I was privileged to receive an opportunity to work with Harper Collins and Biblio Lifestyle to collaborate to breath life into the project of one of the most amazing human beings alive, Natasha Trethewey. Memorial Drive: a Daughter’s Memoir will be available for purchase July 28th, but I’ve lived and with this book for the past three days–allowing it to stretch me, remind me, and break me in short increments, medium increments, long ones, then short ones again.
When I finished it I thought to myself, what am I supposed to say about that? Where does one find the words for being able to watch someone search for the light in a dark room, only to find the switch then illuminate an even darker scene? While I looked for the words on a drive, I thought to myself: wow, you didn’t read the back of the book so you walked into this blindly. Then I sat with that idea–the realization that I haven’t been reading the back of books for years now, as if I want to be snapped in two sometimes… as if I too want to flip the switch and illuminate something.
If I would’ve had the foresight to read the back of this book I would’ve known she was going to lose her mother and that whoever wrote the blurb on the back saw it as an attempt to understand how this shaped her as an artist (first) but then an entry point into understanding her mother’s life and though I feel like it was more of the latter, I can definitely see why I always felt she displayed a knack for setting up space and then filling it with her words like when Katrina cleared out space on the coast and we Mississippians refilled our homes while everyone’s eyes were elsewhere. (If you’re interested in seeing the juxtaposition of creating space, filling space, and losing space again + her mother, her book Native Guard really does a good job of highlight these in a very amazing way).
Death stops the body’s work, the soul’s a journeyman.
In the book her family’s existence is revolutionary. Having been born in Gulfport, Mississippi in 1966, she existed in direct opposition to the miscegenation laws banning interracial marriage. As the caption for the picture accompanying this post shows, Trethewey illuminates the experience black people living in Mississippi will find all too familiar, the simultaneous understanding of both a hatred nobody believes is there and a danger that feels all to real. I don’t pretend to understand Trethewey’s purpose for including the effects of the south on the black psyche, but I know how I feel, and I could feel this duality eating away at her mother who found her existence with her new partner, Joel, to be another kind of inner warfare that she hadn’t necessarily experienced with Trethewey’s father.
When her mother is stolen, the reader will find a cold anger waiting for them when the switch is flipped. The police could’ve saved her, the institutions she sought help through could’ve done more…even Trethewey blames her self and none of it changes anything so we’re all just cold. It reminded me of my students who find themselves existing in these harsh crevices that people walk by everyday and the way that we put on masks so that we can walk among the other masked folk, and pretend it’s all ok. If you are a lover of memoir then I highly recommend this book as a welcomed twist on traditional memoirs. Trethewey is first a poet, and her writing moves that way–that with the addition of so many of her mother’s actual words makes this book moving in a different way than what you’re used to. I’d recently started reading The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr and there was so much insistence on approaching dark moments, by when Tretheway picks up those documents and reads them, the affect is a shivering, shaking ache that leaps from the page in way that I’ve never seen before. Please. Please. Please go and get this book.
