“Blond” post

Natasha Trethewey’s poem “Blond” begins with the speaker imagining that had she been born with blonde hair, she could have passed as a white person. Natasha’s father being white and her mother African-American, she has the perfect tan colored skin to “pass.” It seems funny that I landed on this page when choosing what poem to write about, because we just finished discussing the book Passing last week. However, Natasha differs from the characters in Passing in that she does not seem to have any desire to “pass” as an adult. She instead looks at her childhood of wearing blonde wigs and playing with white dolls as a time of ignorance. This is shown in lines 9-13 when it says, “When on Christmas day I woke to find/a blond wig, a pink sequined tutu,/and a blonde ballerina doll, nearly tall as me,/ I didn’t know to ask, nor that it mattered,/ if there’d been a brown version”(Trethewey). Being so young, she did not know to question her parents as to why her dolls did not look like her or why she was given a blond wig. One has to wonder who gave Trethewey these presents that were clearly meant for a white little girl? All signs point to her father, who in the photograph “looks on as Joseph must have at the miraculous birth” as she dances around in a blond wig. The words “miraculous,” “halo,” and “shining,” are used to describe the way Trethewey looks in the blond wig through her father’s eyes. He clearly had wanted a white child, and is looking with satisfaction and joy at what could have been, had she been born blonde.