The House of Being

The House of Being: Why I Write

By Natasha Trethewey

Yale University Press, 2024

Hardcover: $18

Genre: Literary Criticism/Memoir

Reviewed by Steve Harrison.

Natasha Trethewey’s new book is a prose meditation on memory, violence, and language. The title comes from her father’s reminders that, as Martin Heidegger observed, “Language is the house of being.” Trethewey explores the ways in which the boundaries of personal identity and social justice are determined by words: what is said, how it is said, and what is left out. The House of Being extends those boundaries, and the details of Trethewey’s life illuminate some of the enduring problems in American society: racism, institutionalized discrimination, and domestic violence.

These are familiar themes for Trethewey. In Domestic Work (1999), the poem “Domestic Work, 1937” begins, “All week she’s cleaned / Someone else’s house,” and then goes on to describe the pleasure of working for oneself, cleaning one’s own house. Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002) gives a voice to the mixed-race prostitutes of New Orleans who served as subjects for the photographs of Ernest Bellocq in the early 1900s. Native Guard (2007), for which Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize, tells the largely neglected story of the Louisiana Native Guards, African-American regiments that served in the Union army during the Civil War. Many of these soldiers were former slaves. One of these regiments guarded white Confederate soldiers who were held prisoner in a fort on Ship Island, which lies only ten miles south of Trethewey’s childhood home in Gulfport, Mississippi.

The House of Being gives a deeply affectionate picture of Trethewey’s grandmother Leretta, with whom Trethewey and her parents lived during Trethewey’s early childhood. Leretta comes across as an immensely capable woman. She had run her own beauty parlor, worked in private homes and in a drapery factory, and by the time of Trethewey’s birth, had become an independent seamstress, making curtains in her living room so that she could take care of Natasha during the day. It was in Leretta’s home that Trethewey first found an assortment of fascinating books. And after her mother’s second marriage, this one to an abusive husband, Trethewey found calm and stability there during her school vacations. 

It was also in Gulfport that Trethewey’s experiences of violence began. Hurricane Camille made a direct hit on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1969, destroying numerous homes in her grandmother’s neighborhood. Trethewey, child of a white father and a Black mother, encountered racial hatred early. Klansmen burned a cross in her grandmother’s driveway, and when she read the World Book Encyclopedia‘s entry for “Races of Man,” it named three: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid. These stark divisions impelled Trethewey to search for words to describe her own identity. In The House of Being she observes, “Writing is a way of creating order out of chaos, of taking charge of one’s own story, being the sovereign of the self by pushing back against received knowledge.” 

Trethewey, born in 1966, studied at the University of Georgia, Hollins College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she completed her MFA. Her first teaching job was at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama; the location meant that she could often visit her grandmother in Gulfport. She later taught at Emory University, and now holds a distinguished professorship at Northwestern University. From 2012 to 2014 she served as Poet Laureate of the United States, and during that tenure appeared regularly on the PBS television series “Where Poetry Lives.” 

The House of Being is a slender volume, but profound. It forms part of Trethewey’s ongoing search for language that tells us who we are and how we got here. She writes because “the soul sings for justice, and the song is poetry.”

Steve Harrison grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, attended Auburn University, and worked in the software industry. Since his retirement, he has taught courses in poetry and world literature.