Reflecting violence in the warpland: Gwendolyn Brooks's Riot

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Annette Debo

"There they came to life and exulted, the hurt mute. Then it was over.

The dust, as they say, settled." (lines 107-10)

In these lines, Brooks captures the nature of a riot: the participants roar to life, speaking when before they were unheard, and then, in a matter of days, it is over. What remains is the phoenix's re-birth, which happens in the final part of Riot.

A suggestive result of the 1960's riots was a surge in self-esteem among African Americans. Over the twentieth century, according to sociologists, African American identity changed from "the racial self-hatred characteristic of the predominantly southern black population of 1900 to the more positive black identity of today's [1973] black militants" (Sears and McConahay 188). After studying the 1965 riot in Watts, California, David O. Sears and John B. McConahay argue that a major legacy of the riot was "increased pride in blackness": "Blacks' image of blackness became notably more positive over time, following the riot. Black pride was particularly strong among the New Urban Blacks. It appeared to have become a core mainstream value in the contemporary northern urban ghetto, where the best educated and best informed blacks showed the highest levels of black pride" (195).

Brooks taps into this new formulation of black identity and pride in the last part of Riot, "An Aspect of Love, Alive in the Ice and Fire," a celebratory poem of human intimacy made possible by the riots. Brooks's title alludes to Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice," which considers whether the world will end through fire (passion, desire) or ice (ire, hate). Brooks borrows Frost's meditation on the world's end to insert her pair of lovers into the apocryphal scene created by the riot. After the violence and chaos, what is to be celebrated and valorized is the connection between people, especially between heterosexual lovers. She opens the poem with "It is the morning of our love," not the evening; the world and the day are just beginning (line 1). (10) Like the phoenix that rises from ashes, this couple thrives in a new world, on a street that is now "imperturbable," unrocked by violence (line 25). They are concerned with themselves, with their own love. The chaos of the outside world makes possible this relationship because besides living in a new world, these are new people. Both are strong in confidence--confidence produced by fighting back, by standing up against oppression. The male partner, for example, is "a lion / in African velvet ... level, lean, / remote" (lines 14-16). The pair embodies the fight that has taken place in the street; they are created by the ice and fire, but they live within it and beyond it: "This is the shining joy; / the time of not-to-end" (lines 20-21). It is in allowing these final lines of tranquility, strength, and love that the battle has made the difference.

The remaining question is why Riot, as well as the entire post-1967 partition of Brooks's career, has not received more critical attention. The violence discussed here is certainly a factor. To accept this poem is perhaps a tacit acceptance of violence as a necessary part of the Civil Rights movement when the national holiday belongs to Dr. King, who rejected riots as a profitable vehicle for social change. In Riot, Brooks joins a throng of militant voices demanding immediate social change. Sounding outrageous, her voice reads the riots as positive and does not call for a cessation of violence; instead, violence creates tangible political and personal gains. She sounds much like Malcolm X, who said about the language of the white man, "Let's learn his language. If his language is with a shotgun, get a shotgun. Yes, I said if he only understands the language of a rifle, get a rifle. If he only understands the language of a rope, get a rope" (108). (11) She sounds much like Amiri Baraka, who demands "'poems that kill.' / Assassin poems, Poems that shoot / guns" (lines 19-21). She sounds much like Stokely Carmichael with his call for "black power," like H. Rap Brown, like Medgar Evers, like Bobby Seale, like many militant black voices who terrified white America, as illustrated by a 1967 advertisement from a large manufacturing concern, an advertisement echoed by others published in police journals: