The poet I ended up choosing for this project is Natasha Trethewey. I found her poem “History Lesson” particularly beautiful and meaningful. She starts off talking about when she was younger and took a trip to the beach with her grandmother. The memory is described from a photograph she found of the trip. But the poem shifts around the middle. The perspective changes from a happy beach memory to remembering the racial oppression her family experienced. She writes right at the shift, “It is 1970, two years after they opened the rest of this beach to us, forty years since the photograph where she stood on a narrow plot of land marked, colored”. She is on a beach only recently fully opened to her, and her grandmother has a similar photo in the same place.
One thing that struck me about this poem is that even after the tone shift in the middle, Trethewey does not shy away from the words “smiling” and “flowered”. You would think that as the tone got more serious so would the word choice, but I’m absolutely in love with the way she is able to get her message across while still keeping the moment of the photograph happy. Because her grandmother was legitimately happy when the photograph was taken.
She also uses similar lines when describing the photo of herself and her grandmother’s photographs. Describing both of their poses as having their hands on the “flowered hips” of their clothing. It helps tie together the idea that both moments are intertwined.
Just around the tonal shift of the poem, Trethewey uses simile and metaphor that don't seem to fit the poem. She describes the fish and sand in sharp ways, even directly comparing the minnows to switchblades. It feels out of place with the somber but somehow happy tone of the rest of the poem. I think it’s interesting, and if the intent was to catch my attention she certainly did. But I legitimately do not understand why she would choose these words for the poem.
I think that the title is really important to the poem as well. “History Lesson” captures the feeling of being told of moments of the past with specific significance in the author’s life. And it also shows that the reader is learning too. As the reader, I began to think about how in 1968 this beach was opened to everyone, how that’s incredibly recent.
I was initially kind of confused as to how the author could transition from talking about the beach to reflecting on racial oppression, but the quote you provided helped clarify that. I love the sophistocated way she transitioned from one topic to another, almost contrasting the two time periods she was discussing. Also, the out of place imagery/tone confuses me sometimes too, but I think that might just be this author's writing style.
ReplyDeleteI really like the way you mentioned the absence of a change in tone even after going from what seemed to be a positive memory to a negative one. It adds to the story she is trying to tell.
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