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

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Sheila Hassell Hughes

So it was also on the South Side of Chicago, in a time of financial crisis but growing racial awareness and solidarity for Brooks, that she received her first formal training as a poet. In 1941, Inez Cunningham--editor of Poetry Magazine and a bold liberal for her day (Report 174)--crossed town from the posh white neighborhood known as the "Gold Coast" to offer a writing workshop in the Negro district of "Bronzeville." The intense scrutiny Brooks encountered in the workshop was the first truly critical response she had received, and it served to spark her poetic impulse. This led to a series of writing prizes and publications in literary magazines, and eventually to a book contract. The enthusiastic response from family, friends, and neighbors was to "thank heaven and Harper's" (72). There was no sense from Brooks's Black supporters that she should be anything but thrilled with her prestigious white publisher. This was the late 1940s, after all, and she was seen as paving new inroads for Black writers--Black women writers especially (Erkkila 192).

The critical response to her first collection of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), was quite positive. The poetry was populist in theme, yet modernist in technique (Gary Smith 129). Black readers appreciated seeing in print the particular urban rhythms and characters they knew so well, while the larger audience of whites enjoyed the opportunity to see into this other world--and both recognized the power of her imagistic verse and balladry. The volume was hailed by the dominant white press as written by an evidently "solidly Chicago person," which nonetheless "would be superb ... in any year by any person of any color" (Engle 3). It was considered fresh "city-folk poetry" ("Review" 5).

There were also patronism and warning discernible in the tone of such reviews, however, as in all those of her early work. Inevitably, it was both notable and negligible that Brooks was a "Negro poet," and while she was widely praised for having "universal" appeal, the category was most often a white construction. She was commended for her strongly focused, or localized, powers of observation, for her direct treatment of things, yet chastised when this focus or location was too far beyond the dominant field of view. A review of Annie Allen (1949), which praises its "Cellini-like lyrics," for example, worries that, when the poetic talent "devotes itself to setting forth an experience even more special and particularized than the usual poetic experience, then it puts itself under unnecessary strain." When the poem deals with colorist discrimination against dark women within the Black community, for example, the critic asks, "Who but another negro can get the intimate feeling, the racially particular ... the oblique bitterness ...?" (Redding 6-7). The poet was expected to "stand in" as a singular representative of her people and mediator to white readers. Exploring differences and exposing divisions within the Black community could only frustrate white expectations of a monolithic racial identity and experience. While racial solidarity is certainly one of the poet's goals from the first; she always both celebrates diversity and recognizes the ways internalized oppression can work to make "outsiders within."