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

(9.) Borrowing from psychoanalytic and semiotic theories, I take "place" to refer to one's location, situatedness, or the position from which one perceives and speaks to others. One's place, in this sense, determines and is determined by a relation to others that is often oppositional. In relation to place, "space" signals something mere fluid. Space implies freedom of movement, or expansiveness. If place is the point, space is the continuum. In this schema, place signals the particular and immanent, and space the universal and transcendent. The former is not simply contained within the latter, however, for the border is permeable and inside and outside can shift. Space can also imply something that is created in, or hollowed out of, some place or mass.

(10.) D. Harvey, The Conditions of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), summarized in Massey 139-40.

(11.) hooks remembers the historical role of African American women in creating "homeplaces"--sites of resistance and healing--for family and community, hooks stresses her appreciation of this as a chosen, rather than essential, role. Barbara Smith discusses her choice of a title in the introduction to Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. "Home girls" refers to girls from "the neighborhood" (a term that encompasses and connects multiple literal black neighborhoods in the U.S.), but it also articulates the need for a home, a "place to be ourselves," to be at home with each other and escape the role of the social outsider. Smith outlines a number of ways that "home" is complicated for black women: the ambivalent role of women in the family, and also the broader black community, in transmitting "fear and shame ... as well as hope" (xxii); the problem of conformity within a group pressed to define itself in opposition to oppression (xxxix); the "psychic violence" of incorporating that oppression as self-hatred; and the need for a concept of the "simultaneity of oppression" for "coalition building" across different social locations.

(12.) I borrow these terms from Diana Fuss's introduction to Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, in which she maps the space of "the closet."

(13.) When Hull presses Brooks about the absence of heroic female figures in her poetry from the sixties and seventies, Brooks explains, "These people who influenced me so much in the late sixties tended to be men.... The women--what can I say about them? ... Well what were the women doing ... aside from amening what the others did.... I didn't say 'Okay, women are supposed to take the back seat and I won't write about them.' ... there was this tendency on the part of the women--announced too--to lift the men up, to heroize them" (Hull and Gallagher 36-37).

(14.) Two tribute anthologies have been published: To Gwen With Love, ed. Brown, et al. (1971); and Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks, ed. Madhubuti (1987).