#memorial drive

Cambridge, Massachusetts -- 3/18/15

Helga Floros things i want to ask you. / Audrey Niffenegger The Time Traveler's Wife / unknown / @hamletmaschine unaligned (2016) / Natasha Trethewey Memorial Drive / Jan Heller Levi Writing for This Story to End Before I Begin Another

“Scientists tell us there are different ways that the brain records and stores memory, that trauma is inscribed differently than other types of events. To survive trauma, one must be able to tell a story about it.” In Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and two-term U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey revisits her family history and early years as a “child of miscegenation” in Mississippi, before illuminating the darkness of her coming-of-age in Atlanta, Georgia. Tretheway unearths her dormant memories, repressed trauma, and survivor's guilt while giving voice to her late mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who was brutally murdered by her unstable second ex-husband when Natasha was 19. It is raw, heavy, harrowing, and chilling yet eloquently written. Almost like transforming the spirit back to flesh, Turnbough speaks her account of experiencing domestic violence, and the will to live and protect her children through court documents and phone transcripts up until the last words before her demise. "If trauma fragments the self," Tretheway notes, "then what does it mean to have dominion over the self? You can try to forget. You can go a long time without making a full revolution, but memory is a loop." Tretheway confronts this loop even in her dreams, etching a glimpse of joy and a momentary pathway for her mother's survival before the inevitable fast forwards.

-- Petra

Natasha Trethewey

Six Feet Under

The clouds rolling in over the Hancock Tower right before the rain today.

Source: Missouri History Museum.