Myth

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2007

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

Natasha Trethewey was the first poet to receive the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for best debut book by an African American poet. This prestigious honor helped to solidify Trethewey’s significance as a poet who was able to express the concerns of African Americans. The themes of Domestic Work—the history of African American people, the working class, the function of memory, and the loss of loved ones—continues throughout her other collections. In 2006, she wrote Native Guard, which looks closely at the history of the Native Guards of Louisiana and Black troops in the American Civil War, as well as her own personal experience, particularly those challenged by the murder of her mother. The collection was lauded for its honesty regarding life and racial tension in the South and for Trethewey’s craftsmanship. This collection won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, with Trethewey being only the fourth African American to win this high honor. This also was influential in her being appointed to the position of Poet Laureate. Her poetic ability to negotiate liminal spaces—moving from myth to reality, from historical to autobiographical, from past to present, from segregation to inclusion—is something Trethewey is known for and something that appears here in “Myth.” Her ability to use fixed form is also widely praised. She has been compared to other contemporary African American poets like Rita Dove and Kevin Young.

Biographical Context

In Trethewey’s memoir Memorial Drive, she investigates her life with her African American mother, Gwendolyn Turnbough. Her mother and her white biological father, the poet Eric Trethewey, divorced in 1972 when Natasha was only six. Gwendolyn moved Natasha to Atlanta, which she felt was a more progressive city and included more opportunities. There, she met Joel Grimmette, whom she married and with whom she had a son. The marriage was plagued by verbal and physical abuse, and the couple divorced in 1983. Grimmette, however, remained physically abusive. Convicted of threatening to murder Gwendolyn in 1984, he received jailtime. However, by March of 1985, Grimmette was out of prison and harassing his ex-wife again. On July 5, 1985, he borrowed his son’s house key and entered Gwendolyn’s apartment and began to assault her. He followed her to the parking lot where he shot her, fatally, in the head. Natasha was 19 and has talked in many interviews, and in her memoir, of how this was one of the central wounds of her life and directly affected her art. As recounted in an interview with The Paris Review, Trethewey was advised by a professor in her graduate program to “[u]nburden [her]self of being black. Unburden [her]self of the death of your mother.” For Trethewey, however, these were the things “that had so shaped my experience of the world,” this was not only “wrong,” but impossible. She could not change the color of her skin. Her mother’s wound was also her own. As a writer, she followed other writers’ advice to “write what she had been given” (Chotiner, Issac. “How Natasha Trethewey Remembers Her Mother.” The New Yorker, 2020) instead of ignoring it. Trethewey has directly indicated that “Myth” is an example of her way of expressing her grief and immortalizing her mother.