Natasha Trethewey was 19 years old on the morning of June 5, 1985, when her mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, was killed by two shots fired at close range by the man she had just divorced after ten years together. After a series of threats, an arrest warrant had been issued against the man hours earlier.
Three decades later, with Memorial Road, touching and terrible autobiographical tale, autopsy of a personal drama, the American poet Natasha Trethewey (winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2007) continues to learn “to recognize the contours of loss”.
She tells about her own childhood and the interrupted trajectory of this woman, evoking the racism of the deep South where the Klu Klux Klan still prevailed at the time of her birth. Because interracial marriages were outlawed in Mississippi, her parents – an African-American social worker and a Canadian-born poet and scholar – had to go and get married in Ohio before their daughter was born in 1966.
And when, at ten, in a mixture of shame and sadness, she hears for the first time her mother being beaten up by her second husband, it is a window that opens, she says, on “The world of men and women, on domination and submission”.
Could their fate have been different if she had been able to tell her mother that whenever she was away from home, Big Joe – as she nicknamed her mother’s husband – tormented her, made up faults and punishments, violated his privacy? “I can’t help but wonder if my silence has cost him his life. “
After her stepfather forced the lock protecting the diary she was keeping, the teenager began writing to him, accusing and insulting him. An act of resistance by which she made him her very first reader.
With this painful exploration of repressed memory and guilt, trying to make sense of what can’t have, Natasha Trethewey walks down the narrow alley of remembrance. “The very death of my mother is redeemed in the story of my vocation, gives it meaning instead of making it crazy. This is the story I tell myself to survive. “