Trethewey, Natasha: Warring Against Domesticity Through Her Poems
Natasha Trethewey is a biracial American contemporary woman poet. She has written many poems on the drudgery of housework, that poisoned the existence of African-Americans historically. Here’s one –
Domestic Work, 1937
All week she’s cleaned
someone else’s house,
stared down her own face
in the shine of copper–
bottomed pots, polished
wood, toilets she’d pull
the lid to–that look saying
Let’s make a change, girl.
But Sunday mornings are hers–
church clothes starched
and hanging, a record spinning
on the console, the whole house
dancing. She raises the shades,
washes the rooms in light,
buckets of water, Octagon soap.
Cleanliness is next to godliness …
Windows and doors flung wide,
curtains two-stepping
forward and back, neck bones
bumping in the pot, a choir
of clothes clapping on the line.
Nearer my God to Thee …
She beats time on the rugs,
blows dust from the broom
like dandelion spores, each one
a wish for something better.
I like the way she uses kinesthetics to make the house move to the music she play. This line is beautiful ‘washes the rooms in light.’ The detail of the dance – two-step, choir, really make this poem vivd. The volta comes at the end, in the acknowledgement that this life is not ideal. It echoes back to the year mentioned in the title. While the domestic chores we do now are more labor saving, we still have to do more of it compared to our husbands.
Here’s another Natasha Trethewey poem –
Letter Home
–New Orleans, November 1910
Four weeks have passed since I left, and still
I must write to you of no work. I’ve worn down
the soles and walked through the tightness
of my new shoes calling upon the merchants,
their offices bustling. All the while I kept thinking
my plain English and good writing would secure
for me some modest position Though I dress each day
in my best, hands covered with the lace gloves
you crocheted–no one needs a girl. How flat
the word sounds, and heavy. My purse thins.
I spend foolishly to make an appearance of quiet
industry, to mask the desperation that tightens
my throat. I sit watching–
though I pretend not to notice–the dark maids
ambling by with their white charges. Do I deceive
anyone? Were they to see my hands, brown
as your dear face, they’d know I’m not quite
what I pretend to be. I walk these streets
a white woman, or so I think, until I catch the eyes
of some stranger upon me, and I must lower mine,
a negress again. There are enough things here
to remind me who I am. Mules lumbering through
the crowded streets send me into reverie, their footfall
the sound of a pointer and chalk hitting the blackboard
at school, only louder. Then there are women, clicking
their tongues in conversation, carrying their loads
on their heads. Their husky voices, the wash pots
and irons of the laundresses call to me.
I thought not to do the work I once did, back bending
and domestic; my schooling a gift–even those half days
at picking time, listening to Miss J–. How
I’d come to know words, the recitations I practiced
to sound like her, lilting, my sentences curling up
or trailing off at the ends. I read my books until
I nearly broke their spines, and in the cotton field,
I repeated whole sections I’d learned by heart,
spelling each word in my head to make a picture
I could see, as well as a weight I could feel
in my mouth. So now, even as I write this
and think of you at home, Goodbye
is the waving map of your palm, is
a stone on my tongue.
This historical poem is like a period piece painting, capturing in its fine details the tacit double captivity of a woman and an African-American. The speaker has the means to better herself through education, but societal shackles rein her in. The books come alive when she nearly breaks their spines. The last lines are fabulous and evoke kinesthetics too – we can see ‘the waving palm’ and feel the weight of the word physically, on our tongues too.
This post is a part of #BlogchatterA2Z Challenge 2023.
