"Some names shall deck the page of history as it is written on stone. Some will not." (Natasha Trethewey Native Guard)The Louisiana Native Guard was an all black infantry unit for the Confederate army in the Civil War. After New Orleans fell to the Union, the Native Guards 'switched sides' as it were and began fighting for the North. Take the word 'fighting' lightly because on the list of duties delegated to the Guard it was at the very bottom. Building and guarding forts, digging trenches, and doing other menial jobs were the responsibility of the Guards- a far cry from the frontlines they were promised to defend when they became Union Soldiers.
You would think these men would be seen as honorable for their willingness to fight for the freedom of AfricanAmericans and would therefore be treated as such, however the Union soldiers treated them no better and no worse than the Confederates. After the fighting was over, most of the members of the Native Guard went on to join in movements for equal rights.
Ironically, the Native Guard wasn't even known to have existed to those outside of the battlefields until 1903. It took nearly 40 years for the bravery and dedication of these young men to be recognized and almost a century for their names to be officially recognized in a memorial in New Orleans.
Natasha Tretheway's collection of poems titled Native Guard pays homage to these men and their commitment to the country that had treated them so badly for so many years. The collection's title poem, "Native Guard" reads like a journal or a diary and chronicles months of a Guard's life in the war. As David McCullough once said, "History is who we are and why we are the way we are," a fact that we have seen time and time again.
These guards would have never been necessary were it not for the Civil War. Tretheway's collection is a modern poet looking back into the past, but another group of poets known as The Fugitive Poets wrote about history while it was in the making. The Fugitives produced a magazine cleverly named The Fugitive which featured poems by a tight circle of distinguished, highly talented poets. The poets were sort of "guardians" themselves in that they were guarding formal techniques in poetry as well as the traditional values of the pasotral South against urban industrialization. Their poems' content and styles reflect the way of life they were accustomed to and they worked hard to maintain stability in their works throughout havoc in their nation.
I think both the Fugitives and Tretheway recognize and portray the burdens of the past and put the weight upon our shoulders. One of the Fugitive Poets, Merrill Moore, wrote "The noise Time makes in passing by is very slight, but even you can hear it having not necessarily to be near it" ("The Noise that Time Makes") which completely sums up the intentions of Tretheway and The Fugitives: time is passing sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, sometimes without notice; but at the end of the day, even after a time of peril for this nation, we are able to look back into that time and learn from it, even if we weren't there ourselves.
photo credit: jackandjillpolitics.com
Tretheway's Native Guard was my favorite collection this semester, and a big part of why is its dedication to the past. In general, I like learning about the past, and I think that Southern poetry's tendency to incorporate elements of the past into the images in the poems. It also seems clear that the Civil War is a huge part of the South's collective unconscious and its reappearance in the literature, music, art, and culture of the South is evidence of this. Again, poetry is a wholly different and infinitely more affecting way to examine history and our personal pasts.
ReplyDeleteI thought that the most modern book this semester by Stacey Lynn Brown was the most relevant to me. However through all the books that we have read I have had a heightened sense of the past being important to the formation of who I am,and who my family is today. The past is something that has shaped all of humanity and especially the South. We are all products of the past and we should all be more open to learning and reflecting on what has brought us to where we are today.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, I wasn't crazy about most of the historical segments of Native Guard. Having said that, I think the phrase, "History is who we are," comes pretty close to being an unofficial motto for the South. For better or worse, the South's attachment to history largely defines its perception as well as many parts of its reality. There's a Southern love of tradition, which I think is largely a product of the importance of family, that keeps us from letting go of the past and encourages us to use that past to define ourselves.
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