by heat and, when cooled, recover its form. Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey—a former two-term U.S. poet laureate and a professor at Northwestern University—is the definition of such resilience. In seven volumes of poetry and prose, including Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, forthcoming from Ecco in July, she has reckoned with traumas, both personal and cultural. In each work, Trethewey goes beyond witnessing to seek truth in all its complexity, forging her language in the hungry furnace of grief. Trethewey was born in 1966, in Gulfport, Mississippi, and grew up there, in Atlanta, and in New Orleans, the biracial daughter of poet and professor Eric Trethewey, a Canadian emigrant, and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, a social worker. The two met at Kentucky State College and crossed the border to marry in Ohio, where interracial couples could legally wed. Her parents divorced when she was six, and Trethewey moved to Atlanta with her mother, who later married Joel Grimmette, an erratic and violent Vietnam War veteran. The family, including Trethewey’s younger half-brother, also named Joel, was subjected to years of psychological, emotional, and physical abuse at the hands of her stepfather. Fearing for her and her family’s safety, Turnbough eventually divorced Grimmette; a

year later Grimmette shot and killed her. Trethewey was just nineteen, at the end of her freshman year at the University of Georgia in Athens, when her mother was murdered.

That would have been enough trauma for a lifetime, for anyone— but there were more devastating losses to come. They arrived in step with some of the highest accolades possible in a poet’s career: Hurricane Katrina rendered the Gulfport home of Trethewey’s maternal grandmother, Leretta Dixon Turnbough, uninhabitable just two years before Trethewey would win a Pulitzer Prize, in 2007, for her poetry collection Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin). A year later, Leretta Dixon Turnbough died. This additional loss in her matrilineal line was particularly hard for Trethewey to bear; her nana, who had been a seamstress, had always seemed to stitch a layer of protection around Trethewey. In 2012 the Library of Congress selected Trethewey as the U.S. poet laureate, a position she held for two terms. Then, in 2014, the poet lost her father, Eric Trethewey.

In reading Trethewey’s work one senses that, but for on the page, she has never truly found safety—and perhaps not even there. Trethewey is often in her work the narrator of the experiences of those who have been lost to history. This is dangerous territory: It requires fearlessness as well as vulnerability and enormous personal strength. With conviction, Trethewey represents not only the stories of the women of her family, denied dignity or agency by the cultures in which they lived, but also the stories of Black Americans who have been deliberately omitted from the larger cultural consciousness. When I spoke to her by phone from her home in Chicago, where she moved in 2017, Trethewey described “the necessity of remembering through our personal recollection.”

“But I would add to that remembering in the service of justice,” she says. “I’m a citizen of the United States, a place that is deeply flawed and unjust and that has a long way to go to become the nation outlined in our creed. We won’t be able to get there unless we remember, and remember truthfully.”

This will to remember abides in Trethewey’s work. Trethewey’s early poetry—Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000) and Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf Press, 2002)—considers historical photographs of Black women, relegated to the margins of white consciousness, and imagines these women with elegance and dignity. In her Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Native Guard, Trethewey recovers the erased story of Union soldiers from Louisiana during the Civil War and elevates her personal histories—the death and life of her mother, other people’s notions of how she should regard her Blackness in a nation where white supremacist patriarchy only spreads and becomes more deeply a part of the land. Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (University of Georgia Press, 2010) is a family history that features the communities and economies of the Gulf Coast that were overshadowed in discussions of New Orleans–focused Katrina recovery.

But it is in Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir that Trethewey trains her diligent attention most acutely on her mother’s story and brings new care to its telling. The slim, revelatory memoir documents Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough’s life and her fatal shooting on June 5, 1985—a fact so disregarded by authorities that they reported the date incorrectly in official documents. The book includes details of an episode prior to the murder in which Trethewey’s stepfather appeared at a high school football game where Trethewey was cheerleading. When she saw him she

smiled, waved, and said, “Hey, Big Joe.” Later she discovered testimony in which Joel said he had intended to kill her, that he’d had a gun, and it was only the kind words that made him change his mind.

There is another arresting scene in the book in which Trethewey and her husband go out to dinner and an assistant district attorney from a neighboring county, at the same restaurant with his wife, happens to recognize her. “Was your mother Gwen Grimmette, and Joey your brother?” he asks her. “I am stunned by his questions, that he knows who my mother and brother are,” Trethewey writes.

I look first to his wife, to see if she seems as perplexed as I am. When I look back at him there are tears welling in his eyes, and then he drops his head and weeps.

“He was the first police officer on the scene,” his wife says then. “Not a day passes that he doesn’t think about your mother.”

When Trethewey remarks upon the twenty years that have passed since the murder—twenty years that mean she has now spent more time on earth without her mother than with her— the assistant district attorney mentions that it is also the year the county plans to purge all records related to the case. He offers to save them for her and subsequently brings them to her in a big file, accompanied by a bottle of wine that he is certain she will need. Among the papers is a twelve-page document Turnbough wrote on a yellow legal pad that was found in her briefcase after her murder. In her account Turnbough writes with heart-shattering hope about a future the reader knows she will not live to see and about leveraging the empowering assistance of the Council for Battered Women to frame her escape from a marriage she always knew she would have to leave.

The story that Trethewey crafts from memory and from these documents, which are woven throughout her lyrical recounting of her family’s story, is nothing short of remarkable. As do other masterworks that reckon with a murder in the family, such as Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts (Free Press, 2007) or Justin St. Germain’s Son of a Gun (Random House, 2013), the book navigates what in lesser hands would seem impossible questions: How do you write about a murder without exploiting its drama, and how do you write about a person who is the victim of a murder in a way that makes their stories, their humanity, closer to whole? How do you tell a story about trauma in a way that neither exploits it nor tidies up its irresolvable questions? In Memorial Drive, one way Trethewey answers this is by allowing her mother’s words to speak for themselves—resurrected, tangible and immortal on the page.

When you have lived and documented a kind of life that feels consistently upended by trauma, it is easy to feel as if you are in some way cursed. But in my conversation with Trethewey, her resilience and power were palpable. She does not, in her writing or in her life, shrink from the fight. On the page and in our conversations, Trethewey has found a way to transmute pain and to cultivate wholeness, to shape a defiantly abundant life.

How long did you contemplate putting the entirety of your mother’s story and yours into this form?

I had never intended to do it aside from mentioning it in the language of a poem. But after I won the Pulitzer, there were a lot of articles about me and my backstory, always entered by way of a line or two about my mother being a murder victim. If I went to give a reading, someone would introduce Native Guard as being about three things: the Civil War, my history growing up biracial

in the South, and my mother’s murder. I would have to go up to the podium with the word murder hanging in the air. I got tired of her being a murder footnote to the story of me. I wanted [to express] some fuller version of who she was, so that her loveliness and her humanity would be what people knew, and not just her victimhood.

In Memorial Drive you offer key evidence in the case your mother was building against your stepfather, in collaboration with DeKalb County officials, including a document she was writing at the time of her death as well as a transcript of one of her last conversations with Joel. Was it cathartic to put her words directly into the book?

I worried about it, because to some readers it might look as if I wasn’t telling the story. But what was more important to me was to present that documentary evidence in her own voice and words. You hear how resilient she was. You can witness it for yourself. That was really more important to me than whether someone felt like I should have narrated. I thought her own words could do better than anything that I might say. It was hardest of all to go back and read the documentary evidence. Like the document they found in her briefcase, where you can see her thinking that she has gotten away [from Joel] and that this [document] is just part of an ongoing story she’s going to tell about her life before and after that escape. A story that I imagine her telling because it might help other women and support the work of shelters like the one she found herself in.

The story of how you came to have those records through this chance encounter with the assistant district attorney is pretty fascinating.

It still amazes me, the happenstance of it; that’s what it means to put yourself in proximity. It was as if I really were putting myself in the places where these things could happen. I didn’t feel like I really knew that. I had vowed never to go back to Atlanta. My grandmother had vowed never to go back to Atlanta. And what happened to her? Katrina hit, and because I had gone back there for a job, she died in Atlanta, too. And then to find out from my mother’s letters that her first internship for her master’s in social work was at Emory.

Are you relieved to have physical distance from Georgia?

As an academic you go where you can get a job. [At Emory] I always had one foot out the door, and part of it was the trauma of that particular geography. I was trying to avoid the most difficult places there. I didn’t want to inhabit the same geography that Joel inhabited. He was in prison there, and he was released last year, so I got out [of Atlanta] just in time.

Have you been changed by writing this memoir?

Yes. I learned something on a conscious level that I somehow only knew in my subconscious—this idea of carrying grief. In 2008 I went to South Korea to give some readings. I met other poets and professors there. One night a poet and professor talked to me about reading Native Guard. They have a saying in South Korea that you don’t bury a mother in the ground; you bury her in the chest, or you carry her corpse on your back. The image of dragging her body around in this grief that I can’t bear to put down and don’t want to put down. The other part, bearing her in the chest: I spent the most time trying to get that first section, “Another Country,” [about the visceral, good memories of her childhood] right. Even if it meant I had to keep rereading it through the editorial process, I wanted to stay there and dwell there and not move on to the rest of the book. As much as I carry her corpse around, I have also planted my living mother in my chest, and she grows there continuously. I have both, two mothers.

Do you think the memoir sort of captures that feeling, suspends it in amber?

I think that’s why I ended on an image of driving in the car with her, leaning against her toward some destination that we’re headed to together.

In an interview you did about ten years ago, you said you were always interested in looking at one’s complicity. For survivors of intimate-partner violence, this is a complicated question, but I wonder if—as one of those survivors—you have grappled with feeling complicit in your mother’s death, or how others were?

I began to learn that I was living with survivor’s guilt in Native Guard, but it was really apparent in Memorial Drive, because [while writing the book] I found documentary evidence of things I had sensed in the back of my mind. If I were the one that [my stepfather] had killed when he came to the football stadium, and if I hadn’t smiled and spoken nicely to him, as he reported to his psychiatrist, I’d be the one dead, and she would not have been. He would not have been able to elude capture, and he would have been arrested for my murder instead.

But then there’s this other kind of complicity that I constantly asked myself about. Why did I not say anything? Why did I believe that it was my place to silently endure? If I had told her to leave earlier on, would she have left then? In her document, her letter, she talks about thinking they were both unhappy and that once my brother went off to college, they would go their separate ways. She thought it was the best thing for my brother to give him that veneer of stability. If I had told her, maybe she wouldn’t have waited, and she would have saved herself.

I left out of the memoir that the Atlanta child murders were the backdrop of my childhood. Being afraid of what was out there was balanced by feeling safe in Mississippi and in our house. What I didn’t know yet was that the danger could be in the house with you.

The loss of a mother is difficult at any age. Was helping others a motivation for sharing your mother’s story and her history?

One of the main reasons I wanted to recover her story is that I hoped this could help other people who might be in similar situations. There are so many stereotypes about domestic violence and victims of domestic violence. That the cops can’t do anything, and the victims are just going to go back to their abusers. That they made their bed, so they should lie in it. This idea that victims of domestic violence somehow asked for it, or, as I wrote in a poem, a friend saying, “My mother would never put up with that”—as if there’s some flaw in the victim. That infuriates me.

My mother was what they call a perfect victim. She did everything right. Everything. If you have a woman who is smart and educated and beautiful and resilient and connected—all the things my mother was, who had access to both institutional support and individuals and friends—if a woman like her can’t get away, what are you going to say to women who are poor or in bad health or dependent on their parents for resources for their children? Not to mention that you are more likely to die for leaving an abusive partner than staying with them. How can you tell these women, “Why didn’t you just do this? What’s wrong with you?” I wanted people to know that if a woman as successful, connected, and smart as my mother could still be the victim of an abuser, it’s not a fatal character flaw of hers, but it is a fatal flaw of a society that doesn’t understand that.

I was discussing Memorial Drive with a friend who immediately saw the parallels between the domestic violence your mother experienced and the spike in domestic violence happening during this current pandemic.

It’s frightening to think about what’s happening in some households where people are forced to shelter in place; there’s not even the respite of leaving the house or having someone leave the house.

Did I read in Beyond Katrina that your great-grandmother was alive during the Spanish influenza pandemic in Gulfport and that the pandemic claimed her?

My aunt Sugar and her siblings were alive during the influenza pandemic of 1918. My grandmother remembered, when she was very little, seeing her mother get up in the middle of the night and falling back onto the bed dead.

I was thinking just this morning, that trauma is always part of my life. It’s like, here’s the next one. We moved to Chicago in 2017. We had lived in our house for six months, and then it burned. It dredged up everything I had been bearing for a long time. It happened Thanksgiving 2017, and we didn’t get back until a week or so before Thanksgiving 2019. I finished writing this book over the past two years of the displacement. We had an apartment around the corner from our house, and I lost myself in it for a while. It was difficult. We just got back into it for a few months, and now there’s this international pandemic. I feel like the trauma is always there waiting to reveal itself, and I’m always trying to deal with it.

How do you cope with that?

Oddly enough, I tend to focus on feeling like a very lucky person. As much difficulty and trauma as there’s always been, I feel tremendously fortunate. I love where we live, about three blocks from Lake Michigan. I can hear it when it’s particularly active. I felt really landlocked in Atlanta. It’s big enough that we can have our in-laws here with us. I think of all the people who are not as lucky as this, who can’t stand out in a backyard and breathe fresh air and feel safe.

To have been able to fashion a life— not just survival, but actual thriving in the aftermath of the greatest loss of my life—that feels pretty lucky. To not be destroyed by it; to not be destroyed by the fire; to be able to get back into this big old house that made me think of my mother the first time I saw it. The fire burned the entire inside of the house, not the outside. It’s more beautiful than ever.