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A prophet overheard: a juxtapositional reading of Gwendolyn Brooks's "In the Mecca"
African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Sheila Hassell Hughes
With these theories in mind, I read Brooks's location--geographic, social, and rhetorical--as more complex, fluctuating, and open than her classifications as a "Chicago poet," "Black woman," or "cultural nationalist" might suggest. The multiplicity at play in each of these designations, and the recombinant potential of all three, makes for sites of potentially progressive politicization--of political "movement as well as alignment"(12)--opening the possibility for localized perspectives to function in liberatory ways. An "extraverted" sense of place helps to explain how the Mecca building serves as such a multivalent signifier in Brooks's poem, and suggests why the particular poetic word so powerfully "stretch[es] beyond" the sphere of its articulation.
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However much Brooks stays in one place all her career, there is certainly a mid-life shift or turn in her social posture. The event which precipitated this was her attendance at a Black Writers Conference at Fisk University in the spring of 1967. Whereas the by-then renowned poet had been "loved" at the white colleges where she had been speaking, she was only "coldly respected" among the "New Blacks" at Fisk. What she had unwittingly walked into was a hotbed of Black nationalism and a new Black aesthetic, and it was a "blood-boiling surprise" to the fifty-year-old poet (Report 84). A generational divide opened, and she found herself an outsider once more.
Although Brooks was at first amazed and confused by the Black community she met at Fisk, her own experience was ultimately confirmed and validated by their expressions. Messages like "Black is beautiful" (Report 172-73) drew the darker sister "in" in a new way and rang prophetic in her ears. This, and the accompanying "Up against the wall white man!" (85), would necessarily hold a different import for those more clearly "outside," of course. Thus, it is with some amusement that Brooks recalls the self-immolating response of one young white man, who jumped up to shout ecstatically, "Yeah, yeah, kill 'em.... Kill 'em all!" (168). She herself emphasizes the inside/outside distinction of race, but suggests it is a social effect rather than an essential feature: "Your least prerequisite toward understanding of the new black is an exceptional Doctorate which can be conferred only upon those with the proper properties of bitter birth and intrinsic sorrow. I know this is infuriating, especially to those professional Negro-understanders" (85). The poet's goal thus becomes to reach all Blacks everywhere with her call to identification as Black, and to convert those who do not as yet understand the "new Black." But this appeal does not extend across racial lines. Brooks appears to have foregone any hope or sense of responsibility toward a white audience, and was resistant, at least in the seventies, toward a broader "third world" identification (204-05). Group solidarity among Blacks--in Africa and the diaspora--was the first and necessary step toward liberation.
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