On Captivity 2007
Being all Stripped as Naked as We were Born, and endeavoring to hide our Nakedness, these Cannaballs took [our] Books, and tearing out the Leaves would give each of us a Leaf to cover us…
At the hands now
of their captors, those
they’ve named savages,
do they say the word itself
savagely — hissing
that first letter,
the serpent’s image,
releasing
thought into speech?
For them now,
everything is flesh
as if their thoughts, made
suddenly corporeal,
reveal even more
their nakedness —
the shame of it:
their bodies rendered
plain as the natives’ —
homely and pale,
their ordinary sex,
the secret illicit hairs
that do not (cannot)
cover enough.
This is how they are brought,
naked as newborns,
to knowledge. Adam and Eve
in the New World,
they have only the Bible
to cover them. Think of it:
a woman holding before her
the torn leaves of Genesis,
and a man covering himself
with the Good Book’s
frontispiece — his own name
inscribed on the page.
Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing
- FIRST RESPONSE. Trethewey has written about the sources of her epigraph: “Because the conquerors made use of the written word to claim land [in North America] inhabited by native people, I found the detail of settlers forced to cover themselves with torn pages from books a compelling irony” (The Best American Poetry 2008, p. 182). How does this comment contribute to the central irony in the poem?
- Discuss Trethewey’s use of alliteration in lines 1–9.
- In what sense are the captors “brought, / naked as newborns, / to knowledge” (lines 24–26)?