Terrance Hayes and Natasha Trethewey: Contemporary Black Chroniclers of the Imagined South
The Southern Literary Journal
Volume 44, Number 2, Spring 2012
pages 122-135
DOI: 10.1353/slj.2012.0009
William M. Ramsey, Professor of English
Francis Marion University, Florence, South Carolina
“I Don’t Hate the South.”
— book title by Houston Baker, Jr.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” William Faulkner famously wrote in Requiem for a Nun (73). His assumption—that the southern writer is a chronicler accessing the essence of a wholly objective place, transparently “explaining” a history to outsiders who misunderstand it—has been undermined by the theorizing in New Southern Studies. To chronicle the historical South as a special space enacts a social construction positing an ideologically reductive, essentialist regional myth. As Richard Gray argues, the invented South is an “imagined community” as well as a real and given space (xix). Diane Roberts terms it “the South of the mind” (371). Faulkner, conflicted and ghost-haunted by memories of the past, saw himself in the grip of a concrete reality so palpable that it could not be wiped away with time. But multiple communities, genders, and races lived in that past, and they stimulate divergent takes on it. Thus Houston Baker, Jr., borrowing from Faulkner’s Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!, ambivalently titled a recent book I Don’t Hate the South.
Black writers ghost-haunted by the southern past are highly wary of being possessed by the grip of a mythical mystique that marginalized black experience into historical invisibility. They know, as Martyn Bone argues, that the idealized southern geography rested economically on a social geography of slavery and it sequel segregation—realities that were suppressed in definitions of southern. As Bone notes, “this strategic exclusion is a structural and ideological necessity” for Agrarian-derived myth-making (3). For black writers, then, to perform southern chronicling one must enter history as a self-aware, reconfiguring maker of history. Resourcefully imaginative excavations are required to recover materials deeply buried and long suppressed. The result is an ongoing birthing of a multi-vocal history that presupposes the chronicler engages not in neutral reception but in a constructive act. The past is never past, and yet it must be newly conceived.
Two contemporary black chroniclers, Terrance Hayes and Natasha Trethewey, interrogate the nature of the South with highly revealing metaphors of southern space and soil. They diverge from the familiar anxiety that the region is losing distinctiveness and that its culture is coming to an end. Against that fear of dispossession—of being uprooted from one’s communal memory by time and new cultural infusions—they express the need to take possession of the soil, to put roots into it so as to occupy new space instead of a tenuous space apart. Their poetry thus reflects the literary sensibility of black writers born after the civil rights gains of the mid-1960s. Growing up during profound cultural transitions—a social order of change and adaptive adjustments—they came to perceive historical inquiry not as monumentalizing the past into granite fixity but as excavation of pliable materials for revised narratives. Their poems are keen moments of individual consciousness in which the poet feels free to find and reshape the clay sediments of dug-up history.
In this respect they crack a barrier that confronted earlier black writers, namely the problem of occupying what I term “a space apart,” on the margin, where black life was kept out of history. In the post-bellum era, Charles W. Chesnutt’s dialect conjure tales ironically undermined the white nostalgic plantation tradition while tapping into oral black folk traditions. Yet, in adopting the plantation tale convention of a white frame narrator (his publisher Houghton Mifflin not indicating his racial identity due to his request that the work be judged on its merits rather than the author’s social status), Chesnutt subtly marginalized himself. Unfortunately this approach, a tactic of an era of accommodation, enfolded black materials inside the dominant white discourse domain, subtly distancing folk life to a quaint space apart. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God reflects a new advance born of…
