Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

In Natasha Trethewey's "South," the poem serves as a complex and intricate meditation on history, identity, and place. Employing rich imagery, the poem conveys the profound psychological and emotional impact of returning to the southern United States, specifically Mississippi, a landscape marked by racial tension and fraught history. The poem's opening epigraph by E. O. Wilson, "Homo sapiens is the only species to suffer psychological exile," provides a lens through which to view the entire poem: that of exile, both physical and psychological.

The poem commences with the narrator's return to a "stand of pines," describing them as a "bone-thin phalanx" that flanks the road. The words "bone-thin" and "phalanx" immediately evoke a sense of struggle and defense, which is intensified by the "dialectic of dark and light" in the understory. This sets the tone for the nuanced discussion of race and history that follows, foregrounding the dualities that will pervade the poem.

When the narrator mentions "magnolias blossoming like afterthought," the reader is presented with "white flags draped among the branches." This image serves as a symbol of surrender but also hints at the complex history of race in the South-white flags amid the dark and light dialectic of the forest. This theme continues to unfold as the narrator returns to "land's end, the swath of coast clear cut and buried in sand," where native trees have been "razed and replaced by thin palms-palmettos-symbol of victory or defiance." Here, the landscape itself has been conquered and rewritten, just as history has been.

As the poem progresses, it moves from the natural landscape to the human history inscribed upon it. The narrator returns to "a field of cotton," which is "hallowed ground" holding "the ghosts of generations" of slaves. The poem thus implicates not just historical places or specific events, but the very fabric of contemporary life: "whose sweat flecked the cotton plants still sewn into our clothes."

The battlefield of Port Hudson stands as another haunting landmark, where "colored troops fought and died," their bodies left "unburied until earth's green sheet pulled over them, unmarked by any headstone." This historical detail serves to underline the erasure and disregard for Black lives and contributions, an erasure that continues in a place "where the roads, buildings, and monuments are named to honor the Confederacy."

The poem culminates with a poignant revelation: "I return to Mississippi, state that made a crime of me-mulatto, half breed-native in my native land, this place they'll bury me." The speaker acknowledges the dichotomy of being both native and criminalized in her native land. Just as the landscape has been vanquished and rewritten, so too have the identities of its native inhabitants.

In "South," Trethewey presents a multi-layered exploration of the American South, revealing the intertwined narratives of land and identity, victory and defeat, inclusion and exile. The landscape is portrayed as a living testament to past and current racial tensions, a complex tableau of beauty and pain. Each word and image in the poem is laden with the weight of history and the emotional toll of psychological exile, making "South" a potent expression of the complexities of returning to a place so intricately linked to personal and collective identity.

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