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As a whole, Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia is a stunning collection of poems that are written from the viewpoint of one of the famous photographer’s subjects. I think that by using poetry, Trethewey elevates the fictional story being told: there is a certain amount of mystery around Bellocq – details about his life, his choice of subject matter, the identities of his subjects – that is heightened by the fluidity and elusiveness of the form. His name is not mentioned until the March 1911 entry, on page 20:

“Later, I took arsenic–tablets I swallowed / to keep me fair, bleached white as stone. / Whiter still, I am a reversed silhouette / against the black backdrop where I pose, now, / for photographs, a man named Bellocq. / He visits often, buys time only to look / through his lens.”

This poem continues with an extremely close eye on its subject, whose eye is on the “you” that used to care for her, possibly “Constance,” and then on herself through memories, until the final line: “Now I face the camera, wait / for the photograph to show me who I am,” (21). This brought, to my mind, the earlier poem, titled, “Countess P–’s Advice for New Girls,” in which the narrator, the Countess, says: “For your customers / you must learn to be watched… See yourself through his eyes… Become what you must. Let him see whatever / he needs. Train yourself not to look back,” (11). When thinking of the Countess’ advice, it seems as if the narrator of the March 1911 poem thinks in extreme detail about “you,” remembering their fingers sifting through the fine strands of her hair, the expression on her face that mirrored that of “you,” while stand-alone details about herself are more obscure; steam over her face, a sea of cotton for her to be lost in. While these are things that veil the memories of her true “self,” as Edna Pontellier would say, they are also things that are distinctively white. 

The other poem that I found most interesting in regard to Ophelia’s identity was the April 1911 entry, on pages 23 and 24 (my personal favorite). It begins:

“My dear Constance, You are as steadfast as your name / suggests, and I am as mute / as my own namesake.”

I took this description of Constance’s character as a reflection of Ophelia’s: where Constance is constant, she is not, or possibly that she cannot be. From Countess P–’s instructions and her own admission needing to be shown, Ophelia does not know who she is, or perhaps her question is who should she be. There is existing evidence of people coming from mixed backgrounds struggling with which lineage they should more closely identify, and there would certainly have been very different lifestyles between Ophelia’s different ancestors. From our class discussions and the literature we have read so far, it seems that white men were fascinated by women of mixed descent or octoroons. In the December 1910 poem, on pages 13 and 14, Ophelia says:

“She calls me Violet now — / a common name here in Storyville — except / that I am the African Violet for the promise / of that wild continent hidden beneath / my white skin… all this to show / the musical undulation of my hips, my grace, / and my patience which was to mean / that it is my nature to please and that I could…” 

This entry romanticizes Ophelia’s blackness and shows great beauty in it, where there are also several instances of encountering white men who refer to her as the n-word. I got the impression, from these encounters and her final entry in the April 1911 poem, that becoming one of Countess P–’s girls put emphasis on the color of Ophelia’s skin in a way that she had not considered before. It brings to my mind a quote from Zora Neale Hurston: “I feel most colored when I am thrown against an all-white background.” The Countess’ advice, to “Become what you must,” would likely vary from customer to customer, and by waiting for the photograph to show her who she is, I think she wanted a clear answer; black or white? 

My favorite passage from this collection, the final passage of the April 1911 poem, reads:

“Once, I could have said / what I wanted. I might have answered, Only / the things that anyone would — clean living, / a place with light and plenty green. / That would have been enough. Though now, / when I think of the cotton field, nettles / pricking my fingers, a circle of shade / from my straw hat, my mother up ahead, / her face sunken where she’d lost her teeth, / the 100 lb. sack dragging behind her / like a bride’s train — the life I’ve led / thus far — I want freedom from memory. / I could then be somebody else, born again, / free in the white space of forgetting,” (24).

I think this passage highlights her internal conflict with which race she should more identify: the comparison of her mother’s dragging of a sack to a bridal train symbolizes the work that comes with being a person of color, where her “somebody else, born again,” is free to forget, but specifically in a white space. I find it even more interesting that this storyline is told through one of Bellocq’s prostitutes because he was a white man and thus the very inspiration for this narrator was, in a way, one of Countess P–’s girls, being seen through “his” eyes and learning to be watched. 

I also found the “Disclosure” poem, on page 44, very interesting because of the way the narrator takes back possession of both the ways she is seen and how she sees the world. “… I’ve learned to keep / my face behind the camera, my lens aimed / at a dream of my own making. What power / I find in transforming what is real–a room / flushed with light, calculated disarray. / Today I tried to capture a redbird / perched on the tall hedge. As my shutter fell, / he lifted in flight, a vivid blur above / the clutter just beyond the hedge–garbage. / rats licking the insides of broken eggs.” Despite her situation in life, she can look beyond the ugly to find the beauty, and vice versa, and I think this is telling both of herself as a character and probably women that really lived their lives in her station.

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