Her mother was more than just a victim
Former U.S. poet laureate’s moving memoir echoes Black America’s trauma
Natasha Trethewey was just 19 years old when her mother was shot and killed by her stepfather.
She was born in 1960s Mississippi to Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, her Black mother, and Eric Trethewey, her white Canadian father — whose mixed race marriage was illegal at the time because of miscegenation laws; they went out of state to be married. They ultimately divorced while Natasha was young; her stepfather, Joel Grimmette, murdered her mother in 1985.
Trethewey went on to become America’s poet laureate, twice, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.
Her new book, “Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir,” is the first time she’s written about her childhood years. In a very emotional interview, she spoke with the Star about why she wrote the memoir now, building monuments and discovering her mother’s voice in police files.
It’s such a beautiful memoir and I had to keep putting it down to absorb it all because it’s also painful.
It was very hard to write. It took me seven years. Even as I had given myself the task of doing it, I don’t think I really wanted to go into the depths of those difficult places that I had to go to write it, to remember all the things I had been trying for so long to bury.
What made you want to do it now?
I had to find a way to contend with the ways that (my mother) was being erased. And what I mean by that is the more attention that I got after winning the Pulitzer, after being appointed poet laureate, the more my back story became part of what would be written about me in magazines or in newspapers. And when that happened, my mother was often presented as just an afterthought, a footnote, murder victim, or just a murdered woman. And I felt that people weren’t recognizing just how important she was in my life, in making me the person that I became and the writer that I became. I decided that if she was going to be mentioned again and again that I was going to be the one to tell her story, and to place her in the proper context in my life.
You’ve addressed your mother’s death and particularly how it frames your life in your poetry collection “Monument.” How does the act of memoir create a different feeling or healing than the act of poetry?
I was working on them at the same time. I would be working on the memoir and I would have to stop and turn the page over because something would start to come out as a poem and not prose. I think that I needed more room to move around, rather than the very small spaces of a poem, the density and compression of a poem. I needed somehow to have more space. And writing prose allowed me to do that. I was, of course, still focused on the kind of lyricism that I try to bring to a poem.
As a poet, language is clearly important to you. Which got me to thinking about you calling your last poetry collection “Monument” and this memoir “Memorial Drive,” both homages to your mother. There’s a real play on the two words.
My mother died on Memorial Drive, which is the road leading up to the nation’s largest monument to the Confederacy. Those two things are placed side by side and always have been side by side, I think, in my psyche as my two existential wounds. The trauma and racism of the Confederacy, and its history of slavery and its ongoing message of subjugation to African Americans, and the way that my mother … (she pauses to take a breath)
The figurative that you are thinking about, certainly the thing that I was thinking about as well: What is it that has driven me toward being the kind of poet who is interested in memory and memorialization in creating a lyrical monument to my mother? What is the possibility of something that is more lasting even than stone?
The police let your mother down — one of them left the job when he was supposed to be guarding her apartment.
We live in a society that does not value some lives as much as others. And we can see that particularly in this story with the case of a woman’s life. This is before the American anti-stalking laws had gone into effect, before the Violence Against Women Act. There are so many ways that the lives of women are undervalued … So I do think that her story does tell us something about lives that are valued less than others.
You’ve referred to your mother’s death as “my greatest wound.” Has writing helped to heal or is the grief what keeps you writing?
Well, I think there is healing from this. What it seems to me that I can do, and what I have done, is give that wound a kind of palliative care so I can live with it. You keep it clean, you keep it from getting infected, but it doesn’t go away — you just live with it. Sometimes certain things make the pain less acute; sometimes it hurts as if it just happened.
I do think that writing about this — and even having difficult conversations about it — is part of that palliative care because it means I get to talk about her with more people who will know something about who she was and participate in the care of the memorial, of the monument I’ve been trying to erect for her.
You serendipitously discovered the police file in 2005 and the transcript of her last phone call, which you published in the book. How important was it to you that we hear or at least read her voice?
It was a hard decision to make. Because I, on one hand, worried that readers would see it as me being lazy because I wasn’t telling the story. But in this case, it felt to me that it would be easy for me to tell you how smart and resilient and calm and patient and thoughtful my mother was, or I could just show you and let you see it for yourself and hear it in her voice.
You write that “To survive trauma, one must be able to write a story about it. And this story evolved over the years to create a narrative of self that could in turn, contain yet another trauma and give it meaning.” This individual story seems to have created an expansive container for the story of Black America.
Without being able to tell an individual story like this one, or a collective story of a people, you would be reduced to thinking of everything as random and capricious instead of thinking about the value in unearned suffering. I think (Martin Luther) King said something about the way that unearned suffering is part of one’s humanizing and nobility of survival and resilience and transcendence. Better to tell that story than a story of subjugation and oppression … Unearned suffering is redemptive.
It’s also the difference between someone trying to victimize you and being a victim.
Absolutely. My mother was not a victim. I am not a victim. The people that I write about who helped to make this country are not victims. Even as it is a nation that is trying to victimize again and again.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.