Brooks, Gwendolyn: General Commentary

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GWENDOLYN BROOKS: GENERAL COMMENTARY

HORTENSE J. SPILLERS (ESSAY DATE SPRING 1985)

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MULLANEY COMMENTS ON BROOKS'S RELATIONSHIP TO FEMINISM

Today's renewed interest in the writing of black women, Brooks feels, has brought attention once again to her novel, Maud Martha, but she does not believe that her works have been sought out as primarily "women's writing." She has never seen her woman's vision as a separate one. As she says, "I've never belonged to that Ms. group of black, or white, women writers." Yet, although Brooks may not write with feminist intent, her female voices speak with a conviction that enables them to rise above the rigid confines of what is often deemed, even in the black experience, a woman's place. Her women are assertive, conscious people who battle "isms" in ways that are consistent with their experience. Like Brooks herself, they defy subordination and reconstruct their own aesthetic in an often hostile, ugly world.

Mullaney, Janet Palmer. An excerpt from "Gwendolyn Brooks." In her Truthtellers of the Times: Interviews with Contemporary Women Poets. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

ANNIE PERKINS (ESSAY DATE 2001)

SOURCE: Perkins, Annie. "The Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks (1970s-1980s)." In Women Making Art: Women in the Visual, Literary, and Performing Arts since 1960, edited by Deborah Johnson and Wendy Oliver, pp. 43-63. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2001.

In the following essay, Perkins offers an in-depth analysis of Brooks's life and works.

Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917) was born in Topeka, Kansas, and was reared in Chicago, her lifelong home. With the support and nurture of her parents, Brooks began writing poetry at age seven. She was first published at age thirteen, and by the time of her graduation from Englewood High School, had published seventy-five poems in the Chicago Defender.

In 1936, Brooks graduated from Wilson Junior College. In 1939, she married and settled happily into domesticity with her husband, Henry Lowington Blakely II, and later Henry III, their baby son. During this period, Brooks continued to write, first winning the 1943 Midwestern Writers' Conference Award and then publishing her first volume,A Street in Bronzeville (1945). Her second volume,Annie Allen (1949), earned the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the first to be awarded to a Black writer. A year later, Brooks's daughter, Nora, was born.

Balancing home, family, and writing, Brooks published within a decadeMaud Martha (1953), a novel;Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956), a book of children's poetry; andThe Bean Eaters (1960). In 1968, she received a National Book Award nomination forIn the Mecca, written in the aftermath of the Martin Luther King assassination.

In honor of her distinguished body of work, Brooks has received many awards, including the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the National Book Awards Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Sewanee Review 's Aiken-Taylor Award, and the National Medal of Arts from the President of the United States.

From 1985 to 1986, Brooks served as the twenty-ninth (and final) Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. In 1988, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. More recently, in 1994, she was a Jefferson Lecturer. Brooks holds seventy honorary doctorates and has taught at several institutions.

A poetry promoter, Brooks has sponsored poetry prizes throughout the country and has mentored and influenced scores of writers. Two tributes, To Gwen with Love (1971) and Say that the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks (1987), attest to the devotion and admiration she has inspired among younger writers. Her reminiscences and observations appear in two autobiographies,Report from Part One (1972) andReport from Part Two (1996). Among her recent poetry isChildren Coming Home (1991).

Gwendolyn Brooks—Pulitzer Prize winner, Illinois Poet Laureate, and poetry ambassador—has earned popular and critical acclaim for a body of work that spans more than five decades. Rich in ideas, complex in form, and centered in the Black experience, Brooks's poetry celebrates human aspiration and the push for empowerment nourished and sustained by respect for self, community and heritage. Through striking poetical sketches, Brooks offers an inspiriting and expansive vision which affirms the necessity for Black unity. However, readers of any race, class, gender, or nationality can identify with her gallery of women, men and children who reflect attitudes and aspirations common to humankind, and who experience life's ordinary—and extraordinary—triumphs and trials.

Critic Dan Jaffe maintains that "the purpose of art is always to communicate to the uninitiated, to make contact across seemingly insurmountable barriers" (54-55). Indeed, Brooks's family pictures do speak across boundaries, for as James N. Johnson observes, "The excellence of Gwendolyn Brooks is that she is able to tell it like it is while speaking to the basic humanness in us" (48). That she sparks this human connection is evident in her sustained popularity among diverse audiences. Brooks enjoys enthusiastic receptions at colleges and universities, at prisons and public schools, at churches and community festivals, at conferences and conventions, wherever she travels—reading, lecturing, mentoring, teaching, and always promoting poetry.

During her distinguished career, Brooks has written prose pieces, including a novel, Maud Martha (1953), and a two-volume autobiography—Report from Part One (1972) and Report from Part Two (1996). But her literary reputation rests principally upon some twenty volumes of poetry, beginning with her debut collection, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), and including other volumes such as her 1950 Pulitzer Prize winner, Annie Allen (1949). Much of Brooks's poetry is collected in The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1971), To Disembark (1981), and Blacks (1987).

In her early years, Brooks was primarily an artfor-art's sake poet, who appealed to her largely white audience for equal treatment of Blacks by depicting their lives with dignity and pathos. Like most Black people of that era, Brooks shared the hope that racial equality and equal opportunity could be achieved, but as the civil rights struggles grew more confrontational, her poetry began to reflect the racial tensions of the times. Noting the overly political nature of Brooks's work, a reviewer of The Bean Eaters (1960) posed this rhetorical question: "In times as troubled as ours, what sensitive writer can avoid a certain obsession with contemporary ills that may be temporary? … Of course she writes of Emmett Till, of Little Rock, of Dorie Miller, of a white [woman] disgusted to see her child embrace the Negro maid.…Increasingly, in each of her books, [social poems] have appeared" (Webster 19).

Brooks might have continued writing about social problems had she not attended a writers' conference at Fisk University in Nashville in 1967, where she met a group of Black poets, including Imiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones). This encounter transformed Brooks's perception of her art and her audience. She was amazed by this group of young, self-affirming writers who were declaring in their poetry what James Brown was commanding in his music: "Say it loud: 'I'm Black and I'm proud.'" This talented group—nurtured in the turbulent decade of civil rights struggle and antiwar sentiment; of marches, demonstrations, and assassinations; of political upheaval, social protest and national trauma—had clarified themselves as BLACK and were shouting it from the ghettoes of the inner-city and from the halls of academia. Feeling as if she were "in some inscrutable and uncomfortable wonderland," Brooks experienced an incipient sea change: "I didn't know what to make of what surrounded me, of what hot sureness began almost immediately to invade me. I had never been, before, in the general presence of such insouciance, such live firmness, such confident vigor, such determination to mold or carve something DEFINITE [capitalization hers]" (Report from Part One 85). These young, mostly college-educated Blacks, who combined a Black Power 'Black-is-beautiful' aesthetic with a Black Panther self-help activism, were looking at themselves through their own eyes and celebrating the view. They had rejected totally the integrationist stance of their parents. Presented with this different perspective, Brooks, then in her early fifties, began to reevaluate her own views:

What I saw and heard … was of a new nature to me … I had been asleep. If I had been asleep. If I had been reading even the newspaper intelligently, I too would have seen that [the integration effort] simply was not working, that there was too much against it, that blacks kept exposing themselves to it only to get their faces smacked. The thing to stress was black solidarity and pride in one's brothers and sisters. People didn't instruct me [in this idea] … I just picked it up by osmosis, listening to [the young poets] and watching what they did. I went around with them sometimes and heard them giving readings. Listening to them was wonderful.
(Report from Part One 176)

While "apprenticing" with these young artists, Brooks also became involved in her community at the grassroots level, conducting writing workshops for a youth gang (the Blackstone Rangers) and participating in neighborhood and cultural events. These experiences eventually transformed her conception of her artistic role and of her audience. In 1972, she wrote, "Today I am conscious of the fact that—my people are Black people; it is to them that I appeal for understanding" (Report from Part One 177). She announced that her intention would be

to write poems that would somehow successfully "call"…all black people: black people in taverns, black people in gutters, schools, offices, factories, prisons, the consulate; I wish to reach black people in pulpits, black people in mines, on farms, on thrones; not [italics hers] always to "teach"—I shall wish to entertain, to illumine. My newish voice, which I so admire, but an extending adaptation of today's [Gwendolyn Brooks] voice.
(Report from Part One 183)

The contemporary voice of Gwendolyn Brooks is populist, realistic, and celebratory, often hortatory, but always grounded in and attuned to the conditions and sensibilities in Black people. Blackness is what I know very well," she explains. "I want to talk about it, with definitive illustration, in this time, in this time when hostility between races intensifies and swirls." "I go on believing," Brooks observes, "that [Blacks who have little allegiance to Blackness] will, finally, perceive the impressiveness of our numbers, perceive the quality and legitimacy of our essence, and take sufficient, indicated steps toward definition, clarification, connection" (Report from Part Two 143). Thus, Brooks's post-1967 poetry became a vehicle for declaring and disseminating a new Gospel—the affirmation of Blackness, group solidarity, self-respect, and a sense of cultural heritage among an "entire range of categories: South Africa, South State Street, the little babe just born in the South Bronx" (Melham, Heroism 26).

But in spite of its new impulse, intent, and message, Brooks's poetry remained rooted in the tradition of well-wrought, polished verse. It continued to manifest what Jaffe calls a "dedication to craft, to the business of making" (50). Having studied Black poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen at an early age, Brooks had developed an appreciation for craftsmanship. Furthermore, after completing high school, she had received training in the techniques of modern poets—T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Robert Frost—during classes at the Chicago Southside Community Art Center conducted by Inez Stark Boulton, a wealthy Chicagoan and reader for Poetry Magazine (Melhem 7-9). With excellent training and natural talent, Brooks developed and cultivated a masterful technique that fuses exquisite diction with allusion, ironic contrasts, juxtaposition, repetition, alliteration, and other devices to create poems in which language, form, and idea happily coalesce. Poems selected from Brooks's collected works will enable readers to experience the artistry of a remarkable poet to apprehend the values informing her art, and to revisit issues of race and gender through her eyes.

As a female poet, a wife, and a mother, Brooks has been sensitive to issues affecting women and families throughout her career. As a matter of fact, her first published volume, A Street in Bronzeville, included "The Mother," a monologue exploring the psychological effects of abortion. And although Brooks has not aligned herself with feminist movements to challenge white male patriarchy, she nonetheless shares the aim of achieving social equality and economic parity for women while displaying and celebrating the full range of their capabilities and achievements. As Brooks has stated, "Black women, like all women, certainly want and are entitled to equal pay and 'privileges,'" but, in her view, the issue of female equality is complicated by a "twoness" that Black women feel, relating to race and gender. Therefore, she continues, "Today's black men, increasingly assertive and proud, need their black women beside them, not organizing against them" (Report From Part One 199). Womanist¹ critic Chikweye Okonjo Ogunyemi elaborates upon this view: "The black woman instinctively recoils from mere equality because … she has to aim much higher than that to knit the world's black family together to achieve black, not just female transcendence" (69). Or as scholar Barbara Omolade explains, "Black women have united with black men to struggle for national liberation from white male rule" (253). However, espousing racial unity to achieve liberation does not mean accepting Black male rule, for as Alice Walker avers in this context, "Silent, uncritical loyalty is something you don't usually inflict on your child" (353). Brooks herself speaks plainly on the matter of male domination:

Black women must remember, through all the prattle about walking three or twelve steps behind or ahead of "her" male, that her personhood precedes her femalehood … She is a person in [emphasis hers] the world with wrongs to right, stupidities to outwit, with [emphasis hers] her man when possible, on her own when not. And she is also here to enjoy. She will be here, like any other, once only.
(Report from Part One 213)

One can understand, then, Brooks's subtle critique of male domination and female submission in the poem "Gang Girls" from In the Mecca (1968). In her poetry workshops, Brooks had interacted with the Blackstone Rangers, a male gang, and although her portraits of the group are mostly sympathetic, she does not romanticize the lifestyle and its effects upon young women. In the poem, the narrator describes gang girls as "sweet exotics," suggesting that they are alien to their tough, male-circumscribed neighborhood. Although Mary Ann, a typical gang girl, "sometimes sighs for Cities of blue and jewel / beyond [the] Ranger rim of Cottage Grove," her longings will not be fulfilled because male rivalries curb her mobility. Excursions beyond the neighborhood are dangerous, the poem states; therefore, Mary Ann, a sensitive, imaginative girl, is restricted by male-imposed boundaries to a stifling, unstimulating environment. The narrator aptly describes her as "a rose in a whiskey glass." This image strikingly reveals the disadvantaged position of gang girls in their relationships with gang members. To escape the deadening effects and frustrations of her confinement, Mary Ann turns to the few diversions her neighborhood offers: "bugle-love," "the bleat of not-obese devotion," and "Somebody Terribly Dying, / under the philanthropy of robins."

In a male-controlled Cottage Grove, gang girls acquiesce to their boyfriends' sexual demands. The narrator describes a passionless encounter in which Mary Ann simply responds as if following a script:

… swallow, straight, the spirals of his flask
and assist him at your zipper, pet his lips
and help him clutch you.
Mary, the Shakedancer's child
from the rooming-flat, pants carefully, peers at
her laboring lover …
(In The Mecca   48)

The phrases "pants carefully" and "peers at her laboring lover" illustrate Mary Ann's lack of interest and involvement during this intimate encounter. Much like Langston Hughes's Harlem dancer, the real Mary Ann is not in that place. The shift in the mood from declarative to imperative lends a coercive quality to the "love-making," thereby implying that Mary Ann is not a consenting partner but a sexually exploited servant. Traditional notions of male authority along with peer influence, negative self-images, and nonaffirming family dynamics can condition young women to act against their interests. The narrator warns that the result of female submission will most likely be a blighted future:

Settle for sandwiches! Settle for stocking caps!
For sudden blood, aborted carnival
the props and niceties of non-loneliness—
the rhymes of Leaning.

This poem suggests that thwarted female potential, arising in this instance from a system of male domination and female submission (complicated by race and social class) is antithetical to Brooks's goal of racial unity and solidarity. Mutual respect and trust, the cornerstones of unity, cannot flourish within a climate of oppression. In this climate, females are unlikely to reach "Cities of blue and jewel," and, ultimately, the creative potential of the human family is diminished.

Gang girls like Mary Ann are not likely to blossom into self-respecting women, but in her gallery, Brooks provides models of self-empowered females worthy of emulation. Blacks includes the poem "To Those of My Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals," which praises Black women like Brooks herself, who did not abandon the natural hairstyle once it had become unfashionable. The "natural," or Afro, as it was called in the 1960s, symbolized racial solidarity and Black pride, but because it was worn by outspoken activists like Angela Davis and Rap Brown, it represented to the mainstream a threatening militancy, an unsettling statement of willfulness, self-affirmation, and political radicalism, which many were unprepared to accept. Within this context, Brooks salutes those Afro-wearing women who faced social ostracism and economic disadvantage within and beyond their communities. The speaker begins dramatically, announcing,

Sisters!
I love you.
Because you love you.
Because you are erect.
Because you are also bent.
In season, stern, kind.
Crisp, soft—in season.
(Blacks   459)

The opening words trumpet forth like a musical flourish, with the exclamation point in the first line signaling a stentorian call and indicating excited anticipation. To imitate this effusiveness, Brooks lengthens each line so that the first boasts a single word; the second, three; the third, four. The speaker appears to love her "sisters" because, even in their literal difference or their varying postures, they accept and appreciate themselves. Brooks reinforces their heterogeneity by employing metrical diversity—iambs, spondees, and anapests—and she emphasizes their shared qualities through repetition (Because you; in season) and antithesis (stern, kind; Crisp, soft).

The speaker commends the actions of these self-respecting women:

And you withhold.
And you extend.
And you Step out.
And you go back.
And you extend again.

…

You reach, in season.
You subside, in season.
And All
below the richrough righttime of your hair.
(459)

The lilting regularity of the "And you" lines—mostly iambic diameter except for the final line in iambic trimeter—highlights the common quality of radical pride these women exhibit. Furthermore, the rhythm of the lines suggests the literal and metaphorical acts described in the poem, namely, withholding and extending, stepping out and going back. In addition, the luxuriant alliterative compounds "richrough" and "righttime" mirror the dense texture of the women's natural hair.

Brooks employs a series of negative statements, featuring repetition and rhythm, to convey the speaker's admiration and delight at the "'sisters'" acceptance of Blackness:

You have not bought Blondine.
You have not hailed the hot-comb recently.
You have never worshiped Marilyn Monroe.
You say: Farrah's hair is hers.
You have not wanted to be white.
(460)

Recognizing that Caucasian looks are ethnically incorrect for most Black women (although many women classified as Black because of the "one drop" rule look European), the speaker is pleased that her "sisters" accept what is natural for them. Women's studies scholar Rita Dandridge explains that for Brooks, "having a natural … is emblematic of being true to one's nature" (294). Therefore, she disdains efforts to "wriggle out of the race" (Melham, Heroism 26). It disturbs her that "hordes of Black men and women straighten their hair and bleach their complexions and narrow their noses and spell their eyes light grey or green or cerulean—thereby announcing: What nature afforded is poor, is substandard, is inferior to Caucasian glory" (Report from Part One 127). To the contrary, Brooks asserts in her poem that Black hair is "the rough dark Other music!" is "the Real / the Right. / The natural Respect of Self and Seal!" She assures her "sisters" that their natural hair is a "Celebration in the world!" (460).

The self-affirmation lauded in Brooks's poem originates in the sassy, self-assertive attitude many Black girls begin to display in adolescence. Alice Walker characterizes their "audacious, courageous, and willful behavior" as "womanist" (xi). Scholar Tuzylane Jita Allan observes that this attitude "is a rich, self-affirming psychological resource that facilitates survival advantage in the social pecking order." Indeed, this "womanist audacity," she continues, "becomes in the wider social context an unbidden demolisher of arrogant authority" (10-11). In the seventies and eighties, as Blacks entered the marketplace to assume positions opened as a result the civil rights struggles, the natural hairstyles mentioned earlier were unacceptable in some quarters. Many Black women resisted the dress codes banning natural hairstyles. Until their resistance (coupled with court challenges) changed the workplace culture, many Black women risked reprimand, censure, or even termination because of their womanist determination to be themselves. These Black women, psychologically empowered and sustained by their courage and boldness, demolished the status quo and at the same time, exemplified the authentic Black womanhood that Brooks praises in her poem.

Other poems among Brooks's family pictures depict Black manhood as Brooks has observed it among her family, friends, and national figures. Like other Black female writers, Brooks honors exemplary Black manhood as a corrective to and a shield against the steady assaults the Black male often faces in the wider society. Ogunyemi observes that "the intelligent black woman writer, conscious of black impotence in the context of white patriarchal culture, empowers the black man. She believes in him" (68). Brooks strongly supports the figures she includes in her gallery, beginning with her late brother-in-law, Edgar William Blakely, whom she tenderly praised in his elegy "In Memoriam: Edgar William Blakely," the dedicatory poem in To Disembark. The two-line opening stanza affirms, "A friend is one / to whom you can [italics mine] say too much." The formal elegiac mood, indicated by "to whom," is sustained in the second stanza by the sermonic opening line: "That was the title and the text of Edgar Blakely" (v).

Shifting to colloquial language, Brooks describes Blakely as "our / rich-humored, raw and ready, / righteous and radiant running-buddy." These alliterative phrases, which appeal to the ear, eye, and intellect, are neatly juxtaposed to the more formal line, "responsible to / community and heart," which conveys both the earthiness and virtue of the late Blakely. Colorful folk and slang expressions like "raw and ready" and "running-buddy" combine with the sedate adjectival-phrase construction "responsible to / community and heart" (linked by the alliterated r) to show a vigorous, fun-loving man who had substance, wit, and community spirit. Jaffe says that Brooks "can stir the grits or stroke the rococo" (To Disembark 56). Actually, she is at her best when she blends both—the colloquial and the formal—as she does in this poem. Brooks's choice of the word "heart" where one might expect "family" or "friends" conveys not only the compassion of the deceased but also the warmth of the in-laws' relationship. The elegy closes with a summing up of Blakely's virtues:

The document of his living is
out and plain,
level and direct. "Be sane. Be
neighbor to all the people in the world."
(v)

The word "document" recalls "text and title" in the second stanza just as "neighbor" relates to "friend" in the opening lines. Brooks's effective use of diction and juxtaposition combine with the theme to create a unified impression of an admired and dearly loved brother-in-law and friend.

Another family picture introduces Walter Bradford, whom Brooks scholar D. H. Melhem describes as "a man of solid merits, pragmatic, dedicated, a worker in the social field of the young, specifically the Blackstone Rangers" (Poetry and the Heroic Voice 204). Having worked closely with Bradford on several community projects, Brooks grew to admire and respect him because of his talent, his dedication, and his effectiveness with young people. Speaking in supportive voice of the experienced elder, Brooks advises, encourages, and commends Bradford:

Just As You Think You're "Better Now"
Something Comes To The Door.
It's a Wilderness, Walter.
It's a Whirlpool or Whipper.

THEN you have to revise the messages
and, pushing through roars
of the Last Trombones of seduction,
the deft orchestration,
settle the sick ears to hear and to heed and to hold:
the sick ears a-plenty.

It's Walter-work, Walter.
Not overmuch for
brick-fitter, brick-MAKER, and wave-
outwitter;
whip-stopper.
Not overmuch for a
Tree-planting Man.

Stay.

(33)

First, Brooks speaks of the never-ending challenges facing Bradford and, by extension, others who try to steer young people in constructive directions. Reflecting the activism and energy of Bradford himself, Brooks chooses motion-charged images. Wilderness, Whirlpool, and Whipper—evoking predators, Charybdis, and slavery, respectively—symbolize the new problems that occur "Just As You Think You Are Better Now." Bradford as "brick-fitter, brick-MAKER, wave-/ outwitter" and "whip-stopper"—shrewd master craftsman, maker of men and women—is equal to the task, Brooks asserts. He can handle the delicate and difficult problems of "[settling] sick ears to hear and to heed and to hold." Brooks reinforces this fact through typography. The capital letters of the first stanza indicate the looming threats to progress and stability, while the lower-case letters of the third stanza indicate Brooks's confidence that Bradford, like the biblical David, can slay any Goliaths. Further, by identifying Bradford as a "Tree-planting Man," Brooks calls forth literal and metaphorical associations of Johnny Appleseed, the nineteenth-century American tree planter, along with the unknown composer of these lyrics: "Just like a tree planted by the water, I shall not be moved." Brooks appeals to Bradford, the cultivator of young men and women, not to be moved but to stand steadfast, to "Stay." Scholar William Hansell states that Black heroes have always figured prominently in Brooks's poetry (79). Whether these heroes are friends like Walter Bradford, relatives like Edgar Blakely, or national figures like Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X, Brooks honors those who demonstrate integrity and an unwavering commitment to Black people around the globe. In the section "To the Diaspora" from To Disembark, she includes "Music for Martyrs," a tribute to Steve Biko, the slain South African anti-apartheid activist. Its epigraph declares that Biko was slain "for loving his people." The poem itself contrasts the person's sincere personal grief with orchestrated public memorials. Deeply affected by Biko's martyrdom, the poet mourns:

I feel a regret, Steve Biko.
I am sorry, Steve Biko.
Biko the Emerger laid low.
(42)

Brooks employs repetition, rhyme and sound devices to establish a funereal tone; Biko's name repeated, the assonantal o rhymed, and the I alliterated combine to create a lugubrious chant. The anguished "I feel a regret" and "I am sorry" convey turmoil, indicating perhaps the poet's guilt feelings about not having been active enough against apartheid. Alluding to Biko's unfulfilled potential, the title "Biko the Emerger" invests the slain leader with dignity and stature; the mournful euphemism "laid low" implies that the word "murdered" is too inelegant to refer to one so noble.

A catalogue of meaningless tributes contrasts with the poet's heartfelt sorrow:

Now for the shapely American memorials.
The polished tears.
The timed tempest.
The one-penny poems.
The hollow guitars.
The joke oh jaunty.
The vigorous veal-stuffed voices.
The singings, the white lean lasses with streaming yellow hair.
Now for the organized nothings,
Now for the weep-words.
Now for the rigid recountings
Of your tracts, your triumphs, your tribulations.
(42)

Brooks very effectively conveys the hollowness of the tributes through damning images—"polished tears," "timed tempests," "vigorous veal-stuffed voices," and "organized nothings"—all of which the poet views as sacrilegious. The bitter tone in this section of the poem extends to the conclusion, which identifies Biko's legacy—his "tracts," his "triumphs," and his "tribulations"—and suggests that the "shapely" memorials dishonor the young hero's memory.

Along with the men and women who comprise Brooks's gallery are children, whose varying situations exhort families and communities to commit themselves to the young and vulnerable. Like William Blake's "Infant Joy," the first poem. "A Welcome Song for Laini Nzinga" from To Disembark, celebrates the arrival of new life. Laini, the child of Brooks's spiritual son, poet Haki Madhubuti, and his wife, enters "through the rim of the world" to parents and friends eagerly awaiting her arrival: "We are here!" they exclaim, "To meet you and to mold and to maintain you." The word "we" appears five times in this eight-line lyric to signify the unity of this extended family and the necessity for its crucial supportive role. "With excited eyes we see you," the personae say. This baby, bringing "the sound of new language," ushers in renewal and hope. The poem ends, "We love and we receive you as our own."

Brooks insists that her picture of a stable, joyous, and united Black family can be multiplied by the thousands, yet the media choose to present images of fragmented Black families in crisis. Brooks thinks that the scores of "firm families" among Blacks … must be announced, featured and credited" (Report from Part Two 134). The successful Black family of the newborn Laini serves as a prototype of the nurturing circle of family and friends that produces "durable, effective, and forward youngsters" (Report from Part Two 134). That some children are not born into warm and welcoming families or communities is demonstrated in "The Life of Lincoln West," which Brooks describes as "a poem presenting a small Black boy coming to terms with outdoor and indoor opinions of his identity" (Report from Part Two 129).

The child pictured in this popular poem is unattractive by societal standards of handsomeness. The narrator pronounces this general consensus in the opening lines: "Ugliest little boy / that everyone ever saw. / That is what everyone said." The pronoun "everyone" in the second line rather than "someone" makes the baby's ugliness an indisputable fact, which the details support:

Even to his mother it was apparent—
when the blue aproned nurse came into the
northeast end of the maternity ward
bearing his squeals and plump bottom
looped up in a scant receiving blanket,
bending, to pass the bundle carefully
into the waiting mother-hands—that this
was no cute little ugliness, no sly baby waywardness
that was going to inch away
as would baby fat, baby curl, and
baby spot-rash. The pendulous lip, the
branching ears, the eyes so wide and wild,
the vague unvibrant brown of the skin, and
most disturbing, the great head.
These components of That Look bespoke
the sun fibre. The deep grain.
(22)

The details of Lincoln's appearance unfold slowly: A "blue-aproned nurse came … bearing … bending." She bore "squeals and a plump bottom," "a bundle." Synecdoche and metonymy, in this description, heighten the reader's expectation. Likewise, negation intensifies the reader's curiosity about the unfortunate baby's appearance. There is "no cute little ugliness, no sly baby waywardness / that was going to inch away." Finally, with the actual description of the baby's appearance, the narrator refers to him clinically, as if he is a specimen rather than a human being: "The pendulous lip, the / branching ears, the eyes so wide and wild." This detachment establishes a distance between the reader and the narrative which is erased as the narrator reveals the cold and unfeeling treatment the child eventually faces at home and in the community. Although Lincoln tries desperately to win his parents' affection, "His father could not bear the sight of him," and

his mother high-piled her pretty dyed hair and
put him among her hairpins and sweethearts,
dance slippers, torn paper roses.
He was not less than these,
he was not more.
(23)

Rejected by his father, Lincoln receives neither love nor attention from his mother, a flighty, vapidly sentimental, self-absorbed woman with little capacity for maternal affection. To her, Lincoln is another acquisition—hardly a treasured one. But the narrator suggests that even if he had been attractive, he would have been only an object for display, not a child to be loved and nurtured. As the mother of two children whom she reared with unconditional love and support, Brooks, through the narrator, is understandably critical of this mother. For as she has shown in poem after poem—most notably in the sonnet sequence "Children of the Poor," from A Street in Bronzeville —mothering entails loving, protecting, and training a child. Viewed in this context, Lincoln's mother is not among those Black women who "create and train their flowers." Lincoln, who is a weed in his parents' sight, experiences continual rejection. The narrator says that "even Christmases and Easters were spoiled" because of him:

He would be sitting at the
family feasting table, really
delighting in the displays of mashed potatoes
and the rich golden
fat-crust of the ham or the festive
fowl, when he would look up and find
somebody feeling indignant about him.
(24)

This snapshot of the sumptuous feast, the animated child, and the disapproving parents starkly reveals a central point of the poem: that senses can be stirred but not hearts.

As if parental rejection were not enough, the narrator reports that Lincoln's kindergarten teacher showed "a concern for him composed of one / part sympathy and two parts repulsion." Playmates "turned their handsome backs on him" when better-looking children appeared. Consequently, Lincoln "spent much time looking at himself / in mirrors. What could be done? / But there was no / shrinking his head. There was no / binding his ears." An answer arrives unexpectedly while Lincoln and his mother are at the movies. He overhears a comment about himself from a nearby moviegoer, who is whispering to his companion,

"THERE! That's the kind I've been wanting
to show you! One of the best examples of the specie. Not like
those diluted Negroes you see so much of on
the streets these days, but the real thing.

Black, ugly, and odd. You
can see the savagery. The blunt
blankness. That is the real
thing."
(27-28)

Although the mother is outraged, Lincoln, misinterpreting the insult, discovers a new self-image, and whenever he is hurt by others or lonely, the narrator says, he takes comfort in knowing that he is "the real thing."

Brooks's artful narration and vivid language point out the pain that rejected children experience and the necessity for ego-building experiences. Whereas Lincoln, a lovable, good natured child, finds a positive outlet for his pain, other children have resorted to acts of violence against others and themselves. Pioneering Black studies scholar Arthur P. Davis considers this poem a parable (in Wright 103). If so, Lincoln may represent the Black community, whose family members have subverted the negative definition of Blackness imposed by society—"Black, ugly, and odd"—and transformed it into "quality and legitimacy."

The final poem, "The Boy Died in My Alley" from Beckonings (1975), comments on public and personal indifference to violence among and against children. In the poem, the persona, representing an apathetic community, moves beyond deliberate isolation and indifference to communal responsibility. The opening lines are chilling: "Without my having known. / Policeman said, next morning, / Apparently died alone." The word Apparently emphasizes the tragedy of the anonymous boy's death. The end punctuation after the opening phrase highlights the isolation of the persona from the violence surrounding her. To dramatize the point that individuals, however, are not islands unto themselves, Brooks connects the title of the poem and the opening line to form a single statement: "The Boy Died in My Alley Without my having known." This pairing links proximity and emotional distance, calling attention to the fact that the death occurs near the persona, but she is detached emotionally from it. When a police officer asks if she heard the shot, the persona responds:

Shots I hear and Shots I hear.
I never see the dead,
The Shot that killed him yes I heard
As I heard the Thousand shots before;
careening tinnily down the nights
across my years and arteries.
(49-50)

The words "hear," "heard," and "Shot" in conjunction with the onomatopoeic phrase "careening tinnily" emphasize the persona's past indifference to routine violence. The persona recounts, "Policeman pounded on my door [and said] A Boy was dying in your alley./ABoyis dead, and in your alley. / And have you known this Boy before?" The conspicuous shift in tense—from the past (progressive aspect) "was dying" to the present "is," and to the present (perfect aspect) "have known"—dramatizes the actual death of the boy and suggests, as well, the pervasiveness of the violence. Acknowledging some acquaintance with "this Boy … who / ornaments my alley," the persona confesses that "I never saw his face at all." The verb "ornaments" alludes to the red blood and the persona's uncaring attitude toward children who "deal with death." The persona admits, "I have closed my heart-ears late and early." At the end of the poem, however, she recognizes her silent complicity in the boy's death: "I joined the wild and killed him / with knowledgeable unknowing." Remorsefully, the narrator confesses, "I saw where he was going. / I saw him Crossed. And seeing / I did not take him down." The word "Crossed" combined with the statement "I did not take him down" evokes the Crucifixion. Further, "Crossed" means both "placed on a cross" and "betrayed." This complex allusion manifests the persona's guilt and anguish. In street vernacular, "to take someone down" means to kill or to seriously incapacitate that person by violent means. Aware of the fact that children were being "taken down" but ignoring them, the persona feels responsible for their deaths. Brooks employs paradox ("knowledgeable unknowing"), allusion, and ambiguity to reveal the persona's feelings. Finally accepting responsibility and recognizing kinship with these children, the persona states, "The red floor of my alley / is a special speech to me." Likewise, this blood is a special speech to readers who have been pulled into the narrative and forced to look at the pain and destruction around them. Such truth-telling, with Brooks's "quiet and merciless accuracy" (Johnson 47), leaves readers no hiding place.

The boy in the alley, Lincoln, West, little Laini, Steve Biko, Walter Bradford, Edgar Blakely, the sisters, and the gang girl are creations of a master artist. Although Brooks paints family pictures, the impulse from which they spring embraces all humanity. As Brooks herself has said, "I cite, star, and esteem all that which is of woman—human and hardly human. And I want the people of the world to anticipate ultimate unity, active [italics hers] interest in empathy." (Report from Part Two 131). The unity to which Brooks subscribes is

a unity of distinct proud pieces. Not a stew.… Because each entity is lovely-amazing-exhilarating [italics hers] in ubiquity and boldness of clear distinction, good design. I hope that in the world, always, there will be Black, brown, yellow, white, red. (And if time has some surprises let us welcome those too.)
(Report from Part Two 131)

The poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks depicts and celebrates the variegated life of one community within the human family. This Black community, with its prismatic family pictures, has inspired, nourished, and sustained her art. Although directed to this community, her canvases of family pictures, like portraits by the Old Masters, hang in full view of the human family for their enrichment, for their illumination, and for their delight.

Note

1. For a discussion of "womanist" and "womanism," see Walker (In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, 1983) and Ogunyemi ("Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English," Signs: Journal of Women and Culture 11.1 (Autumn 1985): 63-80). In her essay, Ogunyemi says a womanist "will recognize that, along with her consciousness of sexual issues, she must incorporate racial, cultural, national, economic, and political considerations into her philosophy" (64).

Works Cited

Allan, Tuzylane Jita. Womanist and Feminist Aesthetics: A Comparative Review. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1995.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. Beckonings. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1981.

——. Blacks. Chicago: Third World Press, 1987.

——. In The Mecca. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.

——. To Disembark. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1981.

——. Report from Part One. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972.

——. Report from Part Two. Chicago: Third World Press, 1996.

——. The World of Gwendolyn Brooks. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

Dandridge, Rita, ed. Black Women's Blues: A Literary Anthology, 1934-1988. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992.

Davis, Arthur P. "Gwendolyn Brooks." Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers 1899-1960. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, (1974). Rpt. in On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation. Ed. Stephen Wright, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996: 97-105.

Hansell, William H. "The Poet-Militant and Foreshadowings of a Black Mystique: Poems in the Second Period of Gwendolyn Brooks." Concerning Poetry 10 (Fall 1977): 37-45. Rpt. in Mootry and Smith 71-80.

Jaffe, Dan. "Gwendolyn Brooks: An Appreciation from the White Suburbs." The Black American Writer: Volume 2 Poetry/Drama. Ed. C. W. E. Bigsby. Deland, FL: Everett/Edwards, 1969: 89-98. Rpt. in Wright 50-59.

Johnson, James N. "Blacklisting Poets." Ramparts 7 (1968): 53-56. Rpt. in Wright 45-49.

Melhem, D. H. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1987.

——. Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions and Interviews. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990.

Mootry, Maria, and Gary Smith. A Life Distilled. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo. "Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English." Signs: Journal of Women and Culture 11.1 (Autumn 1985): 63-80.

Omolade, Barbara. "Black Women and Feminism." The Future of Difference. Ed. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980: 248-257.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983.

Webster, Harvey Curtis. "Pity the Giants." Review of The Bean Eaters, Annie Allen, and A Street in Bronzeville, by Gwendolyn Brooks. The Nation (1 September 1962). Rpt. in Wright 19-22.

Wright, Stephen, ed. On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion