How many times, over the years, would my father remind me — quoting Martin Heidegger — that “Language is the house of being”? It would be decades before I’d read those words myself in a book by the German philosopher — who was also a member of the Nazi Party — and feel again that sharp pang of recognition: the difficult knowledge that some of the most enduring ideas had been written by complicated figures, like Thomas Jefferson, who believed in racial hierarchies, inherent superiority and inferiority. More and more I would come to understand that it was not simply ignorance that I’d need to push back against, but also the stores of received knowledge — philosophy, history, science — that I would encounter in the most learned places.
Written by Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Professor of Creative Writing, and two time US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, The House of Being is thoughtful, compelling, and quotable on literally every page. As part of Yale University Press’ “Why I Write” series (former entries include those written by Joy Harjo, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Patti Smith), Trethewey answers the question deeply and provocatively. With a white father and a Black mother (whose marriage wasn’t even legal at the time Trethewey was born) and a grandmother whose house was situated deep in Mississippi at the intersection of two highways — one famous for the Blues and one named for Thomas Jefferson — Trethewey was intimately shaped by the local geography and its competing narratives and prejudices. Combining history, memoir, and a lifetime of meditation on the forces that shaped her, this is a masterwork; thoroughly satisfying and necessary. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
My need to make meaning from the geography of my past is not unlike the ancients looking to the sky at the assortment of stars and drawing connections between them: the constellations they named inscribing a network of stories that gave order and meaning to their lives. That’s one of the reasons I write. I’ve needed to create the narrative of my life — its abiding metaphors — so that my story would not be determined for me.
Trethewey’s father — a poet himself — taught her early to describe the world around her metaphorically. In later life, people would assume that she “learned to write” from her father, but Trethewey insists that she learned as much from her grandmother — particularly the rhythms she picked up from her grandmother’s sewing machine — and from her mother, she learned how to use her voice to speak back to power; as when her mother would sing an inspirational version of John Brown’s Body whenever they drove past a Confederate flag (as on their state flag):
Singing to me as we passed the state flag of Mississippi was a way to counteract the symbolic, psychic violence of it. Through the triumphant, stirring rhythms of the song, my mother was showing me how to signify, how to use received forms to challenge the dominant cultural narrative of our native geography, and to transcend it by imagining a reality in which justice was possible. Her voice was a counterweight.
From her grandmother living at the crossroads of the Blues (according to legend, guitarist Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in order to play as well as he did — which obviously discounts his talent, skill, and practise), to the whitewashing of nearby Ship Island (a prison for Confederate soldiers that has a plaque at its entrance, thanks to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, that lists the names of every white soldier held prisoner there but which doesn’t acknowledge anywhere that the guards were all formerly enslaved Black men that had fought for the Union Army), the geography of her childhood had effects that were both intimately particular to Trethewey herself and broadly metaphorical of the American ethos. Wanting to add her voice to those who would confront the dominant narrative perfectly answers why Trethewey writes.
The act of writing is a way to create another world in language, a dwelling place for the psyche wherein the chaos of the external world is transformed, shaped into a made thing, and ordered. It is an act of reclamation. And resistance: the soul sings for justice and the song is poetry.
This is a short read, but weighty and compelling. I loved the whole thing.
