Gwendolyn Brooks's Black Aesthetic of the Domestic

Abstract

Gwendolyn Brooks has an undeniable influence on the work of late twentiethand early twenty-first century African American women poets. Honoree 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