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

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Sheila Hassell Hughes

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.

Perhaps because the boundaries of any community are somewhat permeable, Brooks both finds and makes a place for herself at the center of Black cultural life, even as she struggles with being a misfit and outsider at times. Her place in American letters, by contrast, changed dramatically with the publication of Annie Allen (1949), which seemed to cement her "universal" status with the Pulitzer Prize. This collection showed the same focus on Bronzevillean life as her previous book, with even more attention given to the lives of girls and women. It includes, notably, "The Anniad," a mock epic about a girl's coming of age. It also contains poems with a wry critique of white racist indifference, voyeurism, and charity. Its form evinces a more extreme high modernism, however, which drew both appreciation and suspicion from white reviewers and Black readers alike. While those like Redding feared seeing her formal talents "dribble away in the obscure and too oblique" (7), most members of her Black audience may well have been dismayed for opposite reasons, finding the vision of Black life eclipsed by a high formality. Both reactions suggest a dichotomy between content and form (a Black inside and a white outside) that would become more intense during the Black Arts Movement.