Memory and resistance in Natasha Trethewey’s ship island poetry

This article examines the concept of hydrological colonialism in Natasha Trethewey’s poetry, focusing on Ship Island—a barrier island located approximately nineteen kilometers off the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the northern Gulf of Mexico, United States. Through ecocritical close reading and historical analysis, this study analyzes Trethewey’s Native Guard (2006) and Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010) to reveal how racial capitalism, state neglect, and engineered erosion converge across three interconnected Gulf Coast sites: Ship Island, the casino-dominated coastline, and the historically Black community of North Gulfport. The analysis develops three key arguments: (1) that shoreline erosion constitutes a form of slow violence connecting nineteenth-century military segregation of the Louisiana Native Guards to contemporary environmental racism exacerbated by Hurricane Katrina’s racialized impacts; (2) that Trethewey’s tidal poetics—evident in fragmented sonnets and riverine rhythms—reclaim submerged histories by transforming sites of racial subjugation into spaces of memory and resistance; and (3) that her work enacts what I term hydro-resistance, countering narratives of erasure by reconceptualizing water as a medium of connection rather than destruction. By framing Ship Island within its broader Gulf Coast geography, this article contributes to environmental humanities and island studies scholarship, demonstrating how poetic form itself can theorize the entanglement of race, water, and memory along vulnerable coastlines.