Tag: Families

Natasha Tretheway, Thrall

Tretheway, Natasha. Thrall. Mariner Books, 2015.

Summary of Work
Natasha Tretheway’s Thrall is a collection of poems that explores what it means to be mixed race, both through her own personal experience of growing up as a half-black woman and the documented experiences of others through various mediums. She largely looks at paintings: the pictorial representations of the Miracle of the Black Leg, the myth that white men could be saved from their amputated limbs or illness by taking the left leg of an Ethiopian or black man and grafting it onto the white man’s body; the paintings representing the Book of Castas, the documentation of the different blood permutations of blackness in Spaniard blood in Mexico: mulatto, mestizo, casto, etc, believing that once the blood had mixed, there was no way to stop what they saw as a regression to black primitive natures; the paintings of great artists like Velasquez, who kept a mixed blood slave and finally manumitted him in 1650, training him to be a painter, the man who gave us the Calling of St. Matthew, Pareja. All of the examples she brings forward cause us to question why not only the painters painted people of mixed race that way, but how they could participate in the creation of life and yet be so disdainful of it or clinical in the way they looked at it.

She describes the clinical surgical experimentation on black women as the white doctors determined what the female body’s ideal was and what its makeup was. She describes the way, in an anonymous painter’s work, the painter within the portrait is horribly mischaracterizing the black woman who seems to be his wife. She describes the children of those mixed race unions, having her readers question what those children’s lives would have been, how the white men represented in the paintings can be so possessive and yet so dismissive of the things they love. Similarly, she goes through these same questions and experiences in her own life, as she tells us of her mother’s struggles of having people give her money in grocery stores when they found out a child, who they originally thought she was maid to, was actually her half-white daughter. She tells us of her struggles to love her father, who left and marginalized her mother until her death, who would always insist that Jefferson could not have fathered children by a slave woman, because he was so against slavery. The collected work takes plenty of time to describe the conflict and turmoil within mixed-race individuals who have to deal with not only the derision and questioning from the outside world, but with the conflict within their own families as they learn what it means to be mixed race, and to have a mixed-race family member.

 

Brief Note on Themes
The main theme within the work is what it means to be from two different races. There are also themes, however, of objectification, slavery, and possession along with white colonialism and how words on a page, documenting the official narrative, also obscure the narrative, and those obscured stories are told in the white space of the pages. The book also calls for people to recognize that the past is inextricably tied to the present for those people who are mixed race and are dealing with both the history and the racism in the present day, even from their own parents.

by bluesyjune

C.D. Wright, One Big Self

Wright, C.D. One Big Self. Copper Canyon P., 2007.

Summary of Work
C.D. Wright’s “One Big Self” explores the lives of people in three different prisons in Louisiana. Wright suggests that when we look at all the prisons in America—and the prison population, which is the largest in the world—we are looking in a mirror at America’s values and legacy. What makes up the prison population outside of the numbers and the listed crime or law broken? Invited by her colleague and friend to go to learn about the inmates while her friend is taking pictures of the prison inmates for a larger project, Wright sets out to learn about the inmates and their lives, both before prison, during their crimes and trials, and life in prison. She also contemplates what prisons do to the environments and communities they inhabit. She shows that these inmates are more than just numbers, they are people who have dealt with many difficult circumstances: poverty, difficult family situations, poor education and no job opportunities available, relationship woes, and more.

One of the main things I noticed highlighted was the difference in experience for men and women in prison. There was a large focus on women in context of their children, children they have before they go to prison, children they have while in prison, and what happens to their relationships with their children; there is even a poem describing the process of getting ready for an Easter party with the children in the main area of the prison. With the men, the focus is much more on their experiences in prison or getting to prison rather than on families. When children are mentioned, it is in context of the ages that they meet and where the children end up, usually in prison like their fathers.

 

Brief Note on Themes
The overarching theme of the work is incarceration; how does the American prison system function? Who are the people in the system? Since the makeup of the majority of the population is black males and black people overall, what does that say about who we incarcerate or crime? How does the prison system affect the communities in which they are built? How does it save or ruin city economies? What are the reasons people invest in such systems, especially private prison systems, and how does having prison on the stock market change the system as people view it, use it, and strive for its expansion and continuation? Wright’s work largely reflects upon what it means to look at people solely for their crimes when they are much more than that, and what that says about the American justice and incarceration system.

 

Brief Note on Poetic Structure
Written in a free form, the work is a mix of what would seem like prose, followed by poetry that utilizes caesura, line breaks, and plenty of white space to cue readers to changes in scene, narrator, situation, and discussion. The structure takes a minimalist attitude, where the situations are given in pieces rather than as one continuous narrative. The breaks in narrative and the mix of prisoners names, only ever briefly mentioned, give a sense of “everyman” for the prisoners, rendering both their invisibility and individuality clear to the reader. Certain phrases or poetic repetitive structures, such as the “Count the . . .” poems which are brought back within other poems, work to remind readers of the controlling situation in which the prisoners live.

by bluesyjune