Natasha Tretheway’s poem “Flounder” presents the story of a young biracial girl and her aunt Sugar at a fishing spot, as they engage in various pleasantries and the aunt encourages the girl to adopt a white appearance. This continues until the aunt catches a flounder, whose struggle against the aunt resonates immensely with the young girl and her biracial identity. Ultimately, Tretheway in “Flounder” expresses the predicaments of biracial individuals in understanding and embracing their racial identity as well as in maintaining the integrity of such, particularly by way of using dialects, sentence structure, imagery, and sound devices that enhance the themes of contrast between black and white racial identities and resistance against identity disintegration seen in the poem. In this case, the biracial individual in question is the young girl (we know she has a black aunt and a white father); however, with Trethewey being biracial herself, the analysis should note how the author’s racial identity and historical background might play a role in the personality of the girl in the poem. In terms of historical context, the poem is presumably set in the American South, in the later part of the 20th century (the poet herself was born in 1966 and resides in the South), when racial tensions among blacks and whites were prevalent following the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Many blacks believed that having a lighter skin color, especially for biracial people, was an advantage in avoiding racial contempt from others. This would explain the aunt’s encouragement to the girl that she should maintain a white identity. Having made such contextual notes about the poem, the analysis will proceed to investigate the notions about the poem’s significance to the subject of racial identity, firstly in regards to the aunt’s view about racial identity and how they relate to the young girl.

The contrast between white and black racial identities displayed in Aunt Sugar’s attitudes leads the young girl to experience difficulties in understanding the nature of her biracial identity. As they both sit near a pond in the sun, Aunt Sugar lends the girl a hat and declares ““You ‘bout as white as your dad / and you gone stay like that.’” Essentially, Aunt Sugar expresses to the girl that she should maintain a white skin color (thus giving her a hat to avoid darkening) similar to that of her dad; the aunt further implies that the girl should internally maintain a white identity, an image of race and color produced by the phrase “as white as your dad.” However, the key part of the aunt’s language her lies in southern black dialect, such as in pronouncing the words “about” as “ ‘bout” or saying “gone” instead of “gonna” or “going to.” This use of distinctly southern black dialect provides a clear image of the aunt’s racial identity set in the reader’s mind that in turn provides a contrast between the content of the aunt’s dialogue and her racial identity. As the girl’s black aunt, she essentially encourages her biracial niece to maintain a white identity. In additions, she places particular emphasis on this encouragement with repetition of imperative statements beginning with the word “you,” which further pressures the girl to follow her advice. This in turn creates a racial identity crisis that tears the girl between the distinctly black identity of her aunt and the white identity that her aunt pressures her to adopt as a result of this contrast of racial identities seen in the aunt’s dialogue and her accompanying dialect. Although the girl, being young, does not address this contrast and nor what her aunt says, these contrasting racial images do bring a sense of puzzlement and pressure that Trethewey for the girl and for the reader. Tretheway thus presents the girl’s struggle to understand her biracial identity as a result of this pressure that originates from Aunt Sugar’s dialect, sentence structure, imagery and language. The analysis will now investigate how the girl, later in the poem, struggles to maintain the integrity of her racial identity against outside pressures in witnessing the struggles of the caught flounder.

Resonating with the struggles of the flounder, the young girl in turn comes to recognize the pressures placed on her general racial identity, particularly earlier in the poem, and in turn struggles to maintain the integrity of her racial identity, as denoted by contrasting imagery and tones of language. As Aunt Sugar catches the flounder, the young girl describes her as “reeling and tugging hard at the fish that wriggled and tried to fight back.” While she works to reel the flounder in, Aunt Sugar describes the flounder as having a black side and a white side. Focusing mainly on the first part of this scene, the girl clearly has a sympathetic tone for the fish (while she becomes more indifferent towards Aunt Sugar) as she uses more positive imagery allocating justice and righteousness to the struggles of the fish as it “wriggled and tried to fight back” against the comparatively harsh image of the aunt “reeling and tugging hard” that opposes the fish’s resistance. She appears to associate herself with the black-and-white flounder struggling against the pressure of physical forces as the aunt threatens to reel him up to her liking, an allusion to a similar incident earlier in the poem where the aunt pressured the girl to identify with white persons. This resonance of the flounder’s predicament to the girl would suggest that the girl here connects the struggles of the fish against outside pressures that threatens the disintegration of his identity as a fish to the pressures she experienced from her aunt for her to embrace a white racial identity that in turn threatens the disintegration of her racial identity. Her connections here are subtly indicated in contrasting parallelisms she makes in regards to the actions of the aunt in “reeling and tugging” while the fish “wriggled and tried to fight back.” The repetition of the two different suffixes, denoting a present tense and a contrasting past tense, places more tension between the diverging efforts of the aunt and the fish, which strengthens the sense that the aunt is pressuring the fish that tried to resist these pressures (but ultimately failed, hence the past tense). Since the girl associates the scrambling of the flounder with her own efforts to her racial identity against her aunt’s will, the girl would thus recognize the subsequent tension of the pressures of her grandmother and her racial identity. Although she, as described previously, does not fully understand or accept her mixed identity, the pressures she feels from her aunt’s advice produces a general threat of the disintegration of her identity, and in her resonance of with the struggles of the fish, the girl also becomes engaged in a struggle to maintain the integrity of her racial identity, whereas she did not before because she did not recognize these pressures (thus noting the significance of the flounder’s struggle to the girl). Having analyzed how, through the aforementioned imagery and language tones, the young girl’s associations with the flounder in their similar predicaments lead to the girl’s recognition of the racial pressures of her aunt posing a threat to her own identity, the analysis will now observe an evolution of identity and significance of the flounder to the girl that ultimately produces understanding and self-acceptance of her biracial identity.

As the poem progresses, the increasing importance of the differing colors of the flounder, as further denoted by use of rhymes and onomatopoeia, to the racial identity of the girl enlightens her racial self-awareness and presents her with a challenge to embrace her biracial identity as a whole. When the flounder is finally caught by Aunt Sugar, the flounder “landed with a thump” as the girl “stood there watching that fish flip-flop, switch sides with every jump.” Firstly, the notion of the girl standing in the scene and watching the flounder “flip-flop” would indicate that this jumping of the fish is particularly significant to the girl, especially as it switches from the black side to the white every jump. Given the observed significance of racial identity in the poem, the girl clearly views the flip-flopping of the flounder as the fish having a biracial identity with two sides of contrasting colors (black and white). Such racial distinction given to each side of the fish is supported the sound devices that accompany the jumping of switches, such as with the onomatopoeia of “thump” rhyming with “jump.” This attributes a sound effect (mentally played by the reader) to the switching of the sides that emphasizes the contrast of the black and white sides of the flounder; the onomatopoeia of “flip-flop” also gives this distinction to each side and its color with sounds of flip-flopping similarly placing emphasis on switching of sides. Ultimately, the girl is encaptured by the image of the flip-flopping of the fish and the switching of its colors as they relate to her biracial identity. The flounder’s flip-flopping and how it seemingly switches its colored sides indecisively relates to the girl’s experiences in maintaining two distinct racial identities (or sides) and not clearly associating herself with either despites various racial pressures from others, such as from Aunt Sugar in this poem. By being able to relate this dilemma of identity crisis to the flip-flopping of the dying fish, she here, through pondering (as suggested by the image of her standing before the flounder) recognizes the nature of her biracial identity, thus perhaps moving her toward a fuller understanding and acceptance of her identity. There is no clear indication of how the girl perceives her biracial identity, but the reader gets a sense that she is moving in that direction. In observing the struggle of understanding and accepting her biracial identity presented to the girl by way of resonance with the flounder’s flip-flopping, as supported by sound devices of onomatopoeia and indicative imagery in the language of the scene, the analysis will synthesize the various notions about racial identity suggested by Tretheway in this poem, extending beyond the character of the biracial girl.

While the poem “Flounder” by Natasha Trethewey does illustrate, with regional dialects, specific sentence structure, extensive imagery, and sound devices, the predicaments of biracial individuals in coming to terms with and holding the integrity of their racial identity against outside pressures, the overall message that Trethewey leaves in the poem is to encourage self-determination of racial identity. What Trethewey refers to as racial identity is not the actual group one belongs in based on one’s ethnic origins or skin color, but rather what one recognizes oneself as based on one’s personal feelings and emotions. Of course, this view of racial identity is expressed in how the girl in the poem throughout questions her mixed racial identity and struggles to understand and accept how she views herself as she resonates with the identity of the flounder. Even as she ponders about these questions, she begins to resist the pressures of her aunt in accepting a white identity. Clearly, Trethewey in this poem expresses that self-identification of racial identity should lie with oneself and their thoughts rather than with outside influences and perspectives. In addition, this message does not apply to biracial people exclusively, since emotions and personal feelings can lead one to perceive oneself as being of a different race than what one appears to be (but often does apply in biracial people’s situations as they try to find how they identify more with one race or the other, as exemplified by the indecisive flip-flopping of the flounder). However, Trethewey also does not dismiss outside perceptions of one’s racial identity and recognizes such as valid; Aunt Sugar’s encouragements to the girl about maintaining a white identity clearly denotes the aunt’s perception of her as white (or at least this is what she wants to influence the girl with so that she will adopt a white identity and attract less racial animosity, given the history of the South and the aunt’s experiences as an elder) and show the poet’s acceptance of differing perspectives on a person’s racial identity other than that of the person. In this sense, Trethewey ultimately affirms that perceptions of racial identity vary according to one’s point of view and personal experience, thus suggesting that the racial identification of a person is indeterminate in a society where various outside perspectives and one’s self-perception contrast.