I love Natasha Trethewey’s Domestic Work (Graywolf 2000). No wonder it won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize! “White Lies” is probably my favorite of the poems because I can read it repeatedly and get depth from it. The poem addresses the experience of growing up biracial. The persona can pass for white without effort. A white girl in her class feels intimidated by a mostly black student body, squeezes her hand, and says “Now/we have three of us” (lines 17-18), meaning that she is relieved to see another white person. When the persona does make an effort to pass, her lies are “white” lies, both seemingly harmless and intended to represent herself as white. Of course, the persona is part white, so there is some irony in the mother’s washing the daughter’s mouth out with soap, yet the pride in that act is palpable and painful in that it has no effect on the daughter except to encourage her to wish the “suds” would “work/from the inside out” to make her truly white (lines 26-28). The dramatic irony there impacts the reader like a punch in the gut: we want this child to stop wanting to be other than what she is. We can see the complexity of the experience, and she just wants to feel accepted. Wow! I wonder whether young people feel the need to pass that previous generations did?
Another poem along similar lines is “Flounder.” The persona is fishing with Aunt Sugar, and the racial dynamics are evidenced by Aunt Sugar’s dialect and by her comments regarding the persona’s white skin color, which she got from her father. The central motif is the fish, the flounder, which has a black side and a white side, clearly illustrating the persona’s deriving from two races. The word “flounder” also means to struggle or to waver among choices, and at the end of the poem, the caught flounder “flip-flop[s],/switch[ing] sides with every jump" (lines 27-28). The fish image indicates the persona’s own flip-flopping about her racial identity, emphasizing the difficulty of doing so by the fact that the fish is caught and dying. This poem is one of the few in the collection that employs rhythm and meter, in this case approximating ballad stanzas of three and four feet, rhymed abcb. When I discussed this poem with students, they thought the ballad form emphasized the conversational quality of the poem and made it memorable. For me, poignancy arises from using this old form with an increasingly modern issue and perhaps even disappearing issue. More and more people hail from two or more ethnic groups, so perhaps the old-fashioned poetic structure makes lyrical a traumatic phase in human progress that is fading? I hope so.
What is perhaps interesting about this collection is that many of the poems do not relate explicitly to race. Another of my favorite poems, “Tableau,” depicts a couple at the breakfast table. This couple could be anyone. The images associated with the couple indicate relationship difficulties: the fruit between them is “a still life,” as if their relationship has been arrested and evacuated of feeling in this moment (line 4). The woman’s cup is chipped. The man is attacking his fruit aggressively. These details indicate problems in the relationship. The woman, in particular, recognizes the chip, the problem, and just shifts the cup to avoid it. Each is depicted thinking something different, so they are not communicating, and the poem ends with a “hairline crack” beginning to split the cup “in half” (lines 23-24). This relationship is ending, just like any other failed relationship. The fact that the poem allocates three lines per stanza also makes the pair seem off-kilter, unbalanced. If one reads this tableau against Trethewey’s biography, perhaps these are her parents, and she is the third, the extra line, the one not considered in this tableau. Thus, the third line speaks to the rift and also to the absence of the child who was impacted by the split.
Work Cited
Trethewey, Natasha. Domestic Work. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf P, 2000.
Image Source
Trethewey, Natasha. Domestic Work. Amazon.com. 29 Jan. 2012. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Trethewey&x=0&y=0
