Image Of Justice In Natasha Tretheway's Heart Of Darkness

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In the novella Heart of Darkness and the collection of poems Native Guard, Trethewey and Conrad depict vivid images of decaying corpses and bodies to show society’s ability to manipulate justice. Natasha Trethewey uses descriptive imagery of bodies to describe personal and historical unjustifiable acts, specifically through racism and abuse. In the poem “What Is Evidence”, Tretheway depicts her mother’s brutal injuries in order to demonstrate the injustice of her mother’s abusive relationship. Trethewey's mother hides her “fleeting bruises” and her “splintered clavicle, pierced temporal,” so her daughter will not carry the burden of her own abuse by her husband. Specifically choosing to hide the wounds, Trethewey shows her mother’s attempt to protect her daughter from experiencing any of the …show more content…

Trethewey describes her mother’s bones as “thin” to exhibit the result of her step-father’s abuse. Trethewey spends the rest of the section in her collection discussing the death of her mother. Rather than the concept of justice rewarding the mother for her sacrifices and correcting the crime that was thrust upon her, Trethewey’s step-father captures justice for himself by murdering his ex-wife leaving Trethewey without her mother in the unjust world. Furthermore, Trethewey’s personal life interacts with history when discussing the issue of racism. In the poem “Southern Gothic”, Trethewey describes a scene of racism and verbal abuse by using words with a negative connotation to describe a body. At just 51 years of age, Trethewey’s race was deemed illegal when she was born in 1966 in Mississippi. The descriptive words of the body demonstrate the triviality of the situation. A person cannot change their body; therefore, they cannot change the color of their skin. Trethewey uses phrases like “cold lips stitched shut”, “expression of grief”, “language of blood”, and “muck of ancestry” in order to describe the constant verbal abuse and ignorant insults she received due to the

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