The nation's 19th Poet Laureate was born to a white father and a black mother in Mississippi in 1966. At that time, inter-racial marriage was still against the law. Her poetry often explores the way her personal history and that troubled period of American history reflect each other.
She explores ideas about racial difference in her poem “Knowledge.” It was based on a Victorian drawing that shows several white male doctors performing an autopsy on a young woman who had drowned. But it also contains a line written by her father, who is also a poet.
…. In the drawing this is only the first cut,
a delicate wounding: and yet how easily
the anatomist’s blade opens a place in me,
like a curtain drawn upon a room in which
each learned man is my father
and I hear, again, his words - I study
my crossbreed child - misnomer
and taxonomy, the language of zoology. Here,
he is all of them: the preoccupied man -
an artist, collector of experience, the skeptic angling
his head, his thoughts tilting toward
what I cannot know;…
Trethewey says that when she hears her father read the line “I study my crossbreed child,” she feels like an object on display. This, she says, is partly because of the word ‘study.’
“I felt that I was sort of being examined under a microscope or looked at in a sort of scientific sort of way by a distant lens. But also because of the word ‘crossbreed.’ Because of course, in the (English) language, human beings can’t be ‘crossbreds.’ So the word itself implies something of animal husbandry.”
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25