Gwendolyn Brooks, In the Mecca (1968)

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)
Born in Topeka in 1917 but a Chicagoean since early childhood -- has said that "it frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a 'Negro' fraction," non-white instead of black of African, a white-designated Other.

Living in the city (Chicago) gave Brooks much more to write about, a “multiplicity” than if she were writing anywhere else

“I lived in a small second-floor apartment at the corner, and I could look first on one side then the other. There was my material.”

Her first book of poetry was A Street in Bronzeville (1945), after strong show of support by Richard Wright

In 1967 she attended a writer’s conference at Fisk University where, she said she “rediscovered” her blackness. This rediscovery is reflected in her work In the Mecca

Citizen-poet, mixing the radical with the conventional. Spokesperson for Black Activism and African separatism

Uses urban scenes and lower middle class characters in her poetry

Social injustices of racism and poverty dictate choices of scene and character. Color and the color line preoccupy her characters' lives, whether heterosexual relations, relations of mothers to children, or racial relations themselves are at stake.

Use men as subjects and objects, but reserve the roles of wise, vital, or resilient knower for women.

Relationship of private to public, inside to outside, closure to openness.

GB differs a bit from this: a black midwesterner a generation removed from the modernists, committed to urban life differently than the cosmopolitan Moore and HD / Both Brooks and Doolittle are interested in relations of power: who controls, who benefits, and who gets hurt

A poetics of enclosure

Dickinson and imagism affects Brooks, although to a lesser degree

Brooks associates the lyric’s potential confinements with domesticity and maternity for broader cultural reasons; enclosure in style and image also mark the effects of race and class on her speakers and characters

Earlier poems are in fixed forms; even her free verse displays an intense formal consciousness – stylistic closure of content

Brooks concentrates on urban constrictions, depicting worlds narrowed by race, class, and sex. She abandons the lyric as a framework in later verse, although In the Mecca includes some fragments of received forms and conjures the architectural enclosure of the Mecca building.

Brooks may advocate accessibility, but the radical ambiguity of her directives suggest, if not Dickinsonian reticence, at least a commitment to indirection.

'''Brooks depends on a specific strategy as she fuses the privacy of the post-Romantic lyric with public aims and contexts: apostrophe. This quintessentially lyric device, ironically, grants her a powerful public authority to advice, which she construes alternately as maternal and ministerial. '''

The question of audience vitally concerns her

Brooks repeatedly writes as a mother

In “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” Barbara Johnson begins discussing Brokos in relation to the figure of apostrophe, which she defines as “the direct address of an absent, dead, or inanimate being by a first person speaker,” specifically in terms of earlier famous poems

In the narrative usually told by anthology headnotes, Brooks moved from poetry in a mix traditional forms (european/african american) to work in open forms, from an integrationist philosophy to black nationalism, from lyrics written fr private reading to an oral orientation, drastically reconceiving her audience and intentions.

“call all black people: black people in taverns, black people in alleys, black people in gutters, schools, offices, factories, prisons, the consulate….”

Her writing might unify a black community

extending adaptation, though, not totally new, newish

extending its dependence on apostrophe

After 1971 only published with black presses

positive shelter, negative confinement

//A Street in Bronzeville

show the influence of a range of modernist writers

much of the poetry of the early twentieth century turns away from pastoral scenes to city geography, reflecting population shifts and the city’s links with the extremes of modernity in terms of technology, industry, and cultural life.

Borrows simultaneously from Anglo-American high modernism and the Harlem Renaissance in her attempts to represent urban life.

“kitchenette building” echoes “The Love Song of J” with its comic rhyme, fragments of dialogue, and antipoetically polysyllabic diction; her experiments with form evoke modernist patterns  either pointing to or disrupting

Also experiments with AA forms and dialects, as in “Queen of the Blues” and “at the hairdresser’s” like Langston Hughes, Brooks attempts to represent, and even speak for, a range of orginary characters in ordinary urban settings

ballad’s dual tradition—AA and English/Scitth

Brooks read a lot of Dickinson

“Riders to the Blood-Red Wrath”: “I / have sewn my guns inside my burning lips”

Nevertheless, B articulates more directly in her poetry than D, Moore, or HD her political and social contexts: her race, class, and time period mean that those circumstances and contexts differ from those of any of the poets I have discussed. Brook’s poetry values enclosure imagery in hard times, as a barely adequate container for rage and chaos, or dreams that must be put aside

Occasionally her speakers welcome a bit of privacy afforded by an alley, or clothing can function as armor in a hostile world

Elsewhere, confinement remains a negative symptom of poverty and sordidness that B’s speakers, like Dickinson’s, fantasize about escaping

It can function like a gentle trap, like the responsibility a parent feels to her child, but restricts nonetheless

This is one of the central differences between Brooks and HD and Moore: B does create a narrative of enclosure and escape, played out both formally and thematically in her writing

In the Mecca
Alfred / Mrs. Sallie. / St. Julia / Melodie Mary / Cap / Casey / Pepita

Gwendolyn Brooks -- writing in the voice of Emmett Till / a Bronxville mother burns bacon / she takes on the voice of the white woman, her husband lynched Emmett Till

marginalized in a difference sense, reviled

taking on more marginalized, as someone privileged

the speaker of Gwendolyn Brooks's long poem, "In the Mecca," anticipates a specifically urban feminist poetics by narrating the poem from the perspective of a flaneuse.

signs of flanerie: detached observation, anonymous movement through crowd, “unwilling detection of crime”

but the experimental syllabic rhythms and diction identify the speaker with black urban culture

urban mythopoesis by constructing a poetic urban map which posits the Mecca building as an alternate modernist city center

1968 // Succeeding The Bean Eaters, expresses B’s increasing distance from the Anglo-American lyric as a reference point. In it, B continues to move in the move “social” direction she pursues in The Bean Eaters.

She leaves behind, or at least reframes, her work in sonnets and ballads, and certain changes in her voice indicate her reach for a new audience and reconception of what her writing can do

Title poem, longest poem

“After Mecca” a set of lyrics exploring, among other subjects, violence and Chicago gang life, including most famously “Boy Breaking Glass” and “The Blackstone Rangers”

“Sermons on the Warpland” – not her first experiments with a ministerial voice, but her most important

While imagery of enclosure persists through “In the Mecca,” B manipulates it to imply a new openness in her style and form

The actual Mecca, the primary enclosure of this volume, was built in Chicago’s South side in 1891 and was intended to be luxurious, for wealthy

but the wealthy began to move Northward, and the building became an overcrowded tenement for thousands of disposessed blacks

It was razed in 1952, so B’s story in “In the Mecca” of Mrs. Sallie Smith looking for her lost daughter is necessarily retrospective

Her subject remains the crampedness of Bronzeville, although the lyric vignettes of her first book have been fused into one poem of very large scope, and she describes poverty more graphically.

Also, B writes more judgementally, articulating a sometimes sympathetic, sometimes critical attitude toward this beehive of a world

B creates an interactive storyteller’s voice

Her opening resembles “once upon a time” only more biblical and sermonic

“Now the way of the Mecca was on this wise”

She builds up suspense so that her readers participate in Mrs Sallie’s anxiety and invites amusement and anger as she guides us through the Mecca, depicting its human diversity “Sit where the light corrupts your face” as if '''wanting to see her audience and its reactions; instead of sheltering off-stage in the dark, readers are participants, sharing the spotlight She names her readers, or some of them, female''', with her plea “kinswomen!/kinswomen!”

She suffuses the poem with authorial presence, inserts the speaker’s feelings just as she invokes the readers’, advises and questions the poem’s own characters

By the end of the poem, the storyteller truly speaks in apostrophe, addressing the child the mother has been unable to protect

Pulls in all the themes and types from earlier work, even some of the forms, encloses them in this one extended poem about a monstrously large building, itself an enclosure around a courtyard, and thus seems to cap the first project of Brook’s career, to write Bronzeville.

The Mecca building, a part of Bronzeville, stands in synexdochally for the entirety. Brooks creates a written work that feels oral, that finds as many ways as possible to include the reader in its community.

“In the Mecca” also bears resemblance to Whitman’s “Song of My Self” and attempts a similar scope: the Mecca building serves as a cross-section of a black nation

the size, attempt to include all of black humanity, biblical echoes, swinging line, particularly “Leisure” all point to Whitman as a precursor for this new voice

B’s outward reach to animate and connect with her audience resembles also a move W makes frequently and sensually, even across time, as in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

Amiri Baraka, one of the people to whom this poem is dedicated, brought Whitman into the Black Arts movement through his association with the beats, and W’s relatively open poetic represents a natural choice for anyone resisting academic or formal strains in poetry

For all its continuities with the first three books and with a white American tradition, bears the marks of Brook’s professed change of heart and of the new Black Arts movement

This poem expresses anger more forthrightly and more graphically depicts its characters’ sexuality and the violence of the world: B employs tropes of presence and judgement to convey openness, not closure, in style and content

alludes to formal enclosures only when…marks miscegenation – love that cannot be sustained

Offers examples of how AA poetry might respond to social crisis, reflecting the public role Brooks increasingly intends for her poetry.

B critiques “monochromatic” race poetry through the character of 'Alfred, who first worships white writers like Shakespeare and Joyce and then writes poetry celebrating the abstraction of the “Black Woman” while unconcerned about the violent face of the real Pepita—Alfred seems redeemed, perhaps ready to write a new poetry'

'More importantly, Mecca ends with a fragment of Pepita’s own poetry, yet unschooled that “black is not beloved” predicated on a sensual joy in the world: “I Touch’ she said once – petals of a rose / a silky feeling through me goes”'

'The last lines of the poem describes Pepita’s “chopped chirpings oddly rising” a poetry cut short by her violent death. '

If poets apostrophize their muses, B’s muse is a dead black girl, for whom race and gender are not prisons, who has the power to hold generously wide “the A and P’s fly-open door. The poet-mother, or, later, poet-preacher, finds inspiration in her children and speaks to advise or energize them as a sonneteer writes to seduce his lady. This muse becomes unreachable love object but alos part of B herself, the innocent daughter who gets left behind in earlier poems

Perhaps, also, this poem’s resonances with the Myth of Demeter and Persephone mitigate her death; B’s poetry both sacrifices and resurrects Pepita. In any case, B characterizes Pepita as a muse of openness. Suggestively, though, while this idea mobilizes B’s long poem, its paradoxically diminuitive embodiment inspires chiefly through absence.

Quotes:
“now the way of the Mecca was on this wise”

“Sit where the light corrupts your face.”

“inside the wide-flung door of 215”

“isn’t our Lord the greatest to the brim?”

“Ida died in self-defense. /(Kinswomen!/ Kinswomen!)/Ida died alone.”