that is most prevalent and significant in Trethe-
wey’s poem. An example of situational irony
might be when a straight-A student fails to pass
a final exam in math while an almost-failing
student earns the highest grade on that same
exam. The math teacher might then state that
this outcome is indeed ironic.
Throughout Trethewey’s poem, the speaker
appears to be constantly amazed at the turns in
his life. These turns sometimes send him in a
direction 180 degrees different from where he
had expected to go. Through these ironic twists
of fate, the speaker comes to some interesting
conclusions about life. The speaker finds that
although on the surface, people can appear to
be quite different from one another, everyone
faces ironic changes, which can transfer a person
from what he was into what he never guessed
he would become. In this way, the speaker dis-
covers that on some deeper level, everyone is
equal.
The first ironic statement of this poem
occurs in the first verse, when the speaker talks
of wanting freedom. While one might expect the
speaker to be happy to simply enjoy his freedom
once he has it, he expresses that he wished to
retain that feeling of wanting even after being
released from bondage. The memories of having
been a slave are so profound that he cannot
shake them—but the speaker even says that he
does not want to shake them. He wants to
remember them all. He is free now, but he is
not like other free men who have never been
slaves. Free men who have never been enslaved
do not even think of themselves as free because
they were born that way. Only those who have
been released from slavery truly know what it
feels like to be free. The speaker’s freedom is
much more intense because he has known
slavery.
In the same first verse is another irony, this
one making reference to history. While the
speaker was a slave, his history was scrawled
across his back, imposed by the whips of his
master. The whip was the tool of discipline, the
voice of the master, which was imposed upon the
slave through torture. After he is freed, however,
the speaker voices his new history with a pen and
ink. With the markings of the whip, his historyWHAT
DO I READ
NEXT? In 2002, Trethewey published her second
collection of poems,Bellocq’s Ophelia. The
collection is narrated by a light-skinned
biracial woman who works as a prostitute
in New Orleans prior to World War I.
Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, playwright,
and essayist. Her 2005 collection of poems
American Sublimewas a runner-up for the
2006 Pulitzer Prize. The poems in this col-
lection cover various aspects of African
American lives in the nineteenth century.
Joyce Pettis’s African American Poets:
Lives, Works, and Sources(2002) provides
readers with a quick snapshot of poets from
the eighteenth century to today. Some of the
poets included in this book are Maya Ange-
lou, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Nikki Gio-
vanni, and Jupiter Hammon. The book
contains biographical as well as critical
material.
The poet Ai, who describes herself as a mix
of African American, Japanese, and Native
American, won the National Book Award
for her collection of poemsVice(1999). In
this collection, Ai takes on the voices of
famous characters (such as Marilyn Monroe
and the legendary comedian Lenny Bruce)
as well as lesser-known common criminals.
The Classic Slave Narratives(2002), edited
by the renowned scholar Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., provides readers with some of
the best of the written personal accounts of
slavery. Thousands of these narratives have
been chronicled; Gates provides four of the
most outstanding ones.IF HISTORY DOES NOT RECORD TRUTH, WHAT
DOES IT RECORD?’’Native Guard