Critics Flashcards
(17 cards)
Matrilineal - maternal line, female line in a family
Birdsong: ‘collective memory and cultural trauma are profoundly [maternal] Matrilineal’
Agency - power, control over oneself and life
Birdsong: ‘Finally reclaim her agency’ through voice
the native guards
forgotten slavery
negligent views on racism
De Cenzo: she celebrates ‘black soldiers forgotten by history’
past affects the present immensely
potentially the effects on the South and Thretheway’s trauma from her mother’s death
Ford ‘There is no safe barrier between the past and the present’
For example, Trethewey’s poems use modern viewpoints and photography to reinterpret and reanimate historical moments, revealing hidden aspects of the past that previous generations didn’t or couldn’t see. This symbolic “haunting” emphasizes that history isn’t fixed but continuously reinterpreted through the lens of present-day awareness and imagination.
Ford ‘does not just show how slavery haunts us, but how we haunt slavery’
Tretheway - Relationship with the South
Tretheway ‘I have a love-hate relationship with the South’
past haunting her in the present
Tretheway ‘Even when I’m writing about the past, I’m writing about the present’
Mother making sacrifice
links that with jesus christ
Tretheway: I see my mother as having made a kind of sacrifice to save me.
How Tretheway uses her racial identity as strength
Russell: “has turned to her
own racial hybridity as a source of strength”
Identity as mixed race woman + silence of abuse/trauma
Davis: her racial identity “often carries an injunction to remain silent about abuse or trauma”
She felt exiled in life
Davis: “psychological exile she has felt and experienced much of her life”
writing on mother’s life as a monument
De Cenzo: tries to build, in words, a monument to the life of her mother
Why she writes
Tretheway: I write because I cannot stand by and say nothing
How does she use bodies in her poetry
Mchaney: “both historical evidences and narratives”
How she uses history
Hongbo: history takes the stable form not in documents but in people’s memory
How she uses repetition
Hongbo: repetition “displays all kinds of
circling and connecting […] like the echoing from history.’
How she use the symbol of monuments
- monument in elegy
- headstone in graveyard blues
Hongbo: “history is not memorized by stony landmarks […] but exists as part of life itself”
