Mourning as creative resistance: funeral rituals and Black Thanatological Poetics in Natasha Trethewey’s ‘Graveyard Blues’

This study examines how Natasha Trethewey’s ‘Graveyard Blues’ and the broader collection Native Guard illuminate the complex psychological and cultural functions of African American funeral rituals in grief expression and healing. Drawing on close textual analysis, Black grief scholarship, and contemporary thanatology, this article explores how Trethewey’s poetic practice transforms private mourning into public witness, offering a culturally situated framework for understanding death, memory, and identity formation. Through engagement with foundational texts in Black mourning studies, the study situates Trethewey’s elegiac work within the continuum of African American commemorative traditions while developing a theoretical framework of Black Thanatological Poetics. This research contributes to death studies by demonstrating how artistic expression and ritual participation can facilitate meaning-making in the aftermath of traumatic loss, particularly for those affected by racial violence and historical erasure.