Remembering the Unforgotten: A Dialogue on Memory and American Slavery
A Conversation Between Pulitzer Prize-Winners Natasha Trethewey and David Blight Explores the Power of Memory and the Lingering Legacies of America’s Past
Atlanta History Center continues to deliver captivating discussions, and the recent conversation featuring poet and writer Natasha Trethewey, historian David W. Blight, and professor and writer Woody Register is no exception.
Trethewey, celebrated for her brilliant career and a voice that calls for a reckoning with America’s historical record of racist violence, needs little introduction, especially in Atlanta. The two-time U.S. Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and acclaimed author was joined by Blight, a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and a Pulitzer Prize winner himself. Blight’s profound contributions to the understanding of American history, including the Civil War and African-American writers of the 19th century, have made him a must-read contributor and leading voice in the field.
Together Trethewey and Blight explored the complexities of memory, historical violence, white supremacy, and the enduring power of words in shaping the narrative of America’s past in conversation with Woody Register. Their conversation provided a reflective and insightful look into the issues that continue to challenge and define our nation.
Watch the full, unabridged interview here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7r0Hk20DSE, and check out our upcoming Author Talk events.
Woody Register: Are we at an extraordinary moment of artistic and cultural creativity in this country, one that is tragically related to the extraordinary violence against black people over the last eight to 10 years? Do you think that this is a moment of unusual artistic and cultural creativity attributable to the renewed attention to race in American history on life? Do you have any thoughts about that?
Natasha Trethewey: I certainly think that, especially this young, newer generation of poets, who are addressing all of these issues with such artfulness that it cannot be ignored by the public. And so I feel like we’re in a kind of Renaissance, where people are paying different attention to poetry, and we’re seeing many more writers of color, who are publishing everywhere, winning major awards, which helps get the kind of attention that a writer needs. We’re seeing stories that we haven’t seen, and they are mainstream and getting attention as our American stories.
David Blight: Well, I completely agree, although I’m not a student of poetry the way you are. This is a unique moment, something unusual about this last eight to 10 years. But I suspect if we went back to certain previous generations, people might say, you think you’re unique? Look what we’ve gone through. I do think sometimes we have a tendency to say, in artistic expression, there’s no question, it’s energetic and new, like hip hop. But this is, you know, one of many reckonings Americans have had with race. Tragically, it’s an ongoing history. There is a reckoning in the land on all kinds of levels. But sometimes we have to remember that almost everything has happened before to lest we forget.
Woody Register: I’m thinking in particular about the changes in public art, like those around the site of George Floyd’s murder or new kinds of memorials like the Embrace in Boston. Do you see that as something new or more continuity? Is that an expansion or a new direction in American public art?
David Blight: I wish I were a more serious student of public art. I mean, I can’t go by a monument without looking at it, investigating the date it went up. There is surely a change, and there aren’t going to be any more equestrians; I think we can probably conclude that. The Mellon Foundation supported a project to reimagine memorialization beyond granite. Let’s reimagine the idea of what a memorial or monument is because some motifs have lasted for centuries; some haven’t.
Natasha Trethewey: One lasting thing is the monuments we create in words. What’s different now is that people who couldn’t get their books published before are now being published. Publishing has had a reckoning, so we’re paying more attention to the monuments and words that writers are creating.
Woody Register: I wanted to ask you about David’s most recent big book, the biography of Frederick Douglass. He has called it a biography of a voice of a man of words, a master of metaphor. And you’ve also talked about your learning metaphor and your education in metaphor. That’s the poet’s strength, too, isn’t it? Something that we, as historians, can’t really do metaphor. We can talk about those who do it.
Natasha Trethewey: We’re constantly dealing in metaphor. And the way I talk about it, learning my proper poetical education in metaphor helped me contend with growing up in a white supremacist society. If I didn’t understand metaphor, it would have been deeply destructive to my humanity.
David Blight: Words become a weapon. There’s a line in a Robert Penn Warren poem. He says, “history is the thing you can’t resign from.” That one line tells us you can’t resign from it. And that’s what you, poets, do. You have those moments where this single phrase is a definition of history. Sometimes the poets get it better than we do.
Natasha Trethewey: When you’re a poet trying to write about history, particularly for me, I wanted to even as I was imagining characters; I could only imagine them from documentary evidence. Because it was important for me to try to, in poems, do what professional historians are doing, which is to tell us about these histories, many of which are forgotten, unknown, and unheard of. Because I wanted to do that work, I wanted a reader to understand that it was rooted in actual history, actual evidence.
David Blight: So are you saying then that to get to the interior life of that soldier, you need some kind of evidence rather than just the imagination?
Natasha Trethewey: Yeah, the authenticity of the detail or voice. Reading letters that soldiers were writing, reading newspaper articles, reading Walt Whitman, reading that kind of evidence, the diary of someone.
David Blight: I don’t know how to call it. I mean, historians are always wandering around. Looking for respect, I think. But both are acts of imagination. Historians have imagination; the historians you might like best for their writing or their subjects even, probably are inspiring you with some imagination in the way they put the story together. So two different kinds of imagination can draw on one another.
Woody Register: I think what we do as historians is this ability to bring information together into a story to craft it and see connections, to produce a narrative. That’s the excitement of it.
David Blight: And to produce a narrative that all we do have a tendency in academia to write without narrative, forgetting that real people don’t read that.
Natasha Trethewey: Well, I mean, this is sort of why I brought up the need for evidence and footnotes because after Native Guard came out, I was on NewsHour with Jeff Brown. And we start talking about the native guards. And then I get lots of emails from people telling me things like, “Well, if they really existed, they would be in the National Archives. You made all this up.” And, of course, they are the National Archives. But they thought I’d made it all up because I’m a poet. So it’s not only that they thought I’d made it all up because I was a poet, but also, they’d never heard about it.
David Blight: I’m the oldest one in the room, maybe. But we do need to remember that these things have happened before. We have faced these things before. But it’s only how many years ago? How do you want to date this? When nobody thought any Confederate monument would ever go down? Frankly? I can only speak for myself. I must have publicly said 15 times Monument Avenue will always be there. And no, it isn’t. So we’ve learned something here about never saying “never.” Because there are events, events are gonna happen. We couldn’t know about Emanuel AME until June 2015. We couldn’t know about Charlottesville until it happened. We couldn’t know about George Floyd until it happened. We’re still coping with the election of Mr. Trump, and Trumpism, and all that has flowed from that. And we’re living with it yet. So this is what fascinates me so much going back to this historical moment. For one thing, it’s not over by any means. And yet, it happened in ways. No one believed it would.
Woody Register: So you don’t think the good people here at Atlanta History Center are tilting at windmills and going after Stone Mountain?
David Blight: No, they’re not. But no, you’re not tilting the windmills, not now; you might have been 10 years ago. That’s what’s amazing about this moment; whether you’re a poet, a historian, a public historian, or just an interested citizen, you know that the times are changing. The past is unstable. You know, that line, the past is unpredictable. But we want it to be settled. We wanted to stay put. The many grievances out there in America, but one of the deepest ones is history ain’t what it used to be. And it ain’t your granddaddy’s Civil War anymore. It ain’t true. That’s the fight. And who doesn’t want to live in a story that makes you feel good? If you’ve got a narrative that you can tell your children, it makes you sleep well at night.
David Blight: You know, and you can go to it when you need to set well you can go to, and you need a little justification. Who wouldn’t want that? You know, it’s much harder to say trouble my past. Go ahead. History Center. Trouble your past; it’s not easy. James Baldwin has a line; he said the trouble was the way Americans used the past to cover up the sleeper but never to wake him up. I’ve always loved that metaphor because we want a past that allows us to sleep at night, not one that gives us nightmares or troubles.
Woody Register: Thinking about Stone Mountain. And you know, I’d mentioned to you both that old tilting windmills, I did a colleague at Morehouse, and I took our classes to Stone Mountain to see the laser show. So a few years ago, Andrew Yang welcomed us; he was part of the laser show welcoming us to Stone Mountain. And I was surprised, and how, I’ve we’ve all wrestled with the question of what that was telling us about the history of the city, and how people regarded that monument had been domesticated and neutered to such an extent, or, I mean, do we have to reawaken people to its history?
Natasha Trethewey: I mean, yeah, I think we have to do both things. I think, you know, some of us are just prone to look at every monument and engage with it so that it has a life. But at the same time, I think you have a lot of people who just become part of the backdrop of every single thing. It’s always had that big monument there. But for some of us, I think it just becomes part of the backdrop. The Confederacy and the Lost Cause ideology looms large in my life. Sometimes it’s nice not to have to see it. So instead, I might look at a laser show projected against it and see that instead of what is always just behind it.
David Blight: Well, you know, I’m curious about my own attitudes toward monuments over time. As a kid, I used to beg my parents to take me out east to historic sites. I grew up in Michigan. So if you went east, it was out east to historic sites. But with time, though, these monuments became a subject. I think for so many people. They’re just there. For some of us, who end up writing about these things, study teaching. They’re more than that. They become a subject. There’s an object, but they’re a subject now; why are they there? What do they mean? Somebody on the panel said to the audience, can you think of a monument that deeply moved you even to weep? Have you ever been to a monument that deeply moved you, even to weep? Link the Lincoln Memorial. Very possible. It’s it’s aesthetics? Oh, god, yes. Oh, my goodness, the Vietnam Memorial, especially if you’re a certain age. And you find your high school friend's name. That’s just there, but for the grace of God, go I. But sometimes, the aesthetic li some monuments are just not artistic. That doesn’t do anything to us. Until we know the story. My own favorite monument in the universe is Augusta thing gardens, Shaw Memorial 54th, Massachusetts memorial in Boston. Part of it is because it’s such a magnificent work of art. It’s just unbelievable. On the other hand, it’s really the story that’s moving when you know the story. But our landscape is dotted with all kinds of monuments. But it’s interesting, those of you who are young in the audience are going to live many decades where this business of monument making may become very, very different. They are very different aesthetically, politically.
Natasha Trethewey: I’m interested in what you were saying about, you know, getting your folks to take you to these historic sites and not knowing exactly why or when you got interested in the monuments. And when they began to say things to you. Early on, having an understanding of, at least, who was on what side in the Civil War very basic, but I was a little kid when I understood that. And I do, I think you’re right. A lot of people walk by them. When Native Guard came out, somebody reviewed it. And one of the problems that they had with it was its interest in monuments and memorialization. Because the writer said that, you know, monuments are static, you know, no one. But I thought, at that time, what a privilege that these monuments aren’t sending a message to you.
David Blight: Why are they static? A monument is always, isn’t it? Partly, its meaning is always when it was unveiled. Why? By whom? This is why we now go back to all these monument unveiling speeches at all the hundreds and hundreds of Confederate monuments between 1890 and 1920. So its always meaning is always about when it was put up. But then, over time, what does it mean to other generations, other people who didn’t represent and not represent? After the civil war comes to an end in the spring of 2015. And in June, the massacre at Emanuel AME. And then, you know, flags come down and a monument here and a monument there. Now we don’t think the same about all things Confederate. Why? Because some events happened that everyone had to reposition themselves to. It’s unfortunate but true. Usually, violent events reposition us on these matters.
Woody Register: Is that a failure on our part, some failure in our political imagination that it takes that kind of horrific, violent injustice to shake the chains loose a little bit?
David Blight: Probably, but it has probably been there since the garden. We have many deep flaws as this human species. Well, some countries have been better at it than others, some cultures, some people’s, for different reasons that’s worth studying.
Woody Register: I visited the church in Charleston with a class in the summer of 2019. And they took us through the heavily secured door and now into the basement of the church. And then they said this was where the massacre occurred. Right here, where they were sitting, where their tables were set up. So and which stunned me, and I think everyone else did. There’s nothing marking it there. There’s no evidence that it happened there, except that they were determined to go on with the life of the church as it had always been. And I wonder if that was a kind of memorial. That’s a kind of determination to continue what you’ve always done.
Natasha Trethewey: Because they didn’t have to tell you. So it’s not just I think that they are occupying that space and carrying on. But they’re carrying on the memory by passing it on to someone who visits. To keep telling it. You know, a monument is memory.
