SOUTHERN ERASURES: NATASHA TRETHEWEY'S NATIVE GUARD

Black Union soldiers, such as the Louisiana Native Guards who maintained the Fort Massachusetts prison for Confederates on Ship Island off the coast of Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico, were an especially unpopular topic for the South as it set about memorializing its defeat and honoring its native sons. Poet Natasha Trethewey considers such public, historical erasures as she weaves tropes of personal and public memory, loss, recovery, and monument in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Native Guard. The essay addresses the facts of the Louisiana Native Guards as well as Trethewey's illumination of the erasures of this unpopular chapter of southern history. Native Guard leads us to acknowledge public lies created by absence and to accommodate such unpleasant histories in our personal lives. The complicated histories that have been erased are poetically re-inscribed by Trethewey's poems, which often follow formal patterns, offering control over emotional and controversial feelings.