Natasha Trethewey: The Cathartic Use Of Visual Art

Since its emergence over 30,000 years ago, one of visual art’s main purposes has been to act as an instrument of personal expression and catharsis. Through the mastery of paint, pencil, clay, and other mediums, artists can articulate and make sense of their current situation or past experiences, by portraying their complex, abstract emotions in a concrete form. The act of creation gives the artist a feeling of authority or control over these situations and emotions. Seen in the work of Michelangelo, Frida Kahlo, Jean Michel-Basquiat, and others, artists’ cathartic use of visual art is universal, giving it symbolic value in literature. In Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,

She first uses the symbol in her opening poem, “Theories of Time and Space,” where she writes the lines: “someone will take your picture: the photograph--who you were-- will be waiting when you return” (1). The “photograph” serves to remind one of themselves in the past; it acts as a stagnant force during change, and allows one to take control of their life, rather than be helpless to the passage of time. In the case of Trethewey, as she moves through the turbulent events in her life, the photograph acts as a reminder of her true identity, providing a sense of coherence to her life. She uses photography similarly in the poems “Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971” and “Blond,” as a she describes photographs that reveal defining moments of her past. In “Photograph: Ice Storm, 1971,” Trethewey writes of “the tired face of a woman, suffering, made luminous by the camera’s eye;” with context from her personal life and other lines in the poem, she reveals that the “woman” is her mother who is being domestically abused (10). Because she is so young-- only five years old-- during this incident, Trethewey most likely did not understand the problems in her home, so as an

Through the photograph, Trethewey is able to look back to this time of complex feelings and try to pinpoint the reason why she felt excluded and isolated, as well as the effect of her racial identity on her childhood. Additionally, she uses the photograph to try to gain a sense of control over her identity now, as a grown woman. Trethewey uses the visual art of photography to try comprehend not only her personal life but Southern history as well. In her poem, “Scenes from a Documentary History of Mississippi,” she describes a photograph of a parade in Vicksburg celebrating cotton, the crop that made white Southerns rich, but left African Americans poor. By reviewing this photograph, Trethewey attempts to understand the truth of Southern history’s double-sided nature, giving her control in the form of knowledge. In an interview with Joan Wylie Hall, Trethewey explains that much of her poetry involves photography because she is interested in “what might be behind an image,” such as the moments before and after the photograph was taken as well as “what the subjects of the photograph could