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Gwendolyn Brooks' work encourages and supports the American Dream by describing the barriers to Americans, and specifically African Americans from achieving the dream, how your childhood can affect your perspective of the dream, and how anyone can achieve the dream no matter what they were given at the start.

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In the book” Blacks” by Gwendolyn brooks, it encompasses many of the issues that affect the black diaspora (native Africans and their descendants living outside of Africa), using a variety of distinct perspectives. Many of her poems capture an important moment in a character's life. Together, these voices reflect the black community's diversity as it continues to resist damaging racist stereotypes. Gwendolyn Brooks explains how the voices cause there to be no racist stereotypes, which reflects on what the American dream is like. Furthermore, she states the issues/problems in the way of African Americans achieving the American Dream. Finally, this captures moments in someone's life that demonstrates the american dream.

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Born: June 07, 1917 in Topeka, Kansas, United States

Died: December 03, 2000 in Chicago, Illinois, United States

Other Names: Brooks, Gwendolyn Elizabeth

Page 128

INTRODUCTION

Blacks encompasses many of the issues that affect the black diaspora (native Africans and their descendants living outside of Africa), using a variety of distinct perspectives. The book contains selections from eleven of Brooks's books of poetry and an autobiographical novel called Maud Martha. Brooks's approach varies in each section, ranging from the succinct portraits of A Street in Bronzeville to the more political "preachments" of To the Page 129 Diaspora. Her characters include children, preachers, soldiers, entertainers, the mentally ill, squirrels, and even ghosts. References to historical figures, such as writer Langston Hughes and Black Nationalist leader Malcolm X, interweave with more personal poems that recount the speaker's experiences with prejudice. Many of her poems capture an important moment in a character's life. Together, these voices reflect the black community's diversity as it continues to resist damaging racist stereotypes.

PLOT SUMMARY

A Street in Bronzeville, 1945

The forty poems in this section are mostly individual portraits of people who live in Bronzeville, Brooks's name for a neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. In poems like "The Murder" and "Patent Leather," Brooks rejects romantic notions of struggle and triumph, while avoiding the tricky territory of labeling and classification. "Matthew Cole" gives readers a spare portrait of a sixty-six-year-old man growing old alone in a tenement flat: "He never will be done / With dust and his ceiling that / Is everlasting sad." The characters portrayed in the poems are realistic, entirely believable in their words, behavior, and experiences. The poet suggests a reverence for all of these perspectives, from the very young and hopeful to the old and resigned.

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BIOGRAPHY

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Gwendolyn Brooks was born June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, to Keziah and David Brooks. Her six-decades-long writing career began when she wrote her first poem at age seven; by sixteen, she had already amassed a portfolio of seventy-five published poems. In 1945, she published her first of collection of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, to great critical acclaim.

Over the years, Brooks's style changed, as did the lives of those she represented in her poetry. Critics locate an important shift around the time her fourth book of poetry, In the Mecca (1968), was published. The American political climate was transforming during this period, reacting to the impact of the civil rights and black power movements. Brooks reacted by abandoning the traditional poetic language and forms that characterize her earlier work, favoring instead the more improvisational sounds and rhythms of urban black language.

Her accomplishments include twenty-one books of poetry, more than seventy honorary degrees, a lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Book Foundation Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Brooks was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize, which she received for her 1949 book of poetry, Annie Allen. She died December 3, 2000.

These poems adopt various perspectives on life in Bronzeville, a world that includes overcrowded apartment buildings, unfaithful and abusive spouses, abortion, neglect, and widespread poverty. Brooks steers readers away from purely emotional responses, focusing them on moments that expose what is really at stake for her characters. Bronzeville is not Page 130
represented in a fixed way; it evolves and responds to various stimuli in the community. Bronzeville and its inhabitants spring to life in these poems, some of which are sonnets (a four-teen-line poem with a specific rhyme scheme). Among complex discussions of beauty and identity, the characters' voices remain open, accessible, and even familiar to readers.

Annie Allen, 1949

The section is organized into four parts. "Memorial to Ed Bland" begins the section, followed by "Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood," in which the speaker observes how poverty erodes children's innocence. In this realm, everything to which one might look forward is already decaying and spoiled. The following section, "The Anniad," shows that even love is temporary for Annie Allen, whose affair with a soldier leaves her asking, "Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?" In poems like "The Sonnet-Ballad," Brooks suggests that Annie's fleeting love is typical of her life, in which sources of joy are uncertain and fragile.

Maud Martha, 1953

Set in the early 1950s, Maud Martha relates the experiences of the title character, a dark-skinned black woman barely escaping poverty on Chicago's South Side. Despite these challenging circumstances, Maud Martha's story presents a balanced view of African American daily life at the time. As a child, she confronts racial prejudice both inside and outside her community. She begins to consider herself less attractive than other black girls who have lighter skin color and "better hair," like her sister Helen. Part of Maud Martha's evolution is in learning to assert and define her own identity in the face Page 131 of prevailing ideals of physical beauty. Other scenes in the novel focus on different aspects of the human experience, including economic woes and social strife, as well as family, parenting, and suffering.

The Bean Eaters, 1960

I am not hungry for bread.
    But hungry hungry for a house
    Where at night a man in bed
    May never hear the plaster
    Stir as if in pain.
    May never hear the roaches
    Falling like fat rain.

The poem's narrator relates the story of a black man who strives to provide a home for his family, but loses his life while protecting his dignity. Poems in The Bean Eaters acknowledge the widespread violence often associated with racism, criticizing those who seem to be ambivalent. They also offer several disturbing examples of prejudice inside and outside of the black community.

1963

The five poems in this section are more abstract than others in the collection. The verbal complexity of "Riders to the Blood-Red Wrath" at times threatens to overwhelm the emotional impact of lines like, "They do not see how deftly I endure. / Deep down the whirlwind of good rage I store." But, unlike "The Empty Woman" (which follows it), "Riders to the Blood-Red Wrath" reads more like a personal declaration of purpose, with a tone that is consistently determined and enraged. The majority of Brooks's poetry seeks to capture an individual's particular experience, but this poem's scope includes the entirety of African history, including slavery and parallel references to historical oppression around the world.

In The Mecca, 1968

Fourteen poems from In the Mecca are included in Blacks, divided into two sections: In the Mecca and After the Mecca. The latter includes poetic dedications to figures like Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and the "Chicago Picasso," a large sculpture given to the city by the renowned artist Pablo Picasso in 1967.

Primer for Blacks

Brooks writes to black women who do not use chemical products like lye, alkaline, or heated appliances (hot-combs, hair irons, etc.) to change their hair's natural texture. When Americans and white Europeans held slaves, it was not uncommon for slave-owners to give preferential treatment to slaves who had some Page 132 European physical traits, such as straighter hair. This practice laid the foundation for an identity crisis among those of African descent. In 1905, Madame C. J. Walker's hair softening products were embraced by mainstream black consumers, making it common practice for black women to straighten their naturally kinky or curly hair-a practice that is still widespread today. Black women tried to change themselves to satisfy a white society's ideal of beauty. Many hoped they would thus become more acceptable or appealing to the white majority, as well as to those within their own communities.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the "black is beautiful" movement proposed a distinctive black ideal. In this social context, it became increasingly difficult for educated black women like Brooks to continue shaping and judging themselves according to white notions of beauty. By including this poem in the collection, Brooks expresses solidarity with her self-proclaimed "sisters," who are reclaiming what Brooks refers to as their "Afrikan" identities by resisting the dominant white culture.

Beckonings

In "A Black Wedding Song," Brooks again deliberately targets a specific, external black audience. The speaker addresses the reader directly, "Strong hand in strong hand, stride to / the Assault that is promised you"-calling for black unity in the face of turmoil.

To Disembark

To Disembark (1981) was originally published by Third World Press, another esteemed independent black publishing house. This section is made up of three subsections-"Riot," "Family Pictures," and "To the Diaspora." The first two sections contain selections from Brooks's books by those names, while the third draws from a later poem.

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 realthing.

The cold, anthropological tone of these remarks offend Lincoln's mother, but surprisingly, Lincoln finds them comforting. Later, when he is mistreated or otherwise made aware of how people see him, Lincoln thinks of the man's words and reminds himself that he is "the real thing."

"Young Heroes" I, II, and III are poetic odes to people Brooks admired, including Keorapetse Kgositsile, a poet and early South African nationalist. The emphasis in these pieces is outside the narrative realm-instead of continuity, the reader finds emotion and rhetorical language. These poems are followed by "Young Afrikans," a tribute to the "furious" flowers who commit themselves to "chimeful / poemhood," and "Paul Robeson" an ode to "The major Voice"-a famous actor, singer, and civil rights activist.

The section concludes with "Speech to the Young. Speech to the Progress-Toward," a poem that calls the reader to act: "Live not for battles won. / Live not for the-end-of-the-song. / Live in the along."

Page 133

The other poems in this section are "A Welcome Song For Laini Nzinga" and "To Black Women."

The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems

THEMES

Identity, Racism, and Double Consciousness

Gwendolyn Brooks's collection Blacks presents a sampling of her wide-ranging work made up of poems and prose written during a period stretching from the 1940s through the mid-1980s. The lives of people in the black community are her primary subject matter, a topic that requires Brooks to document and comment on slavery, segregation, and social stigmas in terms of their lasting effects on black awareness and self understanding. Brooks's work thus illustrates the important idea of double consciousness.

The term "double consciousness" was coined in 1897 by W. E. B. DuBois, an African American civil rights activist and scholar, who wrote in The Souls of Black Folk:

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,-a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.

Prior to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, many blacks would have identified themselves by tribal or ethnic affiliations, rather than by the color of their skin. Arriving in America from Africa, blacks immediately became colored by interacting with a society that was predominantly white, in which black people were recognizably different from what was considered "normal." The double consciousness that DuBois discusses works in three distinct ways. First, blacks must constantly check themselves against pre-existing stereotypes and evaluate whether or not their behavior confirms these damaging representations. Second, the American racism that has historically set blacks apart from whites (slavery, segregation, etc.) continues to shape blacks' awareness of themselves as separate. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, African Americans identify culturally and physically with both their "African-ness" (as experienced in their physical difference from whites) and their "American-ness" (as experienced in their post-slavery incorporation, rather than absorption, into American society).

Many of the poems included in Blacks reflect an awareness of double consciousness. In "I Love those Little Booths at Benvenuti's," Brooks reveals the speaker's sense of stereotypes that shape white perceptions of blacks as well as shaping blacks themselves. At Benvenuti's, "The colored people will not 'clown.' / [...] / Handling their steel and crockery with no clatter, / Laugh punily, rise, go firmly out of the door." The poem examines the speaker's awareness of herself as it is altered by her desire to "hide ... while observing tropical truths." This play on Page 134 perspectives-"us" versus "them"-is characteristic of Brooks's work and recurs throughout the text.

Outsider Status

Brooks creates an insulated world in Maud Martha, one that focuses on the black experience and makes few references to whites. In this way, Brooks heightens the reader's own double consciousness as either an outsider or an insider relative to the black community described in the novel. In a chapter called "We're the Only Colored People Here," Maud Martha and her husband go to the World Playhouse, an upscale theater in Chicago. Maud Martha narrates the events, relating how she, "the Negro woman" is seen by the whites around her:

The people in the lobby tried to avoid looking curiously at two shy Negroes wanting desperately not to seem shy. The white women looked at the Negro woman in her outfit with which no special fault could be found, but which made them think, somehow, of close rooms, and wee, close lives. They looked at her hair. They liked to see a dark colored girl with long, long hair. They were always slightly surprised, but agreeably so, when they did. They supposed it was the hair that had got her that yellowish, good-looking Negro man.

In this passage, Maud Martha's physical appearance becomes the focal point. As she experiences being "the Negro woman" as opposed to merely "a woman" or "a human being," she relates the ways that her presence affects those observing her. Maud Martha's description of what transpires is her own view in her own words-it is not presented as objective or absolutely true. Even though she speaks from only her own perspective-as we all do-she has a narrative authority that lends credibility to her interpretation of her experience. Her reality is double-sided: she is at once an insider and an outsider.

Social Class

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

Civil Rights Movement

The civil rights movement occurred during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, as black community leaders and their supporters made headway in a crusade to eliminate legalized racial discrimination. Two milestones that sparked the civil rights movement were the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision that integrated public schools, and Rosa Parks's 1955 arrest for refusing to yield her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her actions led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the subsequent desegregation of that system. At this time, many black writers began to write about the struggle for equal rights. Brooks's poetry increasingly conveyed her responses to political events during this time. Emmett Till, a black teenager from Chicago, was lynched in 1955 for supposedly flirting with a white woman while visiting Mississippi. "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till" reflects a mother's loss when her child dies in appalling racially motivated violence; more broadly, the poem calls attention to the many racist, violent acts threatening to divide the country then. Brooks's piece added yet another voice to the political firestorm in America. Because of poems like this one, the Page 135 literary community began to view Brooks as a militant black voice, one whose political philosophies increasingly resembled those of Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Bobby Seale, prominent figures of black power and resistance.

Apartheid in South Africa

In the 1980s, after achieving significant legal victories at home, many Americans began to focus on issues of racial discrimination elsewhere, particularly in South Africa. Apartheid, an Afrikaans term that means "separateness," was an elaborate social and political system enforced by South Africa's white minority government beginning in 1948. Under apartheid, races were separated from each other by law and convention, and the ruling minority denied many civil rights to the black majority. The government moved blacks to settlements outside cities, usually poorly constructed slums lacking jobs, social services, and educational opportunities. Many blacks thus had to find work in nearby cities, but a black person leaving settlements or entering white areas had to carry an identifying pass, a sort of internal passport. Government-sanctioned oppression and brutality were commonplace, and riots in places like Sharpeville (1960) and Soweto (1976) left hundreds of black citizens dead. Activists who called for an end to apartheid were often jailed with no trial and no prospect of release. Nelson Mandela, who would later become South Africa's first black president, spent twenty-seven years imprisoned at Robben Island for his involvement in the anti-apartheid movement.

Brooks speaks to her audience in the voice of a black South African boy in the poem "The Near Johannesburg Boy," which appears in the last section of Blacks. After watching how people close to him suffer under the oppression of apartheid, he decides to join a protest march to Johannesburg-a city where, as Brooks explains in an epigraph, "He is not allowed to live" because of the color of his skin. The poem ends with the determination: "we shall forge with the Fist-and-the-Fury: / we shall flail in the Hot Time: / we shall / we shall."

South Africa's brutal policy of apartheid came to an end in the early 1990s under the leadership of President F. W. de Klerk. In February 1990, de Klerk freed political prisoners who had been held for opposing the oppressive apartheid system, including Mandela, who was elected president of South Africa four years later.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

If the idiom is colloquial, the language is universal. Brooks commands both the colloquial and more austere rhythms. She can vary manner and tone. In form, she demonstrates a wide range: quatrains, free verse, ballads, and sonnets-all appropriately controlled. The longer line suits her better than the short, but she is not verbose. In some of the sonnets, she uses an abruptness of address that is highly individual.

Smith goes on to suggest that although critics of the period were quick to recognize Brooks's stylistic successes, not many went beyond the formal aspects of her technique to examine the social commentary in her work. In the 1940s, Brooks's work moved closer to an emerging style known as urban realism, emphasizing political and social awareness. As William L. Andrews notes in Encyclopedia Britannica's Guide to Black History, "Brooks's tribute to the vitality and rigours of black urban life" was significantly affected by this particular "decade of creative experimentation."

Critical response may have been influenced by Harper & Row's publication of a similar compendium entitled The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1971). Baker notes that unlike The World of Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks was published by Brooks's own imprint, The David Company, without the marketing and fanfare associated with large, international presses. The use of a small press was part of Brooks's Page 136 continuing tradition of supporting black publishers, an effort that began with In The Mecca, published by Broadside Press, a small, Detroit-based company operated by African American poet Dudley Randall.

In her essay, "Whose Canon? Gwendolyn Brooks: Founder at the Center of the 'Margins,'" Kathryne Lindberg addresses another potential reason for Brooks's less-than-exuberant critical reception. Lindberg quotes from a 1969 Contemporary Literature interview by George Stavros, in which Brooks answers charges of having "abandoned lyric simplicity for an angrier, more polemical (purposely controversial) voice" in her later work: "No, I have not abandoned beauty, or lyricism, and I don't consider myself a polemical poet. I'm a black poet, and I write about what I see, what interests me, and I'm seeing new things."

Lindberg goes on to explain that beyond the stylistic shifts in her work, Brooks's own existence as a politically engaged, black, female artist would have had an observable effect on the analysis offered by her "white, mostly male, academic" critics. Lindberg argues "There is no reason to assume that a particular political commitment must turn one toward or away from artistic experiment or accomplishment." Interpretive questions still arise today about whether Brooks abandoned her focus on poetic artistry after Annie Allen, but critics' varied responses to her work have done little to hinder her lasting impact on American literature.

CRITICISM

Allison Cummings

In the following excerpt, literary critic Cummings offers an overview of the stylistic evolution of Brooks's poetry.

Critics, white and black, argue over the racial politics of Brooks's early and later work. In the first stage of her career, Gwendolyn Brooks's poetry was praised by a largely white critical establishment for its formal virtuosity, its verbal complexity, and its "transcendence" of racial themes. In the sixties and seventies, however, many African American critics admired and focused on Brooks's welcome treatment of racial themes, violence, militancy, and the new Black Aesthetic. These critical viewpoints are much less segregated now, though as late as 2003, in a critical edition devoted mainly to her later work, Harold Bloom admitted his preference for Brooks's early work, its "wry turn upon the universal" and "imaginatively rich ... enigmas."

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

A recording of Gwendolyn Brooks reading her poetry is included in Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath. This three-CD set includes a book edited by Elise Paschen and Rebekah Presson Mosby, and is available from Sourcebooks Mediafusion.

The Gwendolyn Brooks CD Poetry Collection is an audio collection of Brooks reading her own work. It is available from HarperAudio.

In its second stage, Brooks's poetry was praised by many critics for its political engagement, though more radical poets and critics found it insufficiently revolutionary. Houston Baker finds that Brooks's earlier poems negotiate and "equal the best in the black and white American literary traditions," though the "white" tradition (reflected by "the syllabi of most American literature courses") regards her as a "black writer." Meanwhile, some spokesmen for the Black Arts movement found her work rather pale: Baker notes that Amiri Baraka calls Brooks's work characteristic of "Negro literature," which is to say, not revolutionary or black enough. In an essay tracing the changes between Brooks' early and later poetry, John Callahan calls Brooks' "newish voice" an "evolution" rather than a revolution, noting that her later work, especially from In the Mecca (1968) to Primer for Blacks (1980), is less distant, more direct, "chiefly oral," and more apt to "celebrate and, therefore, intensify the integrity of African American life quite apart from the crises of white America." George Kent argues that, after 1967, "Brooks's poetry became far more attentive to blacks as an audience than it Page 137 had previously." Brooks also more often used European poetic forms, such as sonnets and ballads, as well as allusions and complex diction, in her poetry before 1967 than after. Most of Brooks's critics accept her announced change after 1967 as a given, though they differ in their interpretation of the shift: some say her work moved from a private to a public realm, from white to black audiences, from apolitical to political, or from emotional distance to openness.

The Black Arts movement strongly influenced Brooks's thinking and rhetoric about her work, even if it left ambiguous marks on her work itself. After her legendary radicalization at the Fisk Writers Conference of 1967 and her involvement in the Black Arts movement, Brooks expressed a wish to speak to, for, and about black readers and thereby to forge an audience called to awareness of racial identity and politics. Her statements about her intended audience drew their focus from black cultural nationalism and have influenced numerous writers after her. Within the Black Arts movement, many spokespeople-Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Ron Karenga-called for a recognizably "black" voice to hail and forge a newly positioned, newly politicized black audience for art. As Karenga formulated it, black art must be unifying, collective, speaking for, about, and to the people: "Any art that does not discuss and contribute to the revolution is invalid." Gwendolyn Brooks heard the call to "the New Black, the Tall-Walker" at Fisk, and, inspired by the new aesthetic, left Harper & Row in 1968 for Dudley Randall's Broadside Press, founded in Detroit in 1965. Thereafter, she directed her work more specifically toward black readers: "I want to write poems that will be non-compromising ... [and] meaningful to ... Black people.... True black writers speak as blacks about blacks to blacks.... The new Black is understood by no white, not the wise, the Schooled, the Kind White." Brooks referred to her poetry of the forties and fifties as "high poetincense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable." After Fisk, she viewed her work as "Independent fire!" In her autobiography, she announced her aim "to write poems that will somehow successfully 'call' all black people: black people in taverns, black people in alleys, black people in gutters, schools, offices, factories, prisons, the consulate."

The notion of "calling" to an audience, which will unify itself politically and spiritually as it hears, is useful for conceiving of the generational shift from Brooks's era to the present. In this call, African American artists hoped to interpolate audiences into the ideology of Black Power. The call that Brooks heard enabled her to recognize her "essential African" heritage, and recognizing that heritage gave her a new, deeper sense of "black fellow feeling." She felt immediately at home in her new self-conception, perhaps because the new self was comforting in its coherence, collectivity, and currency. However, followers of the Black Aesthetic became subject to certain political goals and intentions. After her "conversion," some critics judged Brooks's art according to its fulfillment of revolutionary ends, ends that might have encouraged her to unify her hitherto ventriloquial voice and project it as one steady chord, or to subordinate her previous focus on gender to one on race.

In sum, there are discernible shifts in Brooks's form from her early to late work: after 1967 she less often used complex diction, traditional forms and rhyme, and more often used personal pronouns in poems that speak more directly to her audiences. However, it is worth noting that Brooks's publicly announced awakening after Fisk encourages readers to discern more radical shifts than her work necessarily displays. The role of critics in her makeover is key; critics may have emphasized the changes in her work to recuperate a sufficiently politicized Brooks for her literary descendants. Critics who wanted to define and preserve a more militant province for the Black Arts movement regarded her work's changes as minimal. And later, in the 1980s and '90s, feminist critics regarded Brooks's poetry, early and late, as a major milestone in women's poetry. No doubt Brooks's dependable, if too brief, presence in American literature anthologies is due to multiple factors: her importance as the first African American Pulitzer winner and her role in American literary history, including decades of public activity and lecturing, and her poems' accessibility and (teachable) focus on race, gender, and class.

Source: Allison Cummings, "Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen," in Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2, June 2005, pp. 7-13.

Page 138

Houston A. Baker

In the following excerpt, Baker offers an overview of Brooks's poetry and a favorable evaluation of Blacks.

When a compendium of her poetry entitled The World of Gwendolyn Brooks appeared in the 1970s, the Poet Laureate of Illinois seemed fitly rewarded for a life of creative labor. The collection represented more than three decades. And its very name seemed proper and patently personal-a tribute to the genius behind its assembled offerings. "The world of Gwendolyn Brooks," one thought. "Yes, that is certainly appropriate for a Pulitzer Prize winner, a Poet Laureate, a guardian, model, and mentor in the world of American and Afro-American letters."

From the proper "world" of Gwendolyn Brooks, we move to the common denomination BLACKS. A reading of BLACKS reveals the striking appropriateness of the retitling.

The poet's uniqueness resides most decisively in her clear rejection of glorifying ideologies of the common man. Her people have neither the blues temperateness of Sterling Brown's strong men getting stronger, nor the joie de vivre of Langston Hughes's black urbanites, who want to dig and be dug in return. They are not proponents or exemplars of obtainable egalitarian goals. They are not blessed with a consciousness of mission-a sense of manifest destiny or a surety of predestined roles in the unfolding of a mighty national enterprise. They live always at the limits of a bitterly tested tolerance.

Implicit in the poet's portrayals, in fact, is a grammar of dissent. Frontal irony and subtle antagonism are directed against all romantic ideologies of progress and metaphysical salvation. Race, class, gender, and nationality are the grounds of divisiveness and conflict that put such ideologies to shame. Skin color as a sign of race in America, for example, can cause unappeasable anguish. Maud Martha thinks: "... it's my color that makes h[er husband] mad.... What I am inside, what is really me, he likes okay. But he keeps looking at my color, which is like a wall. He has to jump over it in order to meet and touch what I've got for him." Class causes white women who are putative "lovers of the poor" to grow sick with fear and disgust. Philanthropically entering narrow halls of poverty, they are overcome by sights, sounds, and smells of the lower class. Possibilities for heroism are few in a world overdetermined by race, class, gender, and nationality. The bleakness of this universe is in part a function of Brooks's modernism. Commencing her career during "The Great War," she seems to have absorbed a healthy dose of the artistic malaise that prompted somber reveries of a Godless and irreversible universe of atomic fission. But her grammar of dissent is not entirely a by-product of the era in which she began her career.

Her antagonism to glorifying ideologies is also a product of a distinctive artistic credo-a signal aesthetics. Her creative orientation is designed, in fact, to match a world that guarantees the "commonness" of blacks through its restrictive codes of race, class, nationality, and gender. Adornment, embellishment, flamboyance, and proclamations of heroism are as anomalous in such a world as (to summon the poet's own image) "a rose in a whiskey glass." Stability, sanity, physical and mental development, and day-to-day safety survival depend upon an almost brutal refusal of self-deception and artistic idealism.

Brooks's own poetical naming often situates itself within a common order rather than employing the vocabularies of such an order for names. Her polysyllabic verse with its taut syntax and her grammatical substitutions of adjectives and adverbs for nouns often make her poems anything but idiomatic. Her grammatical acrobatics produce memorability and subversion. It is difficult to forget a "thaumaturgic lass," a vaudevillean of "magnificent, heirloom, and deft," or a hipster whose title is bestowed by "inamoratas, with an approbation." Subversion results from the appropriation of the full weight and heft of the King's English to portray lives of common subjects.

A notion of the ever altering thingness of the commonplace-a shiftiness that requires and is a function of ceaseless naming-is the truly distinguishing notion of Gwendolyn Brooks's art. Her poetical portraits alter each time we call their names. They assume a different thingness each Page 139 time she, as a brilliant and accomplished public reader, sets them eloquently before us. Their alteration, however, is not merely a result of our willed and continuous naming. An elusive and always expanding space called "context" also causes them to shift-to change in unaccountable ways "behind our backs."

For example, the lackluster and whimpering populace of Bronzeville that was "not brave at all" in the 1940s transformed itself, quite miraculously, in the United States during the 1960s and assumed the common name BLACKS. Thunderstruck as she was by this behind-the-back evolution of her bean eaters and gar-bagemen dignified as any diplomat, Brooks maintained her aesthetics of two decades' standing. She assumed that her task was to provide a common ground and denomination for these new BLACKS.

When BLACKS became bold, heroic rioters jerking the times out of joint, Brooks energetically relinquished her direct and implicit condemnations of nationalistic grandeur. She became a namer of the militant struggle that not so long ago comprised a common ground and cause for BLACKS in the United States. She came to know in her own life what she had always claimed in her aesthetics: Common denomination can sometimes be a matter of dramatic alterations. The job for the poet facing this continuing drama of transformation is to:

    Live not for battles won.
    Live not for the-end-of-song.
    Live in the along.

To live in "the along" is to inhabit the everyday. It is to confront race, class, national, and gender restrictions with a common lexicon. For Brooks it is to do exactly what she has done in offering a newly retitled volume of her work; it is to provide and share in the common denomination of BLACKS.

Source: Houston A. Baker Jr., "A Review of Blacks," in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 24, No. 3, Fall 1990, pp. 567-73.

SOURCES

Andrews, William L., "Encyclopedia Britannica's Guide to Black History: African American Literature Overview," Encyclopedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/Blackhistory (December 12, 2005).

Baker, Houston A. Jr., "A Review of Blacks," in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 24, No. 3, Fall, 1990, pp. 567-73.

Brooks, Gwendolyn, Blacks, Third World Press, 1987.

DuBois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk, Bantam, 1989.

Lindberg, Kathryne V., "Whose Canon? Gwendolyn Brooks: Founder at the Center of the 'Margins,'" in Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers, edited by Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986, pp. 283-311.

Lowney, John, "'A Material Collapse that is Construction': History and Counter-Memory in Gwendolyn Brooks's 'In the Mecca,' " Find Articles, www.findarticles.com (December 8, 2005).

Smith, Gary, "Gwendolyn Brooks's 'A Street in Bronzeville,' the Harlem Renaissance and the Mythologies of Black Women," in Melus, Vol. 10, No. 3, Fall 1983, pp. 33-46.

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Born: June 07, 1917 in Topeka, Kansas, United States Died: December 03, 2000 in Chicago, Illinois, United States Other Names: Brooks, Gwendolyn Elizabeth Page 128 Blacks encompasses many of the issues that affect the black diaspora (native Africans and their descendants living outside of Africa), using a variety of distinct perspectives.

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One of Gwendolyn Brooks most famous works “A way with words” proved that Gwendolyn brooks supports the American Dream. This article “A way with words” discusses the success of Gwendolyn Brooks and what gave her a purpose to write these poems and books. Gwendolyn Brooks liked to say that African American poetry is the story of a community learning "to lift its face unashamed." Poetry's emotion and commitment to powerful, memorable language made it ideal for writers who wanted to transform how people felt about the possibilities of the future.  She discovered a way to draw attention to the unjust conditions in which they lived and to celebrate the fact that they did so with courage and purpose. Keeping families together, caring for loved ones, educating, and teaching were all necessary parts of the struggle parts that most definitely deserved celebration. Once again, she describes the barriers that are in the way to accomplish the american dream. She responded sensitively to the challenges of these young and politically active writers. She encouraged them in their determination to celebrate their cultural heritage while at the same time reminding them of the accomplishments of the poets who came before them. She helped many people discover the American Dream and how it can be accomplished.

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It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes I am aware there is winter to heed. There is no warm house That is fitted with my need.

--lines from Gwendolyn Brooks" poem "A Sunset of A City"

Gwendolyn Brooks liked to say that African American poetry is the story of a community learning "to lift its face unashamed." Poetry's emotion and commitment to powerful, memorable language made it ideal for writers who wanted to transform how people felt about the possibilities of the future. Gwendolyn Brooks has always successfully tapped the ability of poetry to affect our sense of life's possibilities.

Many African American women preceded Brooks on this quest. Phillis Wheatley (see page 11) is acknowledged by most historians and critics as representing the very beginning of African American literature. Her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) challenged the very basis of slavery as a system. How could an individual capable of creating great beauty be suitable for a life of servitude?

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854) continued the effort to use the writing of poetry in the struggle against slavery. Harper wrote powerfully about the impact of slavery on mothers and children. She also challenged the idea that slavery was in any way a kindly practice. (See also pages 2-5.)

The belief that writing by African American women should uplift the community continued into the 20th century. But many women began to think that this approach to writing limited their ability to tell their personal stories. Georgia Douglass Johnson, Anne Spencer, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Angelina Weld Grimke, and others began to explore themes and images that were more typical of the poetry of the day. They wanted to write passionately about love, family, loss, and change. They believed that just by being themselves in their poems they bettered the situation of all African American women.

Gwendolyn Brooks was perhaps the first poet to combine these two approaches to writing. By paying close attention to the lives of common folk in the Chicago neighborhoods around her, she discovered a way to draw attention to the unjust conditions in which they lived and to celebrate the fact that they did so with courage and purpose. Keeping families together, caring for loved ones, educating, and teaching were all necessary parts of the struggle--parts that most definitely deserved celebration. In A Street in Bronzeville (1945), Annie Allen (1949), The Bean Eaters (1960), and In the Mecca (1968), Brooks perfected a way of writing about African American people and concerns that acknowledged this struggle. Yet, at the same time, it did not reduce the complex nature of human beings to social problems.

Annie Allen was granted the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, and Brooks became the first African American to win that award. Brooks' poetry was elaborate in its use of symbolism and its reference to other writing. However, she always managed to tell the story of individuals whose lives and struggles were easy to recognize and respect. Human lives were always complicated in a Brooks poem, but a reader rarely leaves her work puzzled or unaffected.

Brooks was born in 1917 and died in 2000. For most of her life, Chicago was home, and she had always been one of its model cultural ambassadors. She came of age as a poet in the mid-1930s during a period sometimes called the "Chicago Black Renaissance." A talented group of writers, including Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Fenton Johnson, Frank Marshall Davis, Fern Gayden, and Alice Browning, congregated at various locations on the South Side of the city to share writing and ideas. All these writers had significant successes, but it was Brooks who became most closely associated with the city and its people.

Perhaps Brooks' most significant accomplishment was her commitment to develop young poets. She became the central mentor to a new generation of poets who came of age in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Despite having been trained in a dramatically different style, she responded sensitively to the challenges of these young and politically active writers. She encouraged them in their determination to celebrate their cultural heritage while at the same time reminding them of the accomplishments of the poets who came before them.

In the final decades of Brooks' life, she worked to cultivate an interest in poetry among school-children. She recognized how underserved Chicago's children were and how often poetry and the arts were the first activities to be cut in an underfunded school system. With her own resources, she sponsored a poetry contest for children of all back grounds and creatively drew attention to the skills and ability that might be lost. As effectively as any writer in the African American tradition, Brooks managed to model a life and create a body of work that made known the necessity of "lifting one's face unashamed."

The Pulitzer Prize refers to a number of yearly prizes established by Joseph Pulitzer, a U.S. newspaper owner and philanthropist (1847-1911), given for outstanding work in journalism, literature, and music.

James C. Hall is director of New College at the University of Alabama.

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It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes I am aware there is winter to heed. There is no warm house That is fitted with my need. --lines from Gwendolyn Brooks" poem "A Sunset of A City" Gwendolyn Brooks liked to say that African American poetry is the story of a community learning "to lift its face unashamed."

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The works of Gwendolyn Brooks supports the American Dream through having the readers create imagery. In "The Children of the Poor," Brooks looks at the ravages of World War II from a mother's standpoint. To her, the most vulnerable survivors were the children left fatherless, especially those whose widowed or abandoned mothers were economically impoverished. Describes the situation that people are in that can prevent them from accomplishing the american dream, in this case is World War II. Since it is from the viewpoint of a mother, shows her american dream but also how she has to be aware and care for many around her. It is proving that anyone born in the US has an equal chance at the american dream no matter what they were born into.

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People who have no children can be hard:

Attain a mail of ice and insolence:

Need not pause in the fire, and in no sense

Hesitate in the hurricane to guard.

And when wide world is bitten and bewarred

They perish purely, waving their spirits hence

Without a trace of grace or of offense

To laugh or fail, diffident, wonder-starred.

While through a throttling dark we others hear

The little lifting helplessness, the queer

Whimper-whine; whose unridiculous

Lost softness softly makes a trap for us.

And makes a curse. And makes a sugar of

The malocclusions, the inconditions of love.

What shall I give my children? who are poor,

Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,

Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand

No velvet and no velvety velour;

But who have begged me for a brisk contour,

Crying that they are quasi, contraband

Because unfinished, graven by a hand

Less than angelic, admirable or sure.

My hand is stuffed with mode, design, device.

But I lack access to my proper stone.

And plenitude of plan shall not suffice

Nor grief nor love shall be enough alone

To ratify my little halves who bear

Across an autumn freezing everywhere.

And shall I prime my children, pray, to pray?

Mites, come invade most frugal vestibules

Spectered with crusts of penitents' renewals

And all hysterics arrogant for a day.

Instruct yourselves here is no devil to pay.

Children, confine your lights in jellied rules;

Resemble graves; be metaphysical mules.

Learn Lord will not distort nor leave the fray.

Behind the scurryings of your neat motif

I shall wait, if you wish: revise the psalm

If that should frighten you: sew up belief

If that should tear: turn, singularly calm

At forehead and at fingers rather wise,

Holding the bandage ready for your eyes.

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The Children of the Poor by Gwendolyn Brooks

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People who have no children can be hard: Attain a mail of ice and insolence: Need not pause in the fire, and in no sense Hesitate in the hurricane to guard. And when wide world is bitten and bewarred They perish purely, waving their spirits hence Without a trace of grace or of offense To laugh or fail, diffident, wonder-starred.

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