White Lies Natasha Trethewey Meaning

Throughout history, literature has been used as an excellent form of communication across society. More specifically, however, poetry serves as a well respected medium used to convey messages, as its messages are often displayed in a less obvious manner, which means that they can be enjoyed when interpreted both narrowly and broadly. Poems about racial and social inequality, political issues, and intraracial discrimination have had a lasting impact on the world of literature as well as sectors of society beyond literature. For instance, the autobiographical poem "White Lies" by Natasha Trethewey tells the story of a young African American girl in the south battling the negative connotations of her very fair complexion. This poem addresses the

This stanza is rather long in comparison to the others. Her structural choices, suggest that she was segregating her black life from her white life in forming one long stanza about her encounters while passing for white. At one point in this stanza she reveals that she lied about where she lived, and she lied about where she got her dresses. The place which she says she buys her dresses is extremely significant because it is called Maison Blanche. Maison Blanche in French means White House, yet again this pushes the notion that she is extremely self-conscious of her cultural background, which exposes the level of denial she is experiencing. She also recounts an incident where "...a white girl said (squeezing [her] hand), Now we have three of us in this class." One could perceive this as another one of her "white lies." The girl quite possibly could have been an African American who was also very fair skinned acknowledging that there were now three black girls in the class. But in telling the story she chose to say white girl as a method to convey the great longing she had to be as white as possible, and how she admired the girl for being able to pass as well as she

White is most often associated with the principles of cleanliness and purity; therefore, she thought that being white meant that your beauty and purity were incomparable to any other race, and this led her to believe that being white was the only answer to the conflict in her life. The Ivory soap relates the idea of purity to the title, and suggest that the white lies she told were lies that she thought were going to cleanse her life of negativity; they were lies that she thought would wash the blackness away. She believed lying about her race would give her a better chance at happiness and