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

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).

Unlike the typical laureate, Brooks's urban vision has always had a certain "bleakness" (Gary Smith 129), and the spaces of her city have most often appeared in her poetry as constraining to Black inhabitants. Indeed, her work has sometimes been considered "naturalistic" for its emphasis on "entrapment and the desire to escape" (130-31). Brooks was certainly sympathetic toward this trait in Richard Wright's fiction, and argued for the necessity of a narrow focus (Report 160). She accepts the view that "some people when oppressed, when walled in, when unable to reach The Enemy, will turn upon themselves" and destroy the seeds of their own future (74). While the poet herself exposes racism and poverty as very real constraints, she refuses to portray the trap as inevitable or ultimate, and so her work is not strictly naturalistic. But escape by individual transcendence (moral, spiritual, or otherwise) is not the alternative outcome Brooks is interested in exploring, either. Rather, from her earliest work, she issues a hopeful call for a communal effort toward resistance and survival--to "civilize a space" for future growth. (4)

Certainly one factor in this cultural optimism is Brooks's sense of her place in and indebtedness to a generally inclusive and nurturing community. Of Hughes, who was a special inspiration to Brooks, she observes, "Mightily did he use the street." Interestingly, she describes his encouragement in spatial terms: "Langston Hughes ... considered literature not his private inch, but great acreage. The plantings of others he not only welcomed but busily enriched.... The young manuscript-bearing applicant never felt himself an intruder ..." (Report 71). Brooks thus admires how Hughes makes of the urban street a vast and peopled garden, and, in her roles as writer, mentor, and teacher, she emulates this throughout her life. Fostering several generations of new Black writers is one of the great accomplishments of her career.