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

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Sheila Hassell Hughes

In this schema, by contrast, the white literary machine and the dominant culture it represents are an edifice into which Black writers and citizens, as outsiders, can only peer. Although Bronzeville addresses Black life in "kitchenettes" and other enclosed spaces, poems such as "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith" and the title-poem of the collection itself also locate Black life in the street. Implied is the sense that this world not only borders, but also surrounds and impinges upon, the privileged containment of white life. What Brooks's book does for Mosby is focus his gaze on the exterior space he inhabits--the streets he walks, the other outsiders he knows there--and transform that exterior into a privileged site of self-knowledge and a different kind of "insight." And what his response to this call reveals is that the poet is not merely a spokesperson addressing whites on his behalf, but that she is in an important way speaking to him, to Blacks.

Brooks's relationship to the street and its Black occupants changes, of course, over the course of her career. Initially, her complicated status as insider/outsider to the Black community was shaped by her youthful experience in Chicago's "Black Belt." She was, in her own terms, a "DARK" girl (Report 57) and felt colorist discrimination from other Blacks. She explains that she fell easily into no group, fit nowhere. Her "welcoming, enveloping" (39) home and the writing retreat it provided compensated for the cold reception she sometimes received in her community, but it alone could not alleviate the misfit's sense of restriction. Her autobiography begins with the following revelation, phrased in significantly spatial terms: "When I was a child, it did not occur to me, even once, that the black in which I was encased (I called it brown in those days) would be considered one day, beautiful" (37). Coupled with the protective embrace of her strongly religious mother, this sense of alienation--figured as a kind of bodily enclosure-must have intensified her natural inclination toward isolation.

So while she drew her material from the larger world of Bronzeville--"I wrote about what I saw and heard in the street," she claims (Report 133)--she often did so from a safe window above it. And while poems such as "a song in the front yard" express a secret desire to explore "down the alley, / To where the charity children play" (Selected Poems 6), the poet clearly always relished privacy for writing. From a young age Brooks is both inside and outside the world she portrays, writing "above" it in a literal sense but also both caught and embedded in it. What privileges she has enjoyed--a loving home, an education, extraordinary mentors--remove her from the typical Bronzeville experience even as they enable her to see it with a poetic eye. But Brooks never really "transcends" that space as so many of her white critics suggest, if only because it remains her primary site of identification. It is not until later in her career, however, when she makes that identification more overtly political, that she starts reading and writing poetry with young gang members and earns what Mari Evans has called her "PhD in the street" (84).