Gwendolyn Brooks’s Black Aesthetic of the Domestic

Gwendolyn Brooks has an undeniable influence on the work of late twentieth-and early twenty-first century African American women poets. Honorée Jeffers dedicates her poem “One Morning Soon” (2007) to Brooks. In interviews, Harryette Mullen regularly mentions Brooks’s writings, especially Maud Martha (1953), as shaping her prose poetry (“Conversation”; “Not”; “Solo” 192, 201-02) and lists Brooks among the “literary ancestors” whom she “claims” (“Interview” 206). Nikky Finney also cites Brooks’s influence (“Art,” Lecture). At the 2012 National Book Festival, an audience member asked Finney, “What are the books you read over and over that you love?” She replied, “Anything by Gwendolyn Brooks. Anything.” Evie Shockley regularly calls Brooks an influence on her poetry and devotes a chapter of her scholarly book Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (2011) to Brooks. Poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander includes two essays on Brooks in The Black Interior (2004). Moments celebrating and engaging Brooks erupt so frequently in contemporary African American women’s poetry that they are too numerous to name here. Brooks is such a central influence that Mullen’s statement “I’m very much influenced by Gwendolyn Brooks, to the extent that sometimes I forget to even mention her” (“Conversation”) might describe Brooks’s presence in the work of many black women poets writing today. To “mention” and make visible Brooks’s influence, I consider here one of her important contributions to the African American literary tradition: a black aesthetic of the domestic.

In her early and mid-career writing, Brooks depicts individual, private experience as a sphere of black agency with broad communal implications. Surprisingly, forceful practices of community occur mostly in domestic space: the protagonist of Maud Martha spares the life of a mouse while thinking through the meanings of motherhood; the old couple in “The Bean Eaters” (1960) raise questions of hunger and poverty; Pepita, dead under a cot in “In the Mecca” (1968), points to the dangers of the world for girls; “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” (1960) uses the setting of a woman making breakfast to explore the intertwined racism and sexism in the murder of Emmett Till. These moments are forceful; they demand that the reader confront and resist gender, economic, and racial oppression. They are surprising because they locate this confrontation and resistance in domestic spaces.

Of course, many poets use domestic settings. However, Brooks’s black aesthetic of the domestic deserves attention as a distinct model of radically local black cultural nationalism that gives poets—including Jeffers, Mullen, Shockley, Finney, and Alexander—formal and thematic models for simultaneously making use of and revising the strategies and politics of the Black Arts Movement (BAM). Brooks’s poetry is radically local in the sense that it takes place not just in Chicago (which is among the cities that appear in BAM poetry) but also in ever smaller concentric circles from Bronzeville to its individual backyards, from the Mecca building to specific apartments therein. Many BAM poems move in the opposite direction, taking on large and abstract spaces. Amiri Baraka’s “SOS” (1969) consolidates the black cultural nation by “calling all black people” (2, 5, 6), where “black people” is a designation that increases in scope as the poem progresses. Jayne Cortez’s “How Long Has Trane Been Gone” (1969) celebrates John Coltrane in an increasingly figurative geography that culminates in a demand for “Parker City—Coltrane City—Ornette City / … in the State of Malcolm” (88, 90).

Although the “warpland” and “whirlwind” of Brooks’s later poetry (“Sermon” 2, 3; “Second Sermon” 2, 7, 11, 19, 38) participate in a long tradition of imagining alternative black homelands wholly apart from the US nation-state, Brooks’s early and mid-career writing does the same radical imagining and political work in local spaces that are domestic in both senses: they are private home spaces and they exist within and in relation to the US nation-state. Before, during, and after the BAM, Brooks takes up its investment in a coherent black community and its notion that poetry...