History Lesson

In an article in the New York Times on June 6, 2012, in response to her mother’s death by murder, Natasha Trethewey is quoted as saying, “that was the moment when I both felt that I would become a poet and then immediately afterward felt that I would not. I turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened" (McGrath, Charles, “New Laureate Looks Deep Into Memory”). The phrase, “the personal is political” and also “the private is political” were slogans of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, indicating a belief that personal experience was deeply influenced by the social and political inequities of the time. In the case of Trethewey’s body of work, which spans centuries as well as the specific incidents of her and her family’s lives, the personal is historical in that one generation’s experience evolves from the experience of previous generations—even more specifically, of African American and mixed-race people living in the United States.

Trethewey’s perspective as a poet and historian is directly influenced by events and situations personally experienced by her and/or her family, as well as by people throughout US history. Institutional racism takes hold and is perpetuated through the everyday rites and rituals of, say, a day at

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