Gesture of a Woman-in-Process
from a photograph, 1902
In the foreground, two women,
their squinting faces
creased into texture--
a deep relief--the lines
like palms of hands
I could read if I could touch.
Around them, their dailiness:
clothelines sagged with linens,
a patch of greens and yams,
buckets of peas for shelling.
One woman pauses for the picture.
The other won't be still.
Even now, her hands circling,
the white blur of her apron
still in motion.
In Trethewey's first poem she finds that the past resists efforts to frame it, to understand it. Note that one woman "pauses for the picture" while "the other won't be still." Even a photograph, which fixes a moment, providing an opportunity to study the past, gets Trethewey no closer to a knowing intimacy. A photograph, too, is only a "gesture," not the fullness of presence. A photograph is background, it is "blur," as is the one woman's apron, and there will always be, as the book's final poem makes clear, "a thin white screen between" Trethewey and the past she tries to know..
Images stilled down and observed become for Trethewey a primary entry point into both real and imagined worlds and into both private and collective histories. Begun in her "first" poem, the trope of the image, whether photograph or painting, comes to figure prominently in her work, appearing in "Three Photographs," "Tableau," "History Lesson," and "Family Portrait" (in Domestic Work) and in "Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971" (in Native Guard), among others. When her poems don't rely on still images, they often focus on pictures "in motion,"--documentaries ("Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi") or movies ("Matinee"). Because of this trope, many other poems are easily read as though they were descriptions/investigations of images, including "At the Owl Club, North Gulfport, Mississippi, 1950" and "At the Station."
Through this focus on images, we see Trethewey's ache to read "a deep[er] relief," to touch the "texture" of those in the background, those lost to history. In the poems of her first book, these lost ones include wash women, cabbage vendors, shipyard and factory workers and, in her later work, black soldiers of the Civil War, a regiment whose name becomes the title of her Pulitzer Prize winning collection Native Guard. More importantly, perhaps--among those lost to history--is the poet's mother. In fact, this "first" poem and the "two women" featured quite possibly hint at, or foreshadow, the two most prominent women who emerge in Trethewey's work: herself and her mother. Thus, in a way, this first poem already contains the seeds for later poems such as "Early Evening, Frankfort, Kentucky," "The Southern Crescent," "Blond," and "My Mother Dreams Another Country."
One further observation: this "first" poem also sets up the idea of "woman-in-process," perhaps spawning many of the poems Trethewey has written in the last decade about identity, about an image of self still emerging. Her ghazal "Miscegenation," appearing in Native Guard, is but one such poem, naming and exploring geographical and contextual points within who she is and who she "means." We might interpret that, for Trethewey, identity is positioned between two races, two parts of herself, sometimes one and sometimes the other "paus[ing] for the picture" and sometimes one and sometimes the other not remaining "still." One part is foregrounded while another is backgrounded, "Motown/forty-fives" in one poem becoming "a blond ballerina doll" in another. So, too, the south, which features prominently in her work: it is both fixed--in the sense that its painful history is known and therefore "snug, ordered, certain"--and still in the process of becoming, of developing, of being understood and interpreted. It is a "dialectic of dark/and light," as the last poem in Native Guard says. Therefore, as with any dialectic, hopefully and excitingly the conversation has begun, and we are moving now toward "some other gift" (as so many of her poems are for us) that none of us has yet to imagine.