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.”