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

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Sheila Hassell Hughes

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The Bean Eaters (1960), a less extensively experimental book, seemed to amplify the societal critique voiced in Brooks's earlier volumes. White and Black readers and critics considered it more "social," and while the latter may have welcomed this, the former often found it too much so. One reviewer for Poetry, Brooks recalls, chastised her for a "bitter" tone and "revolutionary" tendency (Tate 43). Brooks acknowledges that in those years "it was whites who were reading and listening to us, salving their consciences--our accusations didn't hurt too much. But I was repeatedly called bitter" (Report 176). Even the more positive reviews would be cast in a suspicious light a decade later, with the poet's heightened awareness of the power behind white patronage: "They thought I was lovely," she says. "I was a sort of pet" (177).

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So there is this tension in the poet's own appraisal of her early work: On the one hand it was written with a conscious appeal to human goodness and white sympathy, from an integrationist perspective (Report 175); on the other hand, it echoed a pre-conscious identification as, about, and to Blacks (Tate 40). Both the poet's self-positioning and her vision of audience was multiple, inviting variant appropriations and critiques of her work, so that no singular critical evaluation seems to do justice to its rhetorical complexity.

Brooks's fourth major collection of poetry, In the Mecca (1968), is generally considered a transitional work. Indeed, Betsy Erkkila describes the epic title-poem thus: "Begun in the fifties as a novel for juveniles, 'In the Mecca' is a kind of palimpsest that inscribes Brooks's changing and conflicting designs." (7) Erkkila reads the shift as a move "from the female-centered vision of her earlier poems toward the increasingly male-centered vision of her work after 1967" (218). The white feminist critic suggests that Brooks had been moving toward a concept of "female bonding" (219) and "interracial sisterhood" (208) that her identification with Black nationalism short-circuited. While I would question any singular "centering" of Brooks's complexly spatial poetics, there is probably at least some truth to Erkkila's observation. Given that many of the poet's most ardent supporters had, from the first, been Black men--her father, Langston Hughes, and her husband, who sacrificed his own writing career to foster hers (Kent, A Life 53)--it is not surprising that she might have experienced the cultural and social bonds of race as strong lines of identification, and might thus have been resistant to any white feminist efforts to disrupt those ties in the social upheaval of the late 1960s and '70s (Tate 47). (8)

Of course, Black feminist critics like Gloria Hull and Claudia Tare have noted a similar change in gender emphasis, but they have been more sympathetic toward Brooks's goals and strategies. Their main interest is in seeing more of the Bronzeville women in her poetry, rather than in restoring or achieving a feminist-integrationist vision. Not surprisingly, Black male critics represent Brooks's transition--and thus "In the Mecca"--quite differently. Lee and Clark, for examples, both stress the shift from an integrationist to a liberationist or revolutionary vision. To do justice to the interplay of these factors in the construction of place and space of the poem, I do not want to reduce the poem to a simple expression of Brooks's consciousness, or to a single perspective on it, but rather to read it as a shifting space of complex processes, with multiple points of identification.

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

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Sheila Hassell Hughes

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