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5. A Reportage and Redemption: The Poetics of African American Countermemory in Gwendolyn Brooks’s In the Mecca
- University of Iowa Press
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Only months before the publication of Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred, Harper’s magazine published a lengthy article by John Bartlow Martin on “one of the most remarkable Negro slum exhibits in the world” (), the Mecca Building on Chicago’s South Side. The narrative journey that begins this article, from the shining towers of the Chicago Loop to the shabby tenements of the South Side, where even the sun is dirty, follows what would become a familiar rhetorical path for describing deteriorating urban neighborhoods , the racialized discourse of urban decline. Perhaps no other building symbolized post–World War II urban decline more starkly than the Mecca Building. Built by the D. H. Burnham Company in , the Mecca was at first celebrated as a boldly innovative architectural prototype for luxury apartment living. With its atrium courtyards, its skylights and ornamental iron grillwork, its elaborate fountains and flower gardens, it was a major tourist attraction during the Columbian Exposition. Beginning with the movement of Chicago’s wealthy to the North Side at the turn of the century, however, and culminating with the economic devastation wrought by the Great Depression, it gradually became an overcrowded tenement. By the Mecca Building had become notorious not because of its architectural magnificence, but because of the poverty of its remaining inhabitants.1 It was demolished shortly afterward so that its final owner, 128 5. A Reportage and Redemption The Poetics of African American Countermemory in Gwendolyn Brooks’s In the Mecca From the Chicago Loop, where sunlight off the lakefront strikes the shining towers, State Street runs straight south, wide, busy with streetcars and heavy trucks. Quickly the buildings get shabby—little stores selling auto parts, a junkyard crammed with rusting wreckage. The city is harsh: concrete streets, brick building walls, black steel viaducts. Beyond nd Street the faces of the people are black. This is the South Side Negro section. Here the street is quieter, the sun is hazy and dirty and pale. , “The Strangest Place in Chicago” the Illinois Institute ofTechnology (IIT), could expand its new campus, designed by the renowned modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Before the Mecca Building was obliterated, it had become the subject of national media attention as a monument to the problem of urban decline, which was increasingly becoming identified with black communities. It subsequently became the subject of one of the most important books associated with the Black Arts movement, Gwendolyn Brooks’s In the Mecca. Brooks’s collection of poems, which begins with an epigraph from Martin’s “The Strangest Place in Chicago” but contests its racial rhetoric of decline, consists of two sections: a long narrative title poem, which was planned and drafted in the s but not completed until , and a second section of more topical poems, “After Mecca,” written in the midst of the – Chicago Freedom movement. Dedicated to “the memory of Langston Hughes; and to James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, and Mike Alexandroff, educators extraordinaire,” this volume is exceptionally important in Brooks’s political transformation as a writer, as it registers her growing commitment to an increasingly activist, cultural nationalist position in the Chicago black community. This stance is most evident in “After Mecca,” which includes such uncompromising poems on African American urban life as “Boy Breaking Glass,” who “has not Congress, lobster, love, luau,/the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty” (), and “The Blackstone Rangers,” whose “country is a Nation on no map” ().2 “After Mecca” also includes poems celebrating African American cultural heroism, such as “Medgar Evers,” “Malcolm X,” and “The Wall,” written for and read at the dedication of the Wall of Respect, a South Side public mural commemorating African American history that became a prototype for the burgeoning community mural movement. The title poem of In the Mecca likewise appeals to the mood of urban crisis experienced most acutely by inner-city blacks in the late s but evoked as well by critics of modernist urban planning.3 Rather than presenting a presumably disinterested “statistical report” on urban poverty, Brooks wrote that she was interested in writing about the Mecca with “a certain detachment, but only as a means of reaching substance with some incisiveness.” She aimed in her long poem to “present a large variety of personalities against a mosaic of daily affairs, recognizing that even the grimmest of these is likely to have a streak or two streaks of sun” (Report ). “In the Mecca” reconstructs the vanished world of the...