Content provided in partnership with
A prophet overheard: a juxtapositional reading of Gwendolyn Brooks's "In the Mecca"
African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Sheila Hassell Hughes
How other readers experience this calling and coming "Something," this apocalyptic birth-in-death, surely depends on how we relate to the Mecca as an historical, mythical, and social space, and how our reading of the poem receives the "seedpod" of the prophet's word. The meaning of a parable resides, after all, in its reception.
- Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »
We should note, of course, that Brooks resists the title "prophet." George Stavros, in a 1969 interview with the poet, calls her series of "Sermon[s] on the Warpland" (in Mecca and Riot) "apocalyptic and prophetic," to which Brooks replies, "They're little addresses to black people, that's all," and changes the subject (Report 152). Stavros pushes her again, asking if she doesn't speak in "the voice of the prophet, speaker to the people ...?" and Brooks responds, "I don't want to be 'a prophet.' ... I am not writing poems with the idea that they are to become 'social forces.' ... I don't care to proceed from that intention" (153). Nonetheless, Brooks began writing in the late sixties with a new awareness that, if "shrieking into the steady and organized deafness of the white ear was frivolous," there were, in contrast, "things to be said to black brothers and sisters, and these things, annunciatory, curative, inspiriting, were to be said forthwith, without frill and without fear of white presence" ("Flowers" 1). This is how she characterizes Black poetry of that time in general, resisting any of the special status that "prophet" might imply.
If the prophetic is understood as a social construction--a category of speech determined by those "inside" a community which is "outside" the dominant order, a speech coming out of the inner being ("exousia"), a speech which nonetheless takes one beyond the borders of the self, in radical, "exstatic" identification with the Other (e.g., Black brothers or Africans)--then Gwendolyn Brooks's poetry is prophetic. (29) Reading between the lines of her own denial, after all, we can conclude that she does not reject this role altogether; she merely resists claiming it as her intention or goal. What true prophet, after all, desires to be a prophet? Isn't resistance to the title necessary to deserving it?
Taken as a prophetic text, "In the Mecca" requires a double-edged reading that attends to difference as well as similarity, anti-absorption as well as absorption, and criticism as well as affirmation. If white feminist critics are to enter the text in imaginative identification with Black women, for example, we must recognize the Mecca's marginal location not only as a site of shared pain, but also as a "space of refusal" (hooks 150) that resists the class and race privileges we would unwittingly bring with us. As parable, the poem may speak secrets we as "outsiders" are yet unable to hear. It also necessarily remains open and unfinished--anticipating a liberation fulfilled only in the actual response of its hearers/readers "outside" or "beyond" the textual realm.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Technology
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »