Thrall.docx - Review: Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey’s...

Review: Poet Laureate Natasha
Trethewey’s “Thrall” explores
father-daughter racial divide
PARUL KAPUR HINZEN SEPTEMBER 10, 2012
Natasha Trethewey ’s body of poems reads like a narrative of race in
America, moving between private family stories and reflections on the
painful experience of blacks and people of mixed blood like her
through history. The story reaches its climax in “Thrall” (Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 84 pages), Trethewey’s riveting new collection of
poems, published just as she takes up her appointment as poet
laureate of the United States. It’s the climax of a voice raised in anger

at a white father, at a punishing culture of enlightenment that viewed
African blood as intrinsically inferior, as “taint.”
Natasha Tretheway
Trethewey was born in 1966 in Gulfport, Mississippi. The marriage of
her black mother and white Canadian father, a poet and one-time
boxer, broke the state law against miscegenation. Her parents
divorced when Trethewey was young, and her mother remarried an
abusive man. In 1985, while Trethewey was at college, her mother
was killed by her second husband, whom she had divorced. These
turbulent biographical facts form the core of Trethewey’s poetry,
personal anguish finding echoes in the wider suffering of black
Americans and, in her latest poems, in the dehumanization of colored
people across the Americas.
Images frequently inspire Trethewey’s poetry. They are where she
finds history: family pictures, vintage photographs. (Her second book,
“Bellocq’s Ophelia,” makes use of E.J. Bellocq’s famous photos of a
mulatto New Orleans prostitute of the early 1900s.) In “Thrall,” she
unearths a genre of Mexican colonial painting known as Casta
painting, which depicts a complicated taxonomy of mixed-race
children produced by a variety of interracial unions. (Trethewey has