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

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Sheila Hassell Hughes

In a review for Poetry, William Stafford alternatingly situates Brooks as a definitive insider and as marginal.

"Sometimes," he claims, "the poems are confusingly local in reference." It would thus seem that being a nonwhite racial "insider" can be disorienting: It distracts the poet from the bearings of the surrounding white culture, and confuses her (white) readers with an obscure locality. On the other hand, Stafford also sets In the Mecca within the context of Brooks's earlier publications by defining these as "books that look in." Gwendolyn Brooks is a "spokesman" for her race, he explains, and she" 'looks in' to a group more avowedly than any of the earlier writers" (Stafford 26). This seems to imply that Brooks somehow stands outside or on the margin of her people, looking in at them, gaining "insight" (26) and then speaking out for them. This rhetoric relies on a geographic schema of containment that puts the poet in her place (as a Negro) even as it accords her some token of privilege and exceptional power of transcendence (as a poet). She is like other Blacks by virtue of her race, and different by virtue of her relation to a white tradition and audience. Stafford's model cannot account for diversity within the racialized "Other." In a similar vein, Norris Clark argues that Brooks exhibits her "dual heritage" as an African American and that, while her unique expression of a Black aesthetic marks her among "black cultural nationalists," she ought not to worry about reaching a large, popular Black audience: "As a spokesperson for the black masses, Brooks is literally different from those for whom she writes; consequently she is the 'seer and sayer,' the Emersonian poet, who articulates the needs, ideas, aspirations of others" (94-95). In this framework, the Black poet speaks for Blacks, but not necessarily to them. Indeed, this description of her people suggests a singularly inarticulate, even illiterate, "mass" trapped inside the limits of their race.

Alternatively, of course, to "look in" from the inside is also to look within the self, to glimpse one's psychic interior with "insight." Indeed, when claiming the universality of Brooks's poetry, her early reviewers tend to argue from the uniqueness of the individual creative mind. The poet speaks as, about, and to all of humanity precisely because she speaks as an utterly free individual. If her race were to serve as more than accident, it would necessarily become a limiting factor, determining her vision and voice as less than transcendent. Blackness, then, would be both an interior space discrete and closed off from the white "universe" and a bodily exterior cloaking a racially unmarked (i.e., white) mind. Brooks's social location might give her a way in to the world she depicts, but her poetic imagination must provide a way out.

Writing four decades later, Sisi Donald Mosby's reflections on the time offer an interesting inversion of this segregated and dualistic spatialization:

   Upon deciding I was a writer I
   devoured the artsy literary review
   magazines. There was very little in
   them about black writers. After reading
   A Street in Bronzeville I understood
   the sense of apartness I felt when I
   read the reviews. I realized I was an
   outsider peeping through the window.

   In A Street in Bronzeville everything
   was in sharp focus. It was about me. I
   lived there, I walked those streets, and
   I knew the people.... It was like being
   born again! (in Madhubuti 23)