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

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Sheila Hassell Hughes

The second half of the essay then offers a "juxtapositional" reading of the prophetic word in Brooks's poem. With this epic, in particular, the poet destabilizes a whole series of sociopolitical dichotomies-- inside/outside, center/margin, here/there, and us/them--in two ways: first, by revealing a complex layering of social, historical, and even geographical forces at play in one seemingly monolithic site (the Mecca building) and, second, by relocating the poem's ultimate "conclusion" beyond the borders of her text. She both maps the matrix and points the way out. Read as an ironic and inverted parable, the poem issues a prophetic call for radical reader-response and responsibility--even across the very lines of race and culture, time and place that Brooks herself delineates so powerfully. All three aspects of the poet's work--the political, the poetic, and the prophetic--are tied to her location, and this is precisely why she continues to speak so powerfully beyond a particular place. Her poetry may not be universal or transcendent in the traditional sense of the words (i.e., timelessly open to identification and appropriation by a privileged white audience), but it continues to speak a liberatory word with implications for both Black and white readers. In contrast to an "integrationist" approach that seeks to salve wounds and consciences, and to reduce tension for the sake of inclusion, a juxtapositional reading aims to expose, even amplify, tensions as a means to transformation. My goal is not to redeem Brooks's more "militant" poetry for a white audience so much, perhaps, as to work out my own redemption as a reader in response to a prophetic word overheard--to formulate an ethical response to a call not meant for me.

Brooks's Social Location as Interpenetrated Space

In the most obvious sense of "location," Gwendolyn Brooks is a Chicago poet. She was Poet Laureate of Illinois for more than three decades, in fact, and the constancy of her geographic identification lends a continuity to her long and varied poetic career. Brooks's parents moved to the South Side of Chicago when she was an infant, and she lived there until her death in 2000, at age eighty-three. For many years, she lived in a series of cramped and damp apartments--basements, garages, and kitchenettes (Report 52)--and struggled to make ends meet with Henry Blakely, whom she married in 1939. As Blacks, they faced both a severe housing crisis in the urban migration "mecca" of Jim-Crow Chicago (3) and a job ceiling that prevented economic advancement. Brooks lived in the same quarter, frequented the same neighborhoods, and described the same streets, for a lifetime, and, from her earliest published collection, her poetry addressed the realities of poor and working-class African Americans in that urban environment.

From the first, the constraining effects of this location on the young poet were countered by the practices of an older generation that had learned how to "make a way out of no way" and a nurturing space out of a confining place. Brooks's parents were the first encouragement to her writing. Her mother had faith that her daughter was to become "the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar" (Report 56), and her father, who dropped out of college to support his family, "revered books and education" (52) and gave his daughter her first writing desk (56). Given the spatial limits of the family home, there was obviously no paternal "library" in which to read and write. The girl's bedroom--small, childish, feminine--thus served as the site of her poetic production for many years. Having written poetry regularly since the age of seven (55), Brooks achieved some degree of recognition early and garnered additional support from the larger Black literary community. As an adolescent, for example, she was mentored by both James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes (173-74). By the time she graduated from high school, she was publishing poems almost weekly in the Chicago Defender and had started an amateur literary magazine (Kent, A Life 25). Remarkably, from an age when most writers are still exploring the most intensely private and purely expressive modes, Brooks was writing with a sense of both a public audience and her place in a larger tradition. It is equally remarkable, perhaps, that for the next half-century her geographic, social, and rhetorical locations never dramatically changed.