{"id":7175,"date":"2016-09-24T17:11:17","date_gmt":"2016-09-24T17:11:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/?p=7175"},"modified":"2016-09-25T21:59:20","modified_gmt":"2016-09-25T21:59:20","slug":"ftf-olga-dugan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/2016\/09\/24\/ftf-olga-dugan\/","title":{"rendered":"Following the Fellows: Olga Dugan"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Voice in the Rose: Reconstitution and Remembrance in Natasha Trethewey\u2019s Papers<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/a>

Dr. Olga Dugan is an Assistant Professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the aftermath of 72\u00a0hours spent in the library taking what has come to 89\u00a0pages of typed, meticulously-organized notes, as well as a treasured and productive afternoon shared in conversation with United States Poet Laureate Consultant (2012-2014) and Emory University professor, Natasha Trethewey, completing this post has become less a way of completing an assignment, and more of an opportunity to bring to discussion a view of the research process as truly self-revelatory and transformative. My research project involved listening for<\/em> Trethewey\u2019s narrative discourse in relation to historical representation in her poetry and poetic prose. Through a study of her \u201cpersonal papers\u201d and \u201cwritings,\u201d I hoped to deepen and broaden my understanding of the problem against which the poet-historian writes. Little did I know, however, that in listening for Trethewey\u2019s discourse of history, I would also hear my own in ways which brought clarity and response to questions I had not planned to review.<\/p>\n

As defined by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, from whom I\u2019ve borrowed the term, listening for<\/em> refers to a method of inquiry into, or the act of discerning, another\u2019s voice and the discourse that expresses it.[i]<\/a><\/sup> The difference between listening for<\/em> Natasha Trethewey\u2019s narrative discourse (and ultimately for her voice) and listening to<\/em> narrative discourse in a poem corresponds nicely to G\u00e9rard Genette\u2019s distinction between \u201cauctorial discourse\u201d that \u201cindicates both\u201d the author\u2019s presence \u201c(actual or fictive) and the sovereign authority of that presence in his work,\u201d and the discourse produced by story\u2014a narrating instance one must never confuse with the instance of writing.[ii]<\/a> <\/sup>In Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method<\/em>, Genette relegates auctorial discourse to \u201chistorical narrative or a real autobiography,\u201d where authority lies with the author as maker and composer of the narrative, and whose lived-experience informs the discourse behind the story the narrative tells (213). Hence, to be considered neither \u201cimmanent to\u201d nor \u201cdeducible from the narrative,\u201d as Gerald Prince warns,[iii]<\/a><\/sup> an author\u2019s narrative discourse must be listened for<\/em>, as well as, if not more than, listened to<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Natasha<\/a>

Natasha Trethewey<\/p><\/div>\n

Teaching her work in community-college literature and composition classes; hosting community and neighborhood poetry and critical theory reading groups featuring one of her books each summer; writing, presenting, and publishing articles about Trethewey\u2019s poetry of history; attending her readings, and watching various interviews and presentations via television and the internet, I have spent five years mostly listening to <\/em>voice. As Peter Elbow would put it, I focused on \u201cwhether\u201d a \u201cgiven text has audible voice, what kind of dramatic voice it has, whether it has a recognizable or distinctive voice, and whether the writer was able to achieve authority of voice\u201d (11).[iv]<\/a> <\/sup>Surely, one does well to explore what is<\/em> being narrated on the page, the elements used to produce what is<\/em> on the page, and the relationships between these elements on the page. But to concentrate on historical foundations and conflicts of contemporary culture as portrayed through Trethewey\u2019s poetry of history, I now sought to listen for<\/em> the poet-historian\u2019s narrative discourse, not only on<\/em>, but also permeating<\/em> the pages of Domestic Work<\/em>, Bellocq\u2019s Ophelia<\/em>, Native Guard<\/em>, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast<\/em>, and Thrall<\/em>. At the Rose Library, which provided resources nowhere else to be found, I would listen for this voice<\/em>; I would hear it, and so much more besides. I became deeply acquainted with Trethewey\u2019s discourse of history, what, in terms borrowed again from Lawrence-Lightfoot\u2019s The Art and Science of Portraiture<\/em>, can be described as an expression of \u201cvoice\u201d or the \u201cstance and perspective, revealing the place from which\u201d Trethewey \u201cobserves and records the action, reflecting her angle of vision, allowing her to perceive patterns and see the strange in the familiar\u201d (105).[v]<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The narrative of my sojourn begins with Rose Library\u2019s mission statement, which deserves quoting in its entirety here. Not only situating the library as a cornerstone of the intellectual and creative life that Emory University\u2019s academic community enjoys on and off campus, and shares across national and international borders, the statement also aids in framing an explanation of how the Rose functioned in helping me to accomplish my task as a research fellow:<\/p>\n

The Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library collects and connects stories of human experience, promotes access and learning, and offers opportunities for dialogue for all wise hearts who seek knowledge by preserving distinctive collections; fostering original research; bridging content and context; and engaging diverse communities through innovative outreach, programming, and exhibitions.[vi]<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Acquiring the papers of a poet, whose expressed obsession is writing to reclaim a history shared by all Americans from the stand point both of her own experience and that of people she knows, as well as that of the many voices too long gone unearthed and silenced, more than aptly attests to a concern with collecting and connecting stories of human experience<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The library\u2019s collection of Natasha Trethewey\u2019s papers<\/a>, including her diaries, notebooks, scholarship, and research, reveals the poet-historian\u2019s preoccupations with raising questions through stories of agency and dissonance that petition for a reader\u2019s response, urging us to recall information and\/or facts of lived-experience\u2014our own and that of others. Notes on her poetic subjects point up topics and themes that occasion dialogue concerning \u201cthe intersections of national and personal memory.\u201d[vii]<\/a> <\/sup>Particularly moving and engaging is her immediate motivation behind this pursuit of hard history and the extended invitation to her readers to pursue the same. For instance, Trethewey writes of a timeless and timely love for words. Poetry, she notes, is \u201ca beautiful encounter with the power and beauty of words.\u201d[viii]<\/a><\/sup> In equal measure, however, I found her more indirect motivation a challenge to heart and head. Several reflections on \u201cduality,\u201d which one might initially misconstrue as a constant concern with being mixed-race<\/em>, actually amounts to the \u201cvoice\u201d of a poet-historian preoccupied and perturbed by reconstitutions of the term mixed-race<\/em> and the moral implications behind the blind\u2014or worse, the deliberate\u2014acceptance of its consistent use to categorize (and marginalize) human beings. In one notebook entry, she writes: \u201cI was beginning to see what a fascination America has with mixed blood. And then I read William Faulkner\u2019s Light in August<\/em>, a novel that addressed the nature of duality through a character unsure of his heritage, and made it [an] unusual concern. For me, the mixed-blood duality became a metaphor that represented . . . all the very different parts that make up . . . the shared experience of that which is truly American, mixed, and whole.\u201d[ix]<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

In response to the general problem by way of the particular, Trethewey rearticulates the term \u201cmixed-blood\u201d or \u201cmixed-race,\u201d to reclaim the culturally and racially interactive American \u201cwe\u201d that inevitably gets erased and forgotten when the term is accepted and used to make some Americans look at other Americans, and those others<\/em> to see themselves, as a \u201cthing\u201d lesser than the \u201cself\u201d they really are\u2014whatever their skin color, their gender, class, age, ability\/disability and so on. She concludes an especially telling entry:<\/p>\n

\"Natasha<\/a>

Natasha Threthewey reading<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI write to rescue from oblivion stories that have not been told.\u201d Through these \u201cstories\u201d of individual and collective human experience that she collects and connects within the context of history, Trethewey thus extends an invitation to recall our own love for words to a caution against the potential of words to beguile, but even more so, to a call for readers to consider the power of words to communicate the truths of our lives and the parts these play in constituting the larger histories of community, culture, country. This is why I teach literature and composition\u2014<\/em>I recall my own preoccupations flooding my consciousness after closing the notebook in which Trethewey wrote the entry above\u2014this is why I teach Natasha Trethewey\u2019s work to unfailingly receptive writers and researchers at an urban two-year college; this is <\/em>why I believe writing a book about artist and art to be vital in our moment of history.<\/em><\/p>\n

Certainly, the fellowship that helped defray travel costs from Philadelphia to Atlanta for my two-week sojourn at the Rose represents the library\u2019s investment in promoting access. <\/em>But best representing, for me, its commitment to learning<\/em>, the library made available materials conveying Trethewey\u2019s interpretive voice, an utterance dedicated to alerting others to the absence of truths or facts of lived experience in order to pinpoint cultural realities that enlighten her discourse of history. \u201cWith the feeling of loss,\u201d the poet-historian writes in another notebook, \u201cis the attempt to regain something\u2014fill in those gaps with memory or whatever else. I write to fill these empty places.\u201d I felt especially at home in Trethewey\u2019s annotated reading lists, which contextualize her preoccupations with the stories of unrecorded \/ unheard voices signaling issues of reconstitution, \u201cfor good or ill,\u201d as James Boyd White would say.[x]<\/a> <\/sup>Together, they confirmed what I had come so far to make certain I knew, that Trethewey writes simply and complexly against \u201cforgetting\u201d as a by-product of reconstituting language in ways that negatively impact the shaping of culture. In turn, she writes for the sake of \u201cremembrance.\u201d In poems and poetic prose, narrative discourse unearths discrepancies between ideological inscriptions of national history and people\u2019s stories as racialized individuals across time and space to whom this Nation owes remembrance. For this cause, she entreats her readers to locate our own stories as equal contributions, not to a narrow, stagnant metanarrative, but to a broader, dynamic history of a shared national place. What I did not know, going forward in my research at the library, was that her call to remembrance would also elicit from me a response of faith in the very voice driving my own scholarship, pedagogy, and art\u2014one that attests to the usefulness of literature, and how poetry matters in particular.<\/p>\n\n\t\t