"Incident" is a poem by America writer Natasha Trethewey that recounts an unsettling story told by a family every year. The poem was originally published as part of her 2006 collection, Native Guard, which went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2007. Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, to a white Canadian father and an African American mother. She studied English at the University of Georgia and received an MA in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, as well as an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of five books of poetry, including Monument (2018), Thrall (2012), Native Guard (2006), Bellocq's Ophelia (2002), and Domestic Work (2000). From 2012 to 2014, Trethewey served as the 19th US Poet Laureate. This particular poem, like much of Trethewey's work, deals with racial tension and violence in American history. The poem recounts the story of a Black family's close encounter with a Ku Klux Klan cross burning.
The poem begins with the frame of a narrative. The speaker says this is a story they retell each year. They describe the way that they peered through their drawn shades to see a cross out the window, surrounded by men in white gowns. Though not quite stated outright, it is strongly suggested that these men were burning a cross. At the end, the speaker seems to deny that anything occurred, as if the disturbing events of that evening were simply a nightmare. At the same time, they again state they tell this story again every year. The speaker continually uses the pronoun "we" instead of "I," suggesting the shared nature of this terrifying experience as well as the communal quality of the telling of the story. Trethewey also uses repetition throughout the poem, recycling the second and fourth lines of one stanza into the first and third lines of the next. These choices all help maintain the mood of a horror story, while also capturing this awful historical moment. Trethewey demonstrates the way acts of hate like this were carried out to stoke communal fear and were remembered as something too disturbing to be real, but too frightening to be forgotten.
