Memory’s Daughters: Professor Margo Jefferson moderates Reading & Conversation with Professor Deborah Paredez and 19th U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey

By
Angeline
September 15, 2020

Professor and alumna from the Journalism program Margo Jefferson ’71 sat down with Associate Professor Deborah Paredez and 19th U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey for a poetry reading and conversation reflecting on memory and the role we call daughter. This event was jointly sponsored by The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department at Columbia University. 

Jefferson is a Pulitzer-Prize winning cultural critic and Professor of Professional Practice, Writing, and Undergraduate Creative Writing. Her writing has appeared in countless publications, including The New York Times and Newsweek, where she served as a staff writer. Her 2015 memoir, Negroland, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography as well as several other honors.

Paredez, Associate Professor of Professional Practice in Writing and Director of Undergraduate Studies, is a poet and scholar. Her works include the poetry collection, This Side of Skin and her award-winning critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory. Trethewey is a poet who has served as both the national Poet Laureate as well as the Poet Laureate of Mississippi. She is the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. Her poetry collection, Native Guard, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. Her further collections include Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf CoastThrall, and Monument: Poems New and Selected.

Opening the event, Paredez remarked, “We are gathered together on the 19th anniversary commemorating the events of September 11th, and I hope that our conversation today can help us continue to navigate the fraught and productive and always politicized terrain of memory and memorialization.” Jefferson echoed Paredez’s sentiments, saying she “can’t imagine a better place, in better company, to be on the afternoon of September 11th.”

Paredez has described her collection, Year of the Dog: Poems, as a Latina chronicle of the Vietnam War era, specifically in and around the year 1970. Her collection is a fusion of the intensely personal and national. “The book, in many ways, is written with the participation of my father and his photographs that he took when he was deployed in Vietnam,” said Paredez. Paredez shared her screen with the audience at one point to show how she not only juxtaposes her father’s images with those from national archives, but cuts and splits them, collaging the personal against the national, her poems inserted among them. Paredez noted how she wanted the collection, “as a documentary-poetry project, to be in conversation with those images.”

As Jefferson summarized, Paredez’s collection also includes poetic mediations on "the police killings of students at Kent State and Jackson State, the police murder of Fred Hampton, a Black Panther in Chicago, the life of Kim Phuc, the napalmed Vietnamese child given horrific immortality by an AP Associated Press photograph in 1972.” 

For Paredez, the book is as much about the Vietnam War era as it is about women bearing witness to disaster, in myth and throughout history. Among the poems she read was “Lightening,” which Paredez wrote for Deborah Johnson (also known as Akua Njeri), who was Fred Hampton’s partner. Johnson was in bed with Hampton—and eight and a half months pregnant with their child—when the Chicago Police assassinated Hampton on December 4, 1969. Paredez also read “Idiom,” a poem where she sought to “reckon with the idiom and make it strange again.”

Book covers, left to right: 'Year of the Dog' 'Memorial Drive' 'Negroland'

This formal experimentation is something that Paredez’s work shares with that of Trethewey. Trethewey read from the prologue and first chapter of Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, which tells the story of her mother Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, her brutal murder, and the legacy of her memory. Paredez asked Trethewey to speak more about the chapter titled “You Know,” which is the only one written in the second person. Reflecting on this decision, Trethewey said, “It is supposed to enact formally what it feels like to have wanted to be so separate from that person that I can only talk to her now as if she is another person. Even as the book is about, in many ways, integrating those two selves, I still need to show that self...I still don’t want it to be me.”

Jefferson asked both writers to speak to the demands of the role of daughter and the task of preserving and recording memory. Trethewey recalled the time after Native Guard had been published, and how she grappled with being the guardian of her mother’s memory. As press surrounding her and the book grew, her background became part of her public narrative, her mother increasingly “presented as victim, as an afterthought, as a footnote.” She decided she was the only one who could and should tell the story of her mother, and thus the memoir project was born. Trethewey also shared that Jefferson’s own memoir, Negroland, was one she returned to again and again as she tried to write Memorial Drive

Similarly, Paredez wanted to honor her father’s experiences by using his photographs throughout the book. However, as Trethewey observed, no complete photo of Paredez’s father appears in the collection. Paredez said that this decision came from a desire to protect the privacy of her father and preserve his own perspective. 

During the Q&A portion of the event, an attendee asked what it meant to be doing the work of remembering now at this moment, as we mourn losses in the midst of anti-Black violence by the police and a global pandemic. Paredez shared that when she was finishing this collection in 2018, it was the year with the highest number of school shootings in the United States. The poem “Self-Portrait in the Time of Disaster” speaks to that very moment. The book then came out in 2020, another unique moment of disaster. “In some ways, it pains me that it is resonant,” said Paredez, “but I do think there is something both comforting and challenging to go back and see, ‘Right. We have faced this, especially as communities of color, we have faced these moments before that seem to be in every way annihilating or devastating’...I think there is something that can guide us even as it feels like a perpetual cycle.”

A recording of the complete event can be found here.