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

In terms of the actual places juxtaposed in her work, Brooks ranges broadly. Most notably, though, she imports the image and idea of Africa to signify on the experience of Blacks in America. Brooks's post-1967 identification with Africa was a kind of journey home for the woman who had, as a second-class citizen, struggled to be "at home" in America, yet it was no idyllic haven. In her descriptions of her travels to the continent, she emphasizes the great gulf between the two places and her own inability to bridge it. In fact, the poet finds her most powerful tool to be one of the clearest markers of the irrevocability of the loss (Report 88). English itself becomes, for her, both a space of exploration and a place of confinement. When Africa then appears as a home to which she can never return, (20) the poet turns to the construction of "Afrika" as a sphere of memory and imagination, a sacred space with the potential to sacralize Black life in the diaspora of the modern social "whirlwind." She does this by envisioning Afrika as a shared and shifting space of identity. In her later poem "To the Diaspora," she writes,

   When you set out for Afrika
   you did not know you were going.
   Because
   you did not know you were Afrika.
   You did not know the Black continent
   that had to be reached
   was you. (To Disembark 41)

Erkkila reads this, along with Brooks's claim to be "essentially an essential African" (Report 1), as a "celebration of the sameness and universality of black nature across personal, historical, and national bounds" that effaces the very particularity and multiplicity that had always funded her poetic vision (Erkkila 224). "Nature" is not the only way to talk about identity, nationhood, and racial consciousness, however, and the unique and different are still prominent in Brooks's poetry. Indeed, her use of "the Black continent" is an imaginative and political construct meant to produce certain effects--pride, solidarity, survival, and liberation--in the midst of overwhelming opposition. Because the site of ultimate reference is not literal, it avoids a reactionary naturalization and dehistoricization of place. Indeed, Brooks's project is profoundly concerned with history and its irrevocability. Writing as an Afrikan, or as Black, Brooks relocates herself with a politicized identity that exceeds this (or any) place. She resists the role of victim to racist social forces not by a transcendent escape of history and geography, but by insisting upon a liberatory deconstruction of the site of oppression itself. Her goal is a radical reconstruction from within.

With "In the Mecca," Brooks uses Africa to sacramentalize Black struggle in the United States by a kind of "interpenetration" or superimposition, importing its image to Chicago's South Side. The result is a powerfully ironic juxtaposition of places. The towering Mecca building signals the Saudi holy city of Islam: the center to which Malcolm X had made his pilgrimage in 1964. (21) Built as a monument to modern American progress, the complex would seem to claim a mystical and holy power, issuing from elsewhere, to reward, guide, soothe, and subdue its inhabitants. At the same time, by taking its name from Africa, the new-world construct seeks to absorb and nullify the other world's mythic power, along with its people. Making claims to other places can be a colonizing move, rather than a liberating one, depending on the agent and motives.