Sewanee’s School of Letters recently celebrated its 20th year with a pivotal speech about Sewanee’s past and promise by poet Natasha Trethewey, the two-time Poet Laureate of the United States. Her message is still being talked about by the School of Letters students, alumni, instructors, and leaders, as well as college faculty, undergraduates and friends lucky enough to hear it.
Trethewey has a long relationship with Sewanee, including being awarded an honorary degree in 2023. Vice Chancellor Rob Pearigen suggested that she would be an ideal keynote speaker for the School of Letters anniversary gala.
“When she started with “this University and its fraught history” my soul left my body. It was a reminder, a reckoning,” said April Alvarez, L’15, associate director of the School of Letters. She was taking us beyond the celebration, beyond our vision; she was there to remind us of our responsibilities as writers.” Alvarez said the response from attendees was massive. “In the days following, we were swamped with notes of gratitude from attendees for having been in that room. I’m reminded that we can do hard things, and that there is a reason I choose to work with writers and with this program.”
School of Letters Director Justin Taylor, said Trethewey’s message was loving and pointed. “She spoke to us boldly and with deep knowledge of Sewanee as a place of both challenge and opportunity. I think this is a testament not only to her poetic vision and personal integrity but to her love and respect for Sewanee itself. She has a long relationship with this school and she urged us to never stop fighting to become the best version of ourselves. For the School of Letters that means working hard and being fearless in our writing; keeping justice, equity, and support for educators at the center of our mission; and making sure that we serve not only ourselves but all Sewanee students and the community at large. I found Trethewey’s words inspiring and I took them as a challenge worth accepting. I hope that the next time we ask her back here we can show her what we’ve done and make her proud.”
Because of the importance of Trethewey’s message, The Sewanee Purple is sharing a full transcript of her June 18 speech with her permission. It is excerpted in part from her 2024 book, The House of Being.
Editor’s Warning: The following includes racial slurs.
Photo by David Andrews.
Good evening. It’s lovely to be back at Sewanee, and I’m honored to speak with you on this celebratory occasion—the 20th anniversary of the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program—about the role of writing, and in the broader sense, the role of the humanities in our personal and civic lives. It is particularly symbolic to me that I am speaking to you here in this beautiful place with its fraught history. I want to begin with an epigraph from W.E.B Dubois: What shall these things mean, O God the Reader?
Like you I am fortunate to have been steeped in an education in the humanities—particularly in the study of literature and poetry—from the very beginning.
When I was very young and my father just beginning graduate study in literature and philosophy, the collection of books that made up his growing library was still small enough to fit in three long rows stacked one upon the other, with only a couple of wooden planks between them. Next to this makeshift bookshelf, in our dim living room, were the only pieces of furniture my father ever seemed to own: a low-slung chair and ottoman, and a single floor lamp that held him in a perpetual circle of light. He’d sit there for hours, reading and writing in the margins of a book or in a small notepad he kept in his shirt pocket. Often, when I’d curl up next to him, he’d stop for a while to entertain me, flipping through the pages of one of my books: a dictionary of the picturesque origins of words from which he was teaching me about metaphor, or an illustrated version of Beowulf whose drawings enthralled me as he’d recite passages in Old English. I loved not only the sound of the poetry, the words I could not understand, but also the emotion conveyed by my father’s expressive voice, the tactile feel of it: I’d place my hand against his throat as he spoke, his words resounding in my fingertips.
Each evening at bedtime, he’d regale me with recitations from the trials of Odysseus, sending me to sleep with images of the hero’s journey that would make its way into my dreams—and later, into my understanding of myself, the journey I would have to undertake. This nightly ritual of stories from classical mythology was only part of the means by which my father meant to reveal the world to me. To prepare me for it, and for the inevitable trials to come, he was determined that I have an early and foundational understanding of the figurative nature of all language. He believed in the necessity of a proper poetical education in metaphor as Robert Frost declared in his essay “Education by Poetry”: “What I am pointing out,’ Frost wrote, “is that unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. You are not safe in science; you are not safe in history.”
During the day, the natural world served as our classroom. Most afternoons, my father and I took long walks during which I’d pick wildflowers for my mother and he would recite poetry. All along the way, he’d point out the flora and fauna we encountered, the vivid imagery inscribed in so many of the names: red wing black bird with its bright slash of feathers; mockingbird mimicking another bird’s song; the word daisy, which he repeated, again and again, altering it just so until I heard—in the syllables of that single word—two distinct words, day’s eye. He had been holding the flower aloft, and suddenly I could see the way it mimicked the sun: each white petal a ray of light; the yellow disc at its center our day’s bright eye.
This happy, early education was taking place in my hometown, Gulfport, Mississippi in the late 1960’s, only a few years after the hundredth anniversary of the civil war. Robert Penn Warren, writing at the centennial, described the metaphors white Southerners had come to live by in the aftermath of the war as “the Great Alibi,” locating the Confederacy’s defeat as the moment “the Solid South was born,” a “City of the Soul” rendered guiltless—in the white mind of the South—by the forces of history. “The South,” he wrote, “explains, condones, and transmutes everything…” “Even now, any common lyncher becomes a defender of the Southern tradition…bloodlust rising from a matrix of boredom and resentful misery becomes a high sense of honor, and ignorance becomes divine revelation…. defeat turns into victory, defects into virtues…. And the most painful and costly consequences of the Great Alibi are found, of course, in connection with race.”
Because the “Solid South” was a society based on the myths of innate racial difference, a hierarchy based on notions of supremacy, the language used to articulate that thinking was rooted in the unique experience of white southerners. The role of metaphor is not only to describe the experience of reality; metaphor also shapes how we perceive reality. Thus, in the decades following the war, the South—in the white mind of the South—was deeply entrenched in the idea of a noble and romantic past. It was moonlight and magnolias, chivalry and paternalism. The blacks living within her borders, when they were good, were “children” to be guided, looked after, protected from their own folly, “mules” of the earth, “darkies” with the “light of service” in their hearts. When they stepped out of line they were “bad niggers” from whom white women—carriers of the pure bloodline—needed to be protected; they were “animals” to be husbanded into a prison system modeled on the plantation system. On the monumental landscape they were unstoried but for the stories told about them: misapprehensions that rendered them, in the mind of the South, “passive recipients of white benevolence” who “never fought for their own freedom”—even as nearly 200,000 fought for the Union in the Civil War helping this nation in its ongoing project of living up to the ideals set forth in our founding documents. And when they were exceptional, in the mind of the south, they were magical: You’re pretty for a black girl, smart for a black girl, not like the rest of them.
This is the world I entered at a moment when, despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act, my parents’ interracial marriage was still illegal in Mississippi and as many as twenty other states in the nation. As in W.H. Auden’s memorium to William Butler Yeats—Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry—Mississippi inflicted my first wound. The day I was born, on the hundredth anniversary of Confederate Memorial Day—the holiday glorifying the lost cause, its heritage of slavery and white supremacy—the confederate flag punctuated the landscape, alongside the state flag of Mississippi, waving an implicit message: Know your place. Incorporating the confederate battle flag in its canton, the state flag was a constant visual reminder of white Mississippians’ allegiance to the state’s slaveholding heritage and the war fought—and lost—to maintain it. And it was a symbol indicative of the new ways the state would find to maintain the second-class status of black Americans.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy in positioning themselves as “guardians of the past,” had been instrumental in the creation of the abiding metaphors of the white mind of the South, the “hallowed falsehoods” that served the white South’s intellectual justification for its ongoing subjugation of black Americans. In the last two decades of the 19th century and the first two of the 20th, they set out to inscribe a dominant narrative on the landscape and in the minds of school children—indeed into the American imagination. Through the erecting of monuments, and the naming of roads, bridges, and other public works, they constructed a physical and psychic landscape that promoted white supremacy, memorialized the myth of a virtuous Confederate cause, and wrote black Americans out of the story—despite black soldiers’ role in the Civil War. The history textbooks commissioned by the UDC—ones I’d later read in school—glorified the institution of slavery and devoted little time to Reconstruction and the horrors inflicted upon African Americans throughout the Jim Crow era. It was a narrative rooted in historical amnesia—willed forgetting and selective remembering—in which I felt both erased and then penciled in again as the descendent of a caricature—the raggedy black minstrel who’d given his name, and its system of oppressive laws, to the whole race.
This is one of the reasons I write: to tell a fuller version of our shared history, to push back against the dominant narrative—its abiding metaphors—in order to create the narrative of my own life so that my story would not be determined for me in a place whose state constitution and its customs rendered me illegitimate in the eyes of the law, persona non grata.
From an early age I was learning—from the monuments constructed on the landscape of my south, to the textbooks I encountered in school, even to the twenty-volume World Book Encyclopedia on my grandmother’s bookshelves—that the world outside had already measured me, my humanity, in ways that did not match who I knew myself to be.
The summer I was nine years old, I was determined to read as many entries in The World Book as I could—a way I thought to be worldly, to escape my own circumstances and imagine myself instead on the steps of the Parthenon, touring the ruins of history, or in Parliament, debating the important issues of the time. What led me to the entry for Races of Man? Perhaps I had been looking for it. Until then, my knowledge about the perceptions of race, racial difference and hierarchy, was still primarily anecdotal, not academic, gleaned mostly from my experience: the way white people in Mississippi had often stared at me and my parents with disgust or contempt; the words I’d heard loud on the playground at school or whispered at the movie theater, dime store, Piggly Wiggly: mongrel, half breed, nigger lover. What did I hope to find in The World Book?
At the top of the page, I read the words, “Basic types: “Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid,” followed by descriptions of hair texture, eye shape, color; what were supposed to be distinguishing racial characteristics—that if you were white, the ratio of femur to tibia was different than if you were black. In one race (the authors asserted) the femur is longer, in the other the tibia. In the illustrations, the Caucasoid type was represented by what seemed to be the head of a classical Roman statue; even in black and white, he seemed carved from Parian marble, his head tilted as in contemplation. The others were rendered primitives, the image of the Negro almost photographic; a specimen, he seemed to look straight ahead as in the pictures I’d later see of enslaved people, their innermost thoughts held in secret behind a blank stare. Even more than the text, it’s the collection of images that has stayed with me, a taxonomy. Starting where the entry began, white was first, at the top; black was last, at the bottom. When the images varied from this hierarchy, white was centered as though it were the standard against which the others were measured. The interplay between image and word—Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid—was telling me everything about the world I inhabited. I knew something was wrong, but I had not yet fully rejected it, had not yet begun to resist the calcified manifestations of received knowledge even as I was already on a journey toward self-knowledge: knowledge based not only in experience, but also in the cultivation of the intellect.
In that moment, armed with the encyclopedia’s combination of traits—the purported rubric for determining what I was, my place within the racial hierarchy represented in the visual language—I sneaked into my grandmother’s workroom, found her tape measure, and held it against my leg.
If encountering the daily onslaught of white supremacy in the symbolic language inscribed on the landscape of my native geography was a kind of psychic violation, so then was finding evidence of those ideas in the encyclopedia’s pages. Before that, as a small child, I had only believed in what I imagined to be the sanctity of books—repositories of knowledge, a higher plane of thought—wherein, across time and space, the greatest and most enduring ideas had been recorded. Because I’d not yet fully grasped what my father was intent on teaching me—the figurative nature of language, my own habitation in it—I did not yet have a means by which to push back against what I read in the World Book and to articulate a notion of self not proscribed by language meant to define me.
What The World Book taught me was one of only many lessons that set me on a path toward becoming a writer. 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, through my education in the humanities, 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.
As George Orwell wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” We are now at another anniversary in our nation’s history and are again in a moment of hallowed falsehoods masquerading as truth: the governor of Florida for example, declaring that slavery was good “job training” for slaves, that slavery was a kind and benevolent institution, or the language in the Texas school system’s textbooks calling enslaved people, euphemistically, “imported African workers.” States are passing laws about what kind of history and subject matter can be taught in schools continuing the pattern of erasure begun by the UDC. The justification: that it might cause pain and anguish or feelings of guilt over the actions of people in the past. Shielding students from difficult knowledge is construed, perhaps, as a way to maintain an idea of innocence—as if the knowing the truth of our shared history would somehow be harmful to the sense of self rather than emotionally and civically instructive, promoting deeper understanding of our selves as historical beings capable of empathy. To lose the idea of American innocence is to begin the understand just how far we’ve come and how far still we must go—a path toward the greatness we have yet to achieve and from which we now seem to be rapidly backsliding. Cultural amnesia in the form of erasure gets in the way progress, blurring the facts and flattening history; it renders innocuous the actions of people in the past, abdicates our ongoing civic responsibility and abandons the possibility of national redemption.
Without a proper poetical education in the metaphor, the kind of education one receives in the study of history, literature, philosophy, and other humanities fields, I would not have—you would not have—the tools to think critically, to write your own story so that it not be written for you, to push back against the hallowed falsehoods of received knowledge, to look critically at the world around us and take up your duty as a citizen to perfect our flawed union.
This study of the humanities and the ongoing pursuit of knowledge that is a necessary part of the writing life isn’t simply a knowledge of facts, not just an intellectual knowledge but an emotional knowledge in which one’s ability to practice empathy is wisdom.
As Toni Morrison writes:
“Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel,
that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights
or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma
and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.
A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind, they are its necessity.”
Indeed, it is the province of the writer to bear witness; to record the cultural memory of a people; to contend not only with beauty, joy and pleasure, but also with difficult knowledge, despair and grief; to challenge and question; to record our human existence, our value as human beings in ways that allow us not only to know where we have come from but enable us also to imagine a future; to show us the world not only as it is but as it could be. The necessary materials are all around us: our memories, dreams, stories, language, history, the natural world. How glorious to be in this moment of celebration, this anniversary of the Sewanee MFA program, anticipating all that is to come in which everything embodied in the study of literature and writing, may find, in your work, its just and necessary articulation. To which I say: What shall these things mean, O God the reader?