A prophet overheard: a juxtapositional reading of Gwendolyn Brooks's "In the Mecca"

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Sheila Hassell Hughes

As Gwendolyn Brooks's last collection of poetry to be published by a mainstream press (Harper, 1968), and the first to come out of her conversion to the Black Arts Movement, In the Mecca marks the end of one age for the poet, and the beginning of another. Situated in the cramped confines of a slum tenement on Chicago's South Side, the title poem is local--even narrow--in focus. But the work continues to speak beyond both its particular subject and its point of articulation; indeed, it is in part because "In the Mecca" is such an intense "reportage" (31) that it also functions as a prophecy of "time / crack[ing] into furious flower" ("The Second Sermon on the Warpland," Mecca 54).

Much of the critical debate surrounding Brooks's work has focused on the tension between the particular and the universal, the localized and the transcendent. White critics (feminist and otherwise) have tended to fault her later work, especially, for too narrow a focus and affiliation. The work is not deemed to offer non-Black readers an enticing--or, in Charles Bernstein's terms, "absorptive"--experience. Brooks's attention to the particulars of Black life, it would seem, renders her poetry less accessible to whites and therefore falls short of a "universal" appeal and a "transcendent" value. (1) A number of Black (mostly male) critics, in contrast, heralded Brooks's political shift of the late 1960s as a necessary turn both inward, to her own community, and outward, beyond the confines of the feminine psyche explored in her earlier epic "The Anniad." These critics valued the strong sense of place and position in Brooks's work and saw no merit in striving to appeal to a broader--i.e., white--readership. They charged her earlier poetry, in fact, with too pleading a tone and with a high aestheticism that actually excluded most Black readers. "Universal" and "transcendent" were understandably read as code-words for white appeal. After all, both terms assume a certain relationship to place and space--a geographic, economic, and/or psychic mobility--at odds with the experience of Blacks living in cramped kitchenettes in Jim-Crow Chicago.

Despite what either these latter critics or the 1950 Pulitzer Prize might suggest, however, Brooks never wrote directly or explicitly for a white audience. She was always concerned to represent, to speak to, and to sanctify Black life as she knew it--most especially in the Bronzeville section of Chicago. But clearly, when she adopted the Black Arts credo that "true Black writers speak as blacks, about blacks, and to blacks" (Report 195), she heightened awareness of her social location and political position, rhetorically situating herself and her readers in a new way.

Part of what I, as a white feminist critic, want to argue here is that this newly visible political alignment reduces neither the aesthetic merit of Brooks's later poetry nor its social value beyond the Black community. Indeed, the poet's word remains richly multivalent, in part because she recognizes that the social location from which she speaks is as complex and shifting as it is precise. Although her other rhetoric might seem to favor one line of identification over another (racial rather than gender solidarity, for instance), her poetic practice exemplifies an indissoluble tension and multiplicity. In her poetry, she simultaneously speaks from the margins and centers of both Black culture and the dominant white society, unsettling the opposition between various kinds of insiders and outsiders in the process.

She exhibits, In fact, the very kind of "both/and conceptual orientation" that Patricia Hill Collins identifies as essential to Black feminist thought. Black women have developed this mode of consciousness, Collins argues, to "negotiate [the] contradictions" inherent in "being simultaneously a member of a group and yet standing apart from it" (207). In contrast to standard Western "either/or dichotomous thinking"--an approach that relies on binary oppositions, which inevitably revert to hierarchies--Black feminist thought examines a "matrix of domination ... structured along [multiple]" axes (230). Brooks's poetry speaks from the matrix, and her voice reverberates in both directions along the axes of race, class, and gender.

The first part of this essay will attempt to sketch the matrix, surveying the conditions of Brooks's literary production and reception, in an attempt to establish how a "politics of location" is intrinsic to her spatial poetics. But my rhetorical concerns also extend to the border between the socio-political and the spiritual realms--to ways the poetry exceeds history and geography, speaking beyond its location even as it speaks out of and for it. Through the poet's figuration of space, both excess and absence function not as a strictly spiritual transcendence of time and place, but rather as the reverse image of a necessary liberation. This kind of freedom begins in a particular time and place but potentially extends beyond it. The "ex-static" (2) call for liberation is what I consider the prophetic element of "In the Mecca."