Aliki Caloyeras

Written for My African American Poetry Class.

Beginning with a recollection of my first encounter with Gwendolyn Brooks–I remember reading “We Real Cool” in an anthology in my high school English class. This is probably how many people first encounter Brooks. But what is striking to me now is how we read the poem in my private, all-girls, mostly-white, high school in the late ’80s. I don’t remember discussing the “We” of the poem as black youths in particular, and I think I imagined the pool players of the poem as white kids–a West Side Story street gang of sorts. The message I received as a teenager reading the poem was a general, “stay in school.” But there is, of course, so much more to “We Real Cool.” As Professor Alexander states so well in her introduction to this edition, “the missing ‘we’ that the poem’s pattern has led us to anticipate is a yawning chasm, the absence of the we, these young black boys, from the poem and from the earth once they have frittered their lives away” (xxi-xxii). Specificity here is important–the loss here is specific.

In other words, the universal can be problematic. I am thinking about the current discussion of Brokeback Mountain as a “universal love story.” This is a phrase I keep hearing over and over again in relation to the film–both in advertisements and from friends and relatives recommending the film. While I don’t disagree that most anybody can relate to the love story presented in the film, I think there’s a tendency in playing up the universal to forget the fact that not everybody will know what it’s like to live in fear of being mutilated, tortured, and beaten to death because of who they love. I don’t mean this response to be about Brokeback Mountain. My point is simply that the term “universal” has the potential to erase difference and politics and often works as a homogenizing force.

I think Brooks, however, works counter to that homogenizing force. The figures in her poems are specific, local, and Black. I am thinking about this, too, in relation to Langston Hughes’s “Racial Mountain.” Brooks is anything but the black poets who want to write like white poets that Hughes describes in his 1926(?) essay. We might read Brooks’ “Primer for Blacks” (118-120) as a kind of continuation of or response to Hughes’ groundbreaking essay–a call to take pride in one’s Black identity, which is not monolithic (universal?), but multifaceted. A “meaningful metamorphosis” occurs in the poem, where the racist symbolism of “black as negative, impure, morally corrupt, etc.” that has been put in place by white writers for hundreds of years is turned on its head so that “Black” comes to stand for “Glory” and “power.” “It’s Great to be white” is transformed into we can “Love the fact that we are Black.” The poem, furthermore, enacts what it describes in its third stanza: “The word Black/ has geographic power,/ pulls everyone in. . .”; by the end of the poem, the “You” is not only the “All of you,” which is given specificity by the list in the previous stanza,” but also the reader.

The “You,” that is given its own line at the end of the poem pulls the reader in and also points us back to the poem’s central strophe: “remember your Education:/ ‘one Drop–one Drop/ maketh a brand new Black.’/ One mighty Drop.” Brooks is in a sense re-educating readers through her poem (which is, after all, a “primer”) so that “Blackness/ stretches over the land” not as a shadow but as a powerful force worth celebrating. Given my original general premise, I’m not sure I want to say that this “you” at the end of the poem is “universal”; rather, I think it is all-inclusive–the difference being that there is difference in the all-inclusive. There is multiplicity here.

There’s a lot happening in this poem, and I doubt I’ve done it justice. We could productively look “Primer for Blacks” with others in our collection. “I Am A Black” on p.128 immediately comes to mind–I’m thinking about how the term “African American” doesn’t quite cut it for Brooks. There are also a few other poems that I really love, and I wonder if others have anything to say about them. They include: “The Anniad” (36), “The Egg Boiler (82), “To Don at Salaam” (112), “Paul Robeson” (113), and “Shorthand Possible” (124).

Responses to my classmates:

Antonio, I really appreciate your deftly drawn characterization of the arc of Brooks’ oeuvre, which moves from a Modernist “reworking [of] traditional [European?] forms” towards a poetry of social protest (which is still formally rich). You said it so well: it “is not to say that her earlier work has no social content, or that her later poems are less carefully crafted; but there is certainly a shift in intensities there as Brooks got involved with the Black Arts movement.” We can characterize Brooks’ work as both formally intricate and socially relevant. It is never simply art for arts sake–Brooks’ formal (whatever the form), shapely poems are a call to action but also enact protest and change.

I think an example of this is “Primer for Blacks,” which GerShun and I have already begun to explicate. Along those lines, I wonder if we can think of “re-education” as both a theme/motif that runs through Brooks’ poetry and an actuality, something that happens as we read the work. Jackie, for example, has described her own re-education as she reads Brooks. And my anecdote of my first encounter with Brooks’ “We Real Cool” was meant to call up images of a “problematic education” that asks for revision. (I want to, as an aside, refer to a poem by Natasha Trethewey from her new collection, Native Guard, which has to do with what I am calling “problematic educations.” Because my e-mail program cannot indicate italics, I am attaching a (Word file) copy of the poem, “Southern History.” I am only attaching the poem for your reference, since it reminds me of Brooks/ seems influenced by Brooks. I read it as a call for revision and re-education. (It is also a sonnet.) But I do want to stay with Brooks.)

Jackie, a quick response to your initial post, where you refer to Brooks’ “simple language,” and suggest that her poems function on a straightforward narrative level. I think I experienced Brooks’ poems differently– I mean, while I see that Brooks uses narrative quite a bit (ballads traditionally are, indeed, narrative poems), I also see that her language is really rich, nuanced, and varied. . . and anything but straight forward. In trying to come up with a written response to Brooks for our “e-class” today, I’ve found that I’ve needed to read the poems again and again in order to figure out what they’re doing–and with many, the jury is still out. That is, for me, Brooks’ language (although she uses the vernacular) is often really complicated–”The Egg Boiler” comes to mind as an example of what I meant. Seems like there is a metaphor at work hear–this sonnet is not simply about boiling eggs, is it?

GerShun has pointed to the motif of childhood that runs through the poems. I agree that Brooks is very protective of black childhood, and I think this also accounts for the tone of celebration and hope that runs through the poems. Reading GerShun’s post, I thought again of “Young Heroes II: To Don at Salaam,” one of my favorite poems in the collection. Am I correct that “Don” is Don L. Lee/ Haki Madhubuti? I know that Madhubuti and Brooks had a kind of literary mother-son relationship, and I am struck my the tone of love and care that underlies this poem. The image in the opening stanza of this loved boy-poet leaning back, reaching beyond almost to the point of falling–but not quite falling–is really lovely and moving. His “fine hands” in “print pockets” is, I think, symbolic of his writerly abilities–This is the young poet sitting at his desk, a virtuoso creating something that seems like it should fail or fall apart (as he should fall from his chair) but succeeds nonetheless. (Jazz can be like this, too, I believe.) He is “Beautiful” and “Impudent,” bold and alive. And his work is a tribute to his ancestors (literary and otherwise). This poem reads, to me, like the flip side of “We Real Cool” where the black boys are absent in the end. Here, instead, the black boy–a poet–has found his voice, “the listened-for music” and is “living in the world.” Such care for “black youth” here; such love.

*All references come from Elizabeth Alexander, ed., The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, Library of America/American Poets Project, 2005.