African American poetry and literary analysis

¶ … American Eulogies to the Old South:

Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard and Marilyn Nelson's a Wreath for Emmett Till Both American poets Natasha Trethewey and Marilyn Nelson tackle aspects of the American history of racial intolerance in their books Native Guard and a Wreath for Emmett Till. Poetry is often though of as a personal medium, although back in Elizabethan times, poetry was also an opportunity for an author to demonstrate exotic wordplay and his or her pure, technical gifts as an artist, as is evidenced in Shakespeare's verbal fireworks in Homeric times, poetic epic told the story and proclaimed the values of a nation as well as an individual. These American women's poetic works are tours de force on all three levels of poetic expression -- personally, in their use of poetic structure, and in their use of poetry to discuss issues of national morality. Their interconnected poems, united by common themes and structures as well as their enclosure within the covers of a single volume, pay homage to seismic historical events in American history of personal significance to the author. The poets claim these relatively recent subjects as relevant and worthy topics of poetic verse in the European tradition of the sonnet, and the volumes also contain reflective aspects of the poet's own life experience in engagement of racial issues.

In a recent interview, Marilyn Nelson specifically stresses her desire to use the mathematical medium of a sonnet sequence in her Wreath for Emmett Till. A wreath is not simply a loving metaphorical, floral display of grief. Her poem is literally a verbal wreath of sonnets that refers to the death of a young person, Emmett Till, whose violent demise is contrasted with the Shakespearean character Ophelia's sad end as well as characters from contemporary American history and the American past. Nelson explicitly states that she chose to use the very mathematical discourse of the sonnet as a way of disciplining and structuring the profound emotions she felt since a child about Till's death. She does not merely use a sonnet, that is, fourteen lines of rhymed, iambic pentameter, but the deploys the storytelling convention of a wreath or a crown of sonnets, seven interlinked sonnets "in which the first line of the first sonnet becomes the last line of the last sonnet" (Pinkney, 2005, p.1).

In a wreath of sonnets, the last line of each sonnet becomes the "first line of the following sonnet. A heroic crown of sonnets is a sequence of fifteen sonnets, which are interlinked like the normal crown of sonnets, except that in the heroic crown the last sonnet is made up of the first lines of the previous fifteen sonnets....My crown is slightly different because the last sonnet is also an acrostic. So the first letters of each line, if you read down, spell out the phrase, "RIP Emmett L. Till" (Pinkney, 2005, p.1). Thus, the poet's verbal skill in prosody, or the science and technique of poetry, is interwoven into the entire work of literature. "The strict form became a kind of insulation, a way of protecting myself from the intense pain of the subject matter," writes Nelson in her introduction to the volume (Nelson, 2005, p. 1).

Yet Nelson deploys this European form for her uniquely American political and personal poetic purposes, to discuss the uniquely American legacy of Black-White relations. Bluntly, Nelson says: "The sonnet form was originally a poetic form that was used to declare love, and love poems very often use flowers as a symbol of romance. What I wanted to do is to turn around that tradition and describe something really beautiful in the form that is traditionally related to love, and I wanted to use the language of flowers to describe something horrible," much like the flowers of Ophelia are used to crown the young woman's horrific death (Pinkney, 2005, p.2). Emmett Till did not die for love; rather he was murdered because of the color of his skin before his time, while he was still a child.

In the images used in Nelson's poetic sequence, the tree is not merely an object of beauty and floral communication, as it was for the Elizabethans, but a reference to the earlier African-American poetic tradition of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, who wrote poetry about how African-Americans were hung upon trees while they were, lynched (Pinkney, 2005, p.2). The crown of sonnets that the poet crowns Till, a thirteen-year-old visitor to relatives from the North who was murdered by White men in the South for allegedly 'sassing' a white woman during the Jim Crow era of the 20th century. Till is thus made into a young martyr, bearing a Christ-like status of one who is remembered, in a regal and formalized fashion, not in merely a wail of grief, or conversely, merely a political symbol. However, even cautious reviewers of Nelson's have found this sweeping pronouncement and use of elevated verse justified, given the historical legacy it has come to symbolize (Shipers, 2006, p.199). Till's specific tragedy as an innocent slaughtered is paid homage to, even while Nelson traces the significance of his death in a larger, contemporary American fabric of politics today. She both mocks and celebrates the idea that America is a sweet land of liberty in her verse.

The crowning of Till in poetry is not merely of relevance to the African-American experience of martyrdom, suffering, and enslavement. References to modern atrocities, like that of the World Trade Center abound. The earlier "epidemic of lynchings was intended to terrorize the Black population in the South. These were acts of terrorism. And I [Nelson] wanted to relate those acts of terrorism with the acts of terrorism that are happening in our era" (Pinkney, 2005, p.1). Even the national government of the modern U.S. has felt palpable grief and fear of terrorism, justifiably so -- but Nelson's poetic wreath shows that this is not a recent historical occurrence, rather that terrorism has been used on multiple occasions against many people, and by United States citizens specifically against Blacks, while the justice system looked away. "The art complements and expands the meanings of the poetry, having its own layers of meaning. Sprigs of rosemary," an Elizabethan herb associated with remembrance that Ophelia carries in "Hamlet," combined with "wreaths of spring flowers, trees bearing strange fruit, and a 'full moon that smiled calmly on his death' counterpoise the innocence of nature with the nature of mankind, the fruited plain with the "undergrowth of mandrake" (Schneider, 2005).

Natasha Trethewey's book Native Guard is an engagement of similar issues, but from the point-of-view of a woman of mixed ancestry, neither Black nor White. The title poem is located in a historical place, near the author's hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi. There, Black soldiers had played a pivotal role in the Civil War, the poet learned many years later, just as she only learned, through trial and error, how her own mixed racial status was perceived by society. "Off the coast, on Ship Island, stood a fort that had once been a Union prison housing Confederate captives. Protecting the fort was the second regiment of the Louisiana Native Guards -- one of the Union's first official black units" ("Natasha Trethewey: Biography," Houghton Mifflin. 2007).

Unlike Emmett Till, of whom Marilyn Nelson assumes she can taste his horror, on some level, Trethewey admits the unknowability of these historical men of the farther past, but uses her imagination to connect and to pays homage to the soldiers who served there and had the strange status of guardians and formers slaves stationed at the fort, and in charge of overseeing their former masters. The speaker of the title poem is a writer, like Trethewey, given the responsibility for writing letters home for those who cannot because slavery has deprived them of literacy or because they are wounded -- like the poet speaks for the men who can no longer speak for themselves. This is why she too uses the elevated discourse of traditional European verse, as even the lost names are worthy of pentameter.

The voice of the lost, nameless (unlike Till) soldier becomes a poetic voice of memory, in short he becomes like Trethewey herself as this modern woman takes on the voice of the memory of fallen men and also the Black woman and a White man who gave her life and raised her even when their marriage was illegal and it was still technically illegal in 1966 Mississippi to have a mixed marriage. Like the South still remembers the Civil War and the Confederacy, Trethewey tries to remember -- but with a difference. She exorcizes her own personal demons and rage -- and love -- of the South by taking on a persona in a dramatic monologue and sonnet, like Nelson assuages her rage by using the walls of verse to explore a person who has haunted her life and haunted America since she was a child.

Although still a proud Southerner, Trethewey's relationship with the Southern culture and literary tradition is profoundly ambivalent, just like Nelson's relationship with the land of the free and the home of the brave. Nelson's violent images call upon the reader to behold the corpse of Till, forcing the reader into a state of seismic cultural shock, as America has long been eager to forget its racist legacy (Harold, 2006, p.263). Trethewey's first lines of her book are gentler, but there is always the urge to remember: "Truth be told, I do not want to forget anything of my former life" (Trethewey, p.1)

The calls her poetic collection an act of memory "Erasure, those things that get left out of the landscape of the physical landscape, things that aren't monumented or memorialized, and how we remember and what it is that we forget. I wanted to kind of restore some of those narratives, so those things that are less remembered (Brown, 2007). Her use of the sonnet form over her cycle of poems is not as perfectly consistent as Nelson's, but repetition and remembrance motivate her to use sonnets, pantoons, and other repetitive forms to encapsulate her poetic project's purpose. Her choice of verse is slightly less formalized and less in the Elizabethan tradition than Nelson's, and also harkens to recent uses of verse, as does her choice of allusions and vocabulary.