Reflecting violence in the warpland: Gwendolyn Brooks's Riot

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:

   The New Bauer Ordinance Armored
   Police Car will stop 30-06 rifle bullets at
   point blank range. It has a 360[degrees] turret
   that will mount a machine gun, riot
   gun, water cannon, flamethrower and
   grenade launcher. The body is protected
   by high voltage electricity. The body
   is designed to protect against Molotov
   Cocktails and the vehicle carries sufficient
   water and foaming agents to put
   out gasoline fires. Can be used to control
   riots or just to patrol the tough districts.
   Plenty of room in the back for
   stretchers or to take in those unruly
   prisoners. This vehicle was designed
   by the same people who designed the
   XM706 (tank) now being used in Viet
   Nam. (qtd. in Masotti, et al. 1)

Similarly frightened by the riots and the militant voices, the FBI reacted with intense surveillance and persecution of contentious individuals. Likewise, literary critics may have found this material intimidating. Even Brooks later softened positions she had taken during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Besides the threatening content, one of the most pervasive criticisms of Brooks's later poetry is that she overly simplified its form. However, that criticism cannot easily be made of Riot, the complex structure of which, particularly in "The Third Sermon on the Warpland," has meant its critical neglect or assessment as ineffective. (12) In contrast, I believe it to be at least as successful as the other two sections, if not more, because its form mirrors the chaotic form of a riot, becoming an exquisite manipulation of form, like Brooks's earlier poetry but without the conventional European poetic types. This section is disjointed, much is left unexplained, and Brooks uses many obscure local references. Riot is precisely what and how a riot is--local, chaotic, explosive, fragmentary. The imagery jumps from the Black Philosopher predicting the action to a local restaurant where people watch the riot, to the young men looting stores, to the fires being lit, to the police's arrival, to the death of a mother, to a newspaper ad promising rumor confirmation, to the restrained Rangers, to the clueless white observers, and, finally, back to the Black Philosopher. Refusing to synthesize the material for her readers, Brooks offers glimpses of the riot, simultaneous events that are only later sorted into a linear story for re-telling even by the historians. Readers are inundated by the disparate images, piling upon each other fast and furious, with no transitions, no warnings, and no explanations. Our confusion is akin to the country's confusion in 1968 as it watched its urban centers explode.