A Prophet Overheard

"A Juxtapositional Reading of Gwendolyn Brooks's "In the Mecca

Bibliographic Data

ID4546196
AuthorsSheila Hassell Hughes (corresponding author)
Year2004
Volume38
Issue2
Pages257
Publication date2004-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrican American Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1062-4783 • E-ISSN: 1945-6182
PublisherPenn State Press (Project Muse) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1512289
OpenAlexW28346697
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited4

As Gwendolyn Brooks's last collection of poetry to be published by a mainstream press (Harper, 1968), and the first to come out of her conversion to the Black Arts Movement, the marks the end of one age for the poet, and the beginning of another. Situated in the cramped confines of a slum tenement on Chicago's South Side, the title poem is local--even narrow--in focus. But the work continues to speak beyond both its particular subject and its point of articulation; indeed, is in part because In the Mecca is such an intense reportage (31) that also functions as a prophecy of time / crack[ing] into furious flower (The Second Sermon on the Warpland, 54). Much of the critical debate surrounding Brooks's work has focused on the tension between the particular and the universal, the localized and the transcendent. White critics (feminist and otherwise) have tended to fault her later work, especially, for too narrow a focus and affiliation. work is not deemed to offer non-Black readers an enticing--or, in Charles Bernstein's terms, absorptive--experience. Brooks's attention to the particulars of Black life, would seem, renders her poetry less accessible to whites and therefore falls short of a universal appeal and a transcendent value. (1) A number of Black (mostly male) critics, in contrast, heralded Brooks's political shift of the late 1960s as a necessary turn both inward, to her own community, and outward, beyond the confines of the feminine psyche explored in her earlier epic The Anniad. These critics valued the strong sense of place and position in Brooks's work and saw no merit in striving to appeal to a broader--i.e., white--readership. They charged her earlier poetry, in fact, with too pleading a tone and with a high aestheticism that actually excluded most Black readers. Universal and transcendent were understandably read as code-words for white appeal. After all, both terms assume a certain relationship to place and space--a geographic, economic, and/or psychic mobility--at odds with the experience of Blacks living in cramped kitchenettes in Jim-Crow Chicago. Despite what either these latter critics or the 1950 Pulitzer Prize might suggest, however, Brooks never wrote directly or explicitly for a white audience. She was always concerned to represent, to speak to, and to sanctify Black life as she knew it--most especially in the Bronzeville section of Chicago. But clearly, when she adopted the Black Arts credo that true Black writers speak as blacks, about blacks, and to blacks (Report 195), she heightened awareness of her social location and political position, rhetorically situating herself and her readers in a new way. Part of what I, as a white feminist critic, want to argue here is that this newly visible political alignment reduces neither the aesthetic merit of Brooks's later poetry nor its social value beyond the Black community. Indeed, the poet's word remains richly multivalent, in part because she recognizes that the social location from which she speaks is as complex and shifting as is precise. Although her other rhetoric might seem to favor one line of identification over another (racial rather than gender solidarity, for instance), her poetic practice exemplifies an indissoluble tension and multiplicity. her poetry, she simultaneously speaks from the margins and centers of both Black culture and the dominant white society, unsettling the opposition between various kinds of insiders and outsiders in the process. She exhibits, fact, the very kind of both/and conceptual orientation that Patricia Hill Collins identifies as essential to Black feminist thought. Black women have developed this mode of consciousness, Collins argues, to negotiate [the] contradictions inherent in being simultaneously a member of a group and yet standing apart from it (207). contrast to standard Western either/or dichotomous thinking--an approach that relies on binary oppositions, which inevitably revert to hierarchies--Black feminist thought examines a matrix of domination

Art · Linguistics · Literature · Reading (process · Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism

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