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

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Sheila Hassell Hughes

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.

Analyzing the poem in spatial terms might seem to undermine my concern with social processes and political movement. Indeed, the modern Western philosophical trend has been to oppose both place and space to time. (9) Geographer Doreen Massey outlines this dominant schema in Space, Place, and Gender, explaining that the spatial would be marked by stasis, by the absence of time, and therefore by the impossibility of movement or change. In Foucauldian terms, space signifies "the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile" (149). Place and space, in this framework, are mutually opposed to history and progress, so any local claims, any political action based on a sense of place could only be variations on "reactionary nationalisms." Clearly, this implies a judgment of "the politics of location" as anti-progressive and a historical. (10)