Natasha Trethewey writes in Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast:
"It is commonplace that the landscape is inscribed with the traces of things long gone. Everywhere the names of towns, rivers, shopping malls, and subdivisions bear witness to vanished Native American tribes, communities of former slaves, long-ago industrial districts and transit routes.
"We speak these names often unaware of their history, forgetting how they came to be. Each generation is further from the events and the people to which the names refer--these relics becoming more and more abstract.
"No longer talismans of memory, the words are monuments nonetheless. As Robert Haas has written, 'A word is elegy to the things signified.'" (Trethewey 33)
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