The Spatial Politics of Gwendolyn Brooks' In the Mecca
INTRODUCTION
In response to reading Gwendolyn Brooks’s In the Mecca, poet Elizabeth Alexander wrote in her analysis that “[f]ew poets walk with such integrity” (378-79). With this statement, she refers to Brooks’s passion and sense of responsibility when it came to the fusion of the poetic and the political. Her 1964 poetry collection In the Mecca is a testament to the multilayered African American experience which unfolds levels of political relevance.
With Chicago’s Mecca Building serving as a spatial metaphor, the reader is moved through hallways, and simultaneously exposed to a tripartite journey: The poem tells past stories and relays future hopes and fears, while simultaneously exposing the reader to a destroyed present. The spatial divisions and the tripartite journey can be linked to the concept of Double Consciousness and Tripartite Yearnings as described by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver in the introduction of the Norton Critical Edition of W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (xi).
By merging linguistic and rhetorical intricacies and intensity, the epic title poem In the Mecca exposes internal and external effects of racism on African-Americans by means of showing and telling while simultaneously leading the reader through a tripartite journey through the poem, which is symbolically tied to a past, present and future in an internally and externally racist environment. This analysis seeks to expose some of the structural intricacies representative of the politics of of location, space and movement, by means of analyzing Brooks’s specific use of poetics and tying it to the poems historical background as well as Brooks’s biography and the timeframe of the poems genesis.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS AND THE MECCA BUILDING
In order to effectively evaluate the connection between the structure and stylistic devices used in the poem, as well as its social, political and philosophical ties, it is of some significance to briefly outline Brooks’s personal experience of being an African-American woman, writer and poet as well as summarizing the historical background of the Mecca Building metaphor employed in the poem.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks was an independent writer who was born in the second decade of the 20th century, and lived to see the new millennium. At age 13, Brooks published her first poem. She experienced a quick rise to notoriety, publishing several critically acclaimed poetry collections, autobiographies, novels and short prose works and winning 93 awards including the Pulitzer Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship throughout her career (Israel and Lawlor 10). Her work is characterized by an “intense awareness of the AfricanAmerican experience, women’s roles and feminist perspectives, and literary tradition” (Rughoff 21).
But to get a better understanding of who Gwendolyn Brooks was, Milred R. Mickle suggests that “we must refer to Langston Hughes, one of her literary mentors” (3). Mickle refers to Hughes’s essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, which outlines a new personal and cultural consciousness of empowerment within the African American community.
This consciousness is epitomized in Brooks’s work (3-4), which focusses on the layers of African Americans identity in a multi-perspective, investigating subject matters internally and externally (Israel and Lawlor 9). Brooks sets a very specific focus on the environment which she felt most closely linked to: Chicago’s South Side.
A New York Times article published in the year of Brooks’s death quotes her as saying "I lived in a small second-floor apartment at the corner, and I could look first on one side and then the other. There was my material“ (Watkins 2). Brooks’s later material - In the Mecca included – “continued to call upon her poetic imagination to create portraits of African Americans [capturing] moments and movements in American history, particularly African American history” (Rugoff 35).
Moreover, she was extremely fond and supportive of the Black Arts Movement, which was gaining significance and acclaim at the time In the Mecca was published. In brief, although Brooks’s work had always emphasized the African American experience, her later work illuminates a shift in focus, highlighting a more specifically internal view and perhaps even viewing African readers as a more specific target group for her work.
THE MECCA BUILDING
In his essay “A Material Collapse That is Construction”: History and Counter-Memory in Gwendolyn Brooks’s In the Mecca, John Lowney outlines the history tied to the poem: The Mecca Building on Chicago’s South Side had initially been constructed “as a boldly innovative architectural prototype for luxury apartment living” (187).
Before its obliteration in 1952, and after a major relocation effort by the wealthy to Chicago’s North Side and the economic crisis of the Great Depression, the building was largely left neglected and “[by] 1950, the Mecca Building had become notorious […] because of the poverty of its remaining inhabitants (187). Brooks reconstructs the Mecca Building as a metaphor relating to the “discourse of urban decline in the 1960s” (187).
Moreover, she revives the building as a symbolic representation of racism in 1960s America.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS'S IN THE MECCA
Gwendolyn Brooks’s In the Mecca is many things: It is an epic poem, with 807 lines, it is the title poem of a poetry collection which Brooks had been working on for about 10 years, it is, perhaps, a work of literature signifying a change in perspective in Brooks’ career, and it is a mental reconstruction of a historical site which represents a racist American mind state which systematically neglects and oppresses African Americans on an external as well as an internal level. It is also a narrative poem, one which follows not only a plot, but also works its way through many layers and stories to convey, in a kind of “multivoice and multivernacular irony” (Clarke 139) a language of despair and discontentment (Clarke 138).
The plot follows first Mrs Sallie Smith, who returns home from work to the Mecca building, to find that her youngest daughter, Pepita, is missing. Later in the poem the focus shifts towards “The Law”, the entity which ends up discovering that Mrs. Smith’s daughter had been murdered. The reader is led through the Mecca building during the search for Mrs. Smith’s missing daughter.
Within the plot, the reader is confronted with the stories and voices of the other inhabitants of the building. In this way, In the Mecca is a “lesson on the spiritual and psychic condition of urban black people in post-modernity” (Clarke 137).
SPATIAL DIVISIONS
In the Mecca employs several spatial divisions that signify the double consciousness of African American identity. The first, of course, is to be found in the relationship between the ‘telling’ of the plot and the ‘showing of experience’ conveyed via character testimony 4 and internalized narration.
There is a clear spatial distance between the narrator and the characters. As much as it seems, at first, that the narrator is in control of the language, the narrator’s influence becomes diminished when the voices of the storytellers dominate:
Furthermore, it outlines a distance between narration and experience, pinpointing the difference of internal and external perspective. Narration offers an external view, while the free indirect discourse is
“employed to communicate the more authentic historical horrors and the subjects’ interiority -and perhaps the narrator’s empathy” (Clarke 140)
The second spatial division which is employed is that of focalization. While the focus in the first part of the poem is on Mrs. Sallie Smith, a shift occurs on page 18, with “The Law” taking over as guide through the building. This is also where the poem expresses more extensively political climate: Now the poem begins to more overtly reflect the black political climate of the sixties, its apocalyptic nature, the turning of blacks toward themselves and against white sanction, acceptance, tutelage, the violent wrenching of an enduring symbiosis. (Clarke 144)
By turning Mrs. Sallie Smith, as focal point, into “The mother” who “screams and wants her baby.” (19), “The Law”, introduced on page 18, takes over as focalization point. The poem has been divided by shifting focus. This is another way in which the internal and external binary of double consciousness is illuminated. By juxtaposing the external view of the Mecca building, focalized by “The Law” with the internal view of the experience of the Mecca building by Mrs. Sallie Smith and, even further, all of her neighbors and children, the fragmented African American experience of self is highlighted. A third division is that of the overarching structure of the poetry collection itself.
The title poem being called “In the Mecca” (1), while all that follows is referred to as “After Mecca” (33) potentially exposes not only the two perspectives of double consciousness but also a possible entry into a new beginning, a turning point guided by a new understanding and a ‘leaving-behind’ of the traditions and internalized behavioral and thought-patterns imposed on African Americans by a past and present fueled by systemic racism towards an empowered future.
TRIPARTITE JOURNEY
What John Lowney calls “history and counter-memory” (187) in his essay, represents the tripartite journey I am looking to highlight in my short analysis: Brooks’s representation of the Mecca resembles neither the utopian space its designers had envisioned nor the dystopian place its commemorators disparaged. Instead, “In the Mecca” interrogates the dystopian discourse of urban decline so often invoked in postwar African American life; as such, it is an “incisive” intervention into the construction of African American historical memory. (188)
While Brooks engages in a fictionalized account of history, she also adds an element of a present “counter-memory”, which is signified by the “emphasis on the local, the immediate, and the personal with the multiple discordant stories that redefine the collective memory of the Mecca” (190). In this way, Brooks creates a present, in which past stories are multi-faceted elements of a time flux of past pain, present-day despair and fears and hopes for the future.
For instance, on page 14-15, we can see a clear juxtaposition of past and present by means of fragmenting the narrative and shifting perspective:
The plot becomes entangled with the past-memories of the inhabitants of the Mecca building, while Mrs. Smith leads the reader through its corridors. For instance, all of Mrs. Sallie Smith’s children represent different aspects of suffering induced by internal and external racism, as explained by Cheryl Clarke:
“Explanatory narratives of impoverishment, sexual exploitation, potential crime and violence, hunger, and isolation interpret each child's psychic and physical space” (140)
These aspects are largely focused on the past and the present. However, the journey itself is representative of the third element of the invoked path: future. Mrs Sallie Smith’s fears of what is to be found at the end of her journey can be viewed as a fear of a dystopian future for African Americans while Brooks’s structural approach to the design of the collection can be viewed as a hopeful and empowered perspective.
The tripartite implications of the metaphorical journey introduced by the first stanza of the poem, commanding the reader to “Sit where the light corrupts your face. […]” and to let “the fair fables fall” (5), become clear: The poem not only reminds of a historical site, it also invokes a present-day reconstruction of the location while emotionally involving the reader in a plot which invokes feelings regarding an unwritten future.
In this way, In the Mecca represents a psychic location which deconstructs, constructs and reconstructs hallways of an African American experience which presupposes an intersectional perspective by anyone interested in going on the journey.
CONCLUSION
Conclusively, In the Mecca, title poem of Gwendolyn Brooks‘s 1964 poetry collection by the same name, can be read as a representation of juxtaposed but interrelated spatial divisions signifying an external racist environment and an internal experience of such an 7 environment. Furthermore, the Mecca building can be read as not only a metaphor of location but also as a journey through the multilayered experience of African Americans, signified by a tripartite journey through time, representative of layers of imposed psychic racism. The importance of spatial perspective becomes clear: The Mecca building serves as a spatial metaphor for physical and psychic effects of racism, as well as its corridors leading the way through multilayered subjective perspectives, and enhanced by free indirect discourse, the poem represents an intersectional view of the African American experience.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY SOURCE
Brooks, Gwendolyn. In the Mecca. Harper & Row Publishers: New York, 1964.
SECONDARY SOURCES
Alexander, Elizabeth. “Meditations on ‘Mecca’: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Responsibilities of the Black Poet.” In: By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry. Ed. Molly McQuade. Graywolf: 2000. 368-79.
Clarke, Cheryl. “Loss of Lyric Space and the Critique of Traditions in Gwendolyn Brooks's In the Mecca.” In: The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 17, No. 1. 1995. 136-147.
DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk: A Norton Critical Edition. Eds. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver. Norton: 1999. ix – xi.
Israel, Charles M. and William T. Lawlor. “Biography of Gwendolyn Brooks.” In: Critical Insights: Gwendolyn Brooks. Ed.: Milred R. Mickle. Salem Press: 2010. 9-13.
Lowney, John. “’A Material Collapse That is Construction’: History and Counter-Memory in Gwendolyn Brooks’s In the Mecca” In: Critical Insights: Gwendolyn Brooks. Ed.: Milred R. Mickle. Salem Press: 2010. 186-209.
Mickle, Milred R. “On Gwendolyn Brooks.” In: Critical Insights: Gwendolyn Brooks. Ed.: Milred R. Mickle. Salem Press: 2010. 3-9.
Rughoff Kathy. “The Historical and Social Context of Gwendolyn Brooks’s Poetry.” In: Critical Insights: Gwendolyn Brooks. Ed.: Milred R. Mickle. Salem Press: 2010. 21-38.
Smethurst, James. “Gwendolyn Brooks.” In: The Cambridge Companion to American Poets. Ed. Mark Richardson. Cambridge University Press: 2015. 316-326.
Watkins, Mel. Gwendolyn Brooks, Whose Poetry Told of Being Black in America, Dies at 83. New York Times. Dec 4, 2000. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/04/books/gwendolyn-brooks-whose-poetry told-of-being-black-in-america-dies-at-83.html. Accessed: May 26 2017
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