Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen

Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison

The Black Arts movement strongly influenced Brooks s thinking and rhetoric about her work, even if it left ambiguous marks on her work itself. After her legendary radicalixation at the Fisk Writers Conference of 1967 and her involvement in the Black Arts movement, Brooks expressed a wish to speak to, for, and about black readers and thereby to forge an audience called to awareness of racial identity and politics. Her statements about her intended audience drew their focus from black cultural nationalism and have influenced numerous writers after her. Within the Black Arts movement, many spokespeopleAmiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Ron Karenga-called for a recognizably "black" voice to hail and forge a newly positioned, newly politicized black audience for art. As Karenga formulated it, black art must be unifying, collective, speaking for, about, and to the people: "Any art that does not discuss and contribute to the revolution is invalid." " Gwendolyn Brooks heard the call to "the New Black, the Tall-Walker" at Fisk, and, inspired by the new aesthetic, left Harper & Row in 1968 for Dudley Randall's Broadside Press, founded in Detroit in 1965. Thereafter, she directed her work more specifically toward black readers: "I want to write poems that will be non-compromising . . . [and] meaningful to ... Black people. . .. True black writers speak as blacks about blacks to blacks.... The new Black is understood by no white, not the wise, the Schooled, the Kind White."19 Brooks referred to her poetry of the forties and fifties as "high poetincense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable." After Fisk, she viewed her work as "Independent fire!" In her autobiography, she announced her aim "to write poems that will somehow successfully 'call' all black people: black people in taverns, black people in alleys, black people in gutters, schools, offices, factories, prisons, the consulate."20

The notion of "calling" to an audience, which will unify itself politically and spiritually as it hears, is useful for conceiving of the generational shift from Brookss era to the present. In this call, African American artists hoped to interpellate audiences into the ideology of Black Power. The call that Brooks heard enabled her to recognize her "essential African" heritage, and recognizing that heritage gave her a new, deeper sense of "black fellow feeling."21 She felt immediately at home in her new self-conception, perhaps because the new self was comforting in its coherence, collectivity, and currency. However, followers of the Black Aesthetic became subject to certain political goals and intentions. After her "conversion," some critics judged Brooks s art according to its fulfillment of revolutionary ends, ends that might have encouraged her to unify her hitherto ventriloquial voice and project it as one steady chord, or to subordinate her previous focus on gender to one on race.

In Brooks's earlier work, her audiences are not specific when she addresses them directly at all. Most of her poems written before 1967 tell compressed narratives of others' lives in third person: "Sadie and Maud," "Hattie Scott," "DeWitt Williams," "Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith," "Annie Alien," "Bronzeville Mother," "Lovers of the Poor," and others. Many of her poems feature personas that narrate their own stories in first person: "Gay Chaps at the Bar," "Negro Hero," "The Mother," "Beverly Hills, Chicago." Very few poems speak in first person to a "you" (with the exceptions of "The Independent Man," "Love Note I and II," "First Fight. Then Fiddle," and "To Be in Love"), and of those, few seem to speak as Brooks in first person to a "you," with the exception of "In Honor of My Father" or perhaps part of "The Mother." Some critics claim that the overall effect of these many voices, many of them not Brooks's personal voice, is a degree of emotional distance.22