was because the writing of the poems led me to it.
It was stunning for me, too, and painfully so.
McHaney: You dedicateNative Guardto
your mother, in memory, and the book is the ele-
gies for your mother, the weaving together the
personal and the public histories, the erasures
and the monuments and the memorial. And then,
moving backward, you dedicated your second
book Bellocq’s Ophelia to your husband, Brett
Gadsden, historian, professor of African Ameri-
can Studies at Emory University. And your first
book Domestic Work, going back further, you
dedicated to your father, Eric Trethewey, a poet,
who teaches at Hollins University. In Domestic
Work, the second section of four is dedicated to
your mother’s mother, your grandmother: ‘‘For
Leretta Dixon Turnbough, born June 22, 1916,’’
who is still living. Yet, Rita Dove introduces
Domestic Work saying, that you ‘‘resisted the
lure of autobiography...weaving no less than a
tapestry of ancestors.’’ In Domestic Work, read-
ing it now again, I see many autobiographical
seeds.
Trethewey:Oh, absolutely.
McHaney: But they are masked just as you
said earlier. In ‘‘Tableau,’’ for example, the beau-
tiful line ‘‘—sees for the first time,/the hairline
crack/that has begun to split the bowl in half.’’
And there are poems about your father, your
Uncle Son and Aunt Sugar. So what changed?
Even though you’ve explained how Native
Guardcame about, what changed even in those
jottings and those poems that you would so explic-
itly write about the private anxieties and grief
experienced by your family, so that you were no
longer passing, in a sense, when you were address-
ing your bi-raciality, your grief, the tragedies?
Trethewey:Rita did a wonderful thing for
me in writing what she did about the larger
public history that is represented by the poems
inDomestic Work,particularly the ‘‘Domestic
Work’’...section. When I started writing
those, I really just wanted to write about my
grandmother who has lived an extraordinary
life. So I thought I was doing a very personal
family history. But early on I started placing the
events of her life within the context of a partic-
ular historical moment. Without understanding
the depth of my obsessions, I was already, by
using dates or other historical events within the
poems, working to blend personal or family sto-
ries with collective history. Maybe her taking
note of that helped me to see it as a long term
obsession of mine.
McHaney: You said a little bit about how
being back here in the physical landscape where
the tragedies happened didn’t let you escape
them. Did your studies at University of Massa-
chusetts, Amherst, influence your shift to the
autobiographical?
Trethewey:James Tate once said to me to
unburden myself of my mother’s death and
unburden myself of being black and just write
about the situation in Northern Ireland. And I
was devastated when he said that. John Edgar
Wideman said to me, ‘‘You have to write about
what you have to write about.’’ But at another
point some advice that Tate gave me was to just
pour my heart out into the poems, and so by the
time I was writingNative Guard,I was indeed
pouring my heart out into the poems. But I was
also not abandoning the very things ‘‘I’d been
given to write,’’ to use Phil Levine’s phrase. I
don’t know what I would have written if I
hadn’t written about those things that I have
been grappling with my whole adult life.
McHaney: You have also said, ‘‘We must
identify with the despised parts of ourselves.’’
Trethewey:I think writing some of the ele-
gies and perhaps even thinking about my place in
the South had a lot to do with approaching the
anniversary of my mother’s death. I was
approaching the twentieth anniversary, at the
same time approaching my fortieth birthday
which was the last age my mother ever was,
and so I think those things were heavy on my
mind. And perhaps returning to the South after
many years in the Northeast made me rethink
Southern history, American history, and my
place in it, because I can get really angry about
my South. Though I love it, it has given me
plenty of reason to hate it. And one of the things
that I hate, not just about the South but the way
Americans remember things, is that so much of
that memory is based upon a kind of willed
forgetting and there’s a lot that gets left out—
of the historical record, of textbooks, of public
monuments. I wanted to tell a fuller version of
what stories I have to add to the historical
record.
...McHaney:We’ve talked a little bit about
how your work evolved from the third person to the
autobiographical observations to reveal the era-
sures and to memorialize both personal and public
history. Yet, the Pulitzer Prize award has shiftedNative Guard