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

Alfred, another poet, finally begins to hear his prophetic calling only with the uncovering of Pepita's body:

   I hate it.
   Yet, murmurs Alfred--
   who is lean at the balcony, leaning--
   something, something in Mecca
   continues to call! Substanceless; yet
      like mountains,
   like rivers and oceans too; and like trees
   with the wind whistling through them.
      And steadily
   an essential sanity, black and electric,
   builds to a reportage and redemption.
        A hot estrangement.
        A material collapse
      that is Construction. (31)

What Alfred sensed before only as a "rending" (27), he perceives now as a potential space for transformation. The collapse and construction that he envisions depend upon his ability to bear witness to what is substanceless--to Pepita's death and absence. The prophet's task, like the poet's, is a sane "reportage" of what exceeds articulation. In a reversal of traditionally gendered roles, then, Alfred finally becomes a bit of fertile ground for the sowing and growth of Pepita's seed. Without this possibility, the meaning of her name is wholly ironic: Pepita would fall only as the parabolic seed upon rock or among thorns, a tragic remainder in a concrete desert.

But Alfred, leaning toward another Meccan voice for the first time, figures a hopeful future growth. This hope emerges more clearly in the poems which follow the epic, in the volume's "After Mecca" section. In "Sermon on the Warpland," for example, the poet preaches: "Say that our Something in doublepod contains / seeds for the coming hell and health together" (49). Brooks never separates her vision of health from her social critique, or call for justice. She asserts that healing for some will surely mean "hell" for others--the ultimate juxtaposition. In this way, "in the Mecca" reads as a parable of inversion: one in which the coming "kingdom" is signaled by a reversal of social status. (28)

Brooks's message was in fact heard as a prophetic call by those "inside" her community of racial "outsiders." In her aptly titled poem "Our MZ Brooks: Clearing Space at the LOC," Eleanor Traylor represents the response to "In the Mecca" from those within the movement:

   Querying her glance calls loudly, yet
      unperturbed,
   "Pepita, Pepita, where is Pepita?
   "Pepita, Pepita, where is Pepita?
   "Pepita, Pepita, where is Pepita?"
   ... Answers "hoodo holler" through
   the white washed room
   gathering like some gentle
   cloud
   raining on the memory
   of our dreams:
   Pepita here! Pepita here! Pepita, here is
      Pepita!
   Pepita here! Pepita here! Pepita, hear
      Pepita.
   We are all, Pepita, here. (59-60)

Brooks's young Black audience--women and men alike--are identified with and as Pepita, drawing together and re-membering the dispersed Black family under their mother-prophet's wing.