The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience and Change Agent

By Quraysh Ali Lansana

“[A] superb tribute . . . [an] essential collection” of essays analyzing the works of the preeminent twentieth-century poet and voice of social justice (Booklist).

Winner of the Central New York Book Award for Nonfiction

Finalist for the Chicago Review of Books Award

Poet, educator, and social activist Gwendolyn Brooks was a singular force in American culture.

The first black woman to be named United States poet laureate, Brook’s poetry, fiction, and social commentary shed light on the beauty of humanity, the distinct qualities of black life and community, and the destructive effects of racism, sexism, and class inequality.

A collection of thirty essays combining critical analysis and personal reflection, The Whiskey of Our Discontent, presents essential elements of Brooks’ oeuvre—on race, gender, class, community, and poetic craft, while also examining her life as poet, reporter, mentor, sage, activist, and educator.

“Gwendolyn Brooks wrote and performed her magnificent poetry for and about the Black people of Chicago, and yet it was also read with anguish, delight, and awe by white people, successive waves of immigrants, and ultimately the world.” —Bill Ayers, from the Introduction

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781608467648

Book preview

The Whiskey

of Our Discontent

Gwendolyn Brooks

as Conscience

and Change Agent

Edited by Quraysh Ali Lansana and Georgia A. Popoff

Foreword by Sonia Sanchez

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Haymarket Books

Chicago, Illinois

© 2017 Quraysh Ali Lansana and Georgia A. Popoff

Published in 2017 by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

www.haymarketbooks.org

[e-mail]

ISBN: 978-1-60846-764-8

Trade distribution:

In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com

In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com

All other countries, Ingram Publisher Services International, [e-mail]

This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation and Wallace Action Fund.

Cover photograph of Gwendolyn Brooks taken on March 10, 1969, during her semester as Rennebohm Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Courtesy of University of Wisconsin Archives. Cover design by John Yates.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

First comes correctness, then embellishment!

And music, mode, and mixed philosophy

may follow fitly on propriety

to tame the whiskey of our discontent!

What can I do?

    But World (a sheep)

wants to be Told.

If you ask a question, you

can’t stop there.

You must keep going.

You can’t stop there: World will

waive; will be

facetious, angry. You can’t stop there.

You have to keep on going.

—Gwendolyn Brooks, In the Mecca

Contents

Foreword: This Gwensister Called Life Sonia Sanchez

Preface Quraysh Ali Lansana and Georgia A. Popoff

Introduction William Ayers

Critical Essays

Hacking at the Root: Brooks’s Exploration of Colorism in Maud Martha Tara Betts

Juxtaposed Dichotomies: The Idealized White Suburban Pastoral, the Surrealist Tableau of Black Poverty, and the Women in Between Antoinette Brim

A Poetics against Obscuring: Reflections on the Black Underclass in the Work of Gwendolyn Brooks R. J. Eldridge

The Politics of Neglect James Allen Hall

We Still Cool? Revisiting Black Masculinity, Resistance, and Urban Violence in Brooks’s We Real Cool Troy Harden

Double Vision: Innocence and Experience in the Childlike Monologues of Gwendolyn Brooks Judith Harris

I Do Not Sell Well: Black Women Decentered in the Black Arts Movement Ciara Darnise Miller

Building an Architecture of Love: An Appreciation of Gwendolyn Brooks’s In Montgomery Patricia Spears Jones

Velvety Velour and Other Sonnet Textures in Gwendolyn Brooks’s the children of the poor Christina Pugh

The Form of Paradox: Gwendolyn Brooks’s The Anniad Keith S. Wilson

Art Urges Voyages: Sense of Self as Social Change in Gwendolyn Brooks’s The Crazy Woman and Song of Winnie Demetrice A. Worley

Gwendolyn Brooks: On Rioting and Riot—a Symposium

Mundane and Plural: Riot David Baker

Brooks’s Prosody: Three Sermons on the Warpland Carl Phillips

The Eros in Democracy: An Aspect of Love, Alive in Ice and Fire Meghan O’Rourke

Personal and Creative Reflections

#149 Jill Hawkins

Deliberate Dasha Kelly

Family Pictures, Old & New Adrian Matejka

Breaking Glass and the Sad Shatter of Hope Georgia A. Popoff

The Necessary Truth cin salach

Jazz June Clifford Thompson

Gwendolyn Brooks and Me: How I Discovered the Golden Shovel Emma Vallelunga

Our Black Ms. Brooks Nagueyalti Warren

Blacks: A Permission to Be Blk. avery r. young

A Moment with Ms. Brooks John H. White

Legacy

Pulitzer Jury Report: February 1950 Major Jackson

Concealed and Carried: Brooks’s Loaded Boxes Quraysh Ali Lansana

Afterword Haki R. Madhubuti

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Bibliography

Online Resources

Notes

Foreword

This Gwensister Called Life

Sonia Sanchez

1

you tell the stars

don’t be jealous of her light. . . .

This is an introduction, yo sé (i know)

This is an introduction, yo lo sé (i know it)

about Sister Gwen’s words, heavy as stones,

beautiful black stones, coming from the sea,

caressing our skins with color,

rinsing our bones where sainthood

might be possible

This is an introduction about hands

yo sé (i know), yo lo sé (i know it), yo sé (i know)

her hands anointing Blacks

sequestered in an American hunger impossible to satisfy.

And she whispered us to attention

with what could be. . . .

She said Venga. Come. vivir. to live. hablar sin bastón. to speak without a cane.

And we came reimagining ourselves on this

American landscape.

And we came because her words exonerated us from crimes in front of the world

And we came as we caught her tongue embroidered with pyramids,

And we moved away from graveyards to our own births.

And she came, woman of trees and parasols

And she came, woman of prophesy and praise

And she came towards us

And she came womanclear. . . .

2

you tell the morning

to ease her into a water

fall of dreams

for she is a holy one . . .

Language itself, in a broad sense, is a symbol of the thought interaction of a people, although it is designed primarily to communicate experiences in fundamental ways. Poetry , on the other hand, is the symbol or essence of language designed to sensitize meaning, motivate, create, or re-create experience, and bestow a state of perception not ordinarily experienced or not experienced in an ordinary way.

The poet, even though she or he speaks plainly, is a manipulator of symbols and language images that have been planted by experience in the collective subconscious of a people. Through this manipulation he or she creates new or intensified meaning and experience, whether to the benefit or detriment of his or her audience. This poetry is what I call subconscious conversation: it is as much the work of those who understand it as of those who make it.

And make it she does. This poet. Woman. Sister Gwen. She reminds us of Du Bois’s saying: This is a beautiful world; this is a wonderful America, which the founding fathers dreamed until their sons drowned it in the blood of slavery and devoured it in greed. With her words. Her poetry. Her genius. She demands/requests that we, her children, must help rebuild it. This America in so much disrepair.

She does what Frantz Fanon wrote. She holds herself like a sliver, to the heart of the world. She stands up to the world. She does battle for the creation of a human world—that is, a world of reciprocal recognition.

So we learn from her words that the enemy is not a few men or women, but a system. We praise her because she has taught us that vengeance is not the point. Change is. Education is. Freedom is. Social and sexual justice is. Love is.

When one day your children ask, What did you do? When they rise like the Guatemalan poet Otto René Castillo rose and asked us what we did when our nation died out slowly, like a sweet fire, small and alone. When they will ask us: What did you do when the poor suffered, when tenderness and life burned out in them? We the lovers of selves, the lovers of justice and freedom and democracy will turn and say, we resisted like Sister Gwen resisted.

I know that one of the words given to us a long time ago was resist; it is an ancient word, a holy word, a churchgoing word, a womanist word, a gay word, a political word, a lesbian word, a word to teach to our children. All children. As they enter into the world. It is a word to teach ourselves as we hummmmmmm ourselves into existence each morning. Giving praise that a woman named Sister Gwendolyn Brooks walked on this earth. Singing eyes. Singing hands. Singing life. Singing poems, alarming the death singers that she had come to celebrate life . . . life . . . life . . .

   Woke up this morning with my eyes on Sister Gwen

   I say, Woke up this morning with my eyes on Sister Gwen

   Woke up this morning with my eyes on Sister Gwen

Gonna Resist, Gonna Love, Gonna Resist

Just like her. . . . . . . . . . .

3

you tell the ocean

you call out to Olokun

to bring her always

to safe harbor . . .

For a long time I’ve pondered this thing that we do called writing. I’ve looked at my words sometimes as if they belonged to a stranger. The truth is as you grow older, as time passes, you stare at some of your words as if you have only a passing acquaintance with them. But each time I read Miss Brooks, each time I revisit her poems, they climb up on my knees and sit in tight contentment. They speak to me of form and color, patterns and dawns. They talk of myths; they tell me where flesh lives, where a troop of young heroes and sheroes lean back in chairs, beautiful. Impudent. Ready for life. Where the young Live not for battles won. / Live not for the-end-of-the-song. / Live in the along.

I never have to ask where are the flowers? Sun? Where are the mothers? Fathers? Where are the old-marrieds? Where are the children adjudged the leastwise of the land? Where are the riots? The Sermon on the Warpland? Where are the prophets? Where is Pepita? Where are they who flail in the hot time? Where is the sound that we are each other’s harvest?

I see them in her poems that breathe women in a blaze of upsweeps and backyards and ballads, in her children dancing between urine and violets, in her singing to us between the sleeping and the waking.

I have gotten lost sometimes in this journey called life, in which nothing moved, when I gathered up our daytime hysteria, when I looked at the country’s delirium, when I tried to disagree with my blood, and I heard her poems turning away from funerals, feasting on rain and laughter, walking toward life with serious hands, heard her footsteps gathering around us, and she came tongued by fire and water and bone, and she came from where the drum sings, and she came reclaiming our most sacred ashes, and her love carved the journey of this womansail.

And as she entered into our twenty-first-century bloodstream, paddling a river of risks, she became the color of bells, set sail on the wind, and sailed home. Said hello to our own good-byes.

Preface

Quraysh Ali Lansana and Georgia A. Popoff

June 2017 marks the birth centennial of Gwendolyn Brooks, one of the twentieth century’s preeminent poets and voices of social justice. The Whiskey of Our Discontent is a collection of writings celebrating her art and influence. One of the finest practitioners of the craft of prosody, she also possessed a keen knowledge of the canon of Western poetry. Ms. Brooks holds a place at the top of the list of major African American writers, national educators, and conscious chroniclers of American society and the Black American experience.

A bold and compassionate voice with an extraordinary perspective, Ms. Brooks explored an ever-changing political climate, confronting oppression and illusion over the course of her lifetime. In her quest to hold up a mirror to the worlds she witnessed and to closely capture the daily communities she navigated and inhabited, she created poetry that skillfully addressed issues of race, gender, class, community, and culture in ways that spoke to a diverse audience—even reached the mainstream—while never losing her connection with home.

Her body of work, spanning seven decades, offers both a lens on an external politic and a personal stance that grew and evolved as the climate of the nation changed throughout her lifetime. Remarking on Ms. Brooks’s legacy at the 2015 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, poet Jericho Brown addressed the critical nature of the role she played as a subversive poet and, as a subversive poet, she still managed to have mass appeal. As a mainstream poet, she was always speaking to race and empire . . . pushing form past what you could expect of it. Brown impressed upon the audience that Ms. Brooks holds a place in a special lineage of artists who preserve the tradition of the Harlem Renaissance that continues today, evident in the voices of so many poets, Brown included. The poets of that movement were known for breaking and subverting prosodic form, which remained a hallmark of Black poetry throughout the twentieth century and continues in the twenty-first. Additionally, Brown asserted, She approached this art as if it were a community.¹

Over the course of her life, Gwendolyn Brooks was witness to major changes in American societal norms, and she was a chronicler of the most significant moments of the twentieth century as well as Black American life, detailing the extraordinary and the everyday, the insult and challenge, the celebrations and dance of living a life of justice and honesty. Her family left the South just a step ahead of the Great Migration to the North for jobs and opportunities that the urban centers purportedly promised. Ms. Brooks had roots in the Deep South, was born in Kansas, and moved north to Chicago herself, where she wrote to reflect the extraordinary implications in the ordinary motions of and daily expressions in family and community relationships, as well as a changing social tide in the nation.

Her poems illustrate both inter- and intra-racial dynamics, addressing the ways notions about skin tone and hair imprint a personal belief system onto the unsuspecting and impressionable. Herself a shy soul once swayed to believe she was not attractive because she did not have good hair and that her dark skin was a detriment even within her own community, she put these sources of self-doubt into verse and meter.

Ms. Brooks was once an integrationist striving to believe in a nation where humans were truly granted fair treatment and equal opportunity, but the reality of oppression and racism moved her to embrace Black Power politics, at the risk of her career and financial security. Gwendolyn Brooks was nothing if not direct and bold. She was also always a step ahead in speaking to critical human justice and civil rights issues. As a Black woman in America, she faced countless obstacles and surmounted them while educating generations to follow in her lineage, all while developing a body of work that will stand as testament to history.

Why was Ms. Brooks so neglected by the canon? Why was her work not valued as serious, well-crafted poetry? Does she belong to supporters of her early poetry books, from A Street in Bronzeville to In the Mecca, who argue that she dumbed down her craft to create a service literature in search of a Black audience? Does she belong to the Black Arts Movement community, many of whom proffered that her early works were safer, less overtly Black, and written for white people? Literary history certainly supports the notion that Ms. Brooks’s career suffered mightily when she elected to leave Harper & Row to publish with Black presses, notably Broadside Press and Third World Press. The two of us often refer to this choice, stemming from the now famous 1967 Second Black Writers’ Conference at Fisk University, as the Pivot. Did her decision to walk away from the New York literary establishment taint her legacy and import to the Western canon? Did any of her choices diminish her direct influence on several generations of poets who have been recognized in the world of letters in general and Black literature specifically?

Pulitzer-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa’s collection, Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries, contains an interview he conducted with writer Tom Johnson. The interview, titled Yusef Komunyakaa on Etheridge Knight, explores the relationship between this pair of significant poets and their shared connection to the blues, jazz, and Southern traditions. It is common knowledge in Black literary history that Knight and Ms. Brooks corresponded regularly when he was incarcerated in the Indiana State Prison. Knight sent her poems, and Ms. Brooks wrote thoughtful and critical responses. Their bond grew to the point that Ms. Brooks was invited to give a reading with Knight at the prison. The audio recording of the reading is remarkable. Ms. Brooks also helped him secure a book deal with another of Knight’s great influences, Dudley Randall, of Broadside Press.

Later in the interview, referring to Knight’s aesthetic relationship with the Black Arts Movement, Komunyakaa states:

I think with the Black Arts Movement, Etheridge was really on the sidelines of that movement. His poems are a lot more grounded than the voices coming out of the Black Arts Movement. Etheridge is not reactionary in his poems. He is confrontational, and he is also seeking a level of truth that pretty much defines the essence of him—an

individual, an artist. Same as a blues singer would, same as Robert Johnson would. Coming to his own voice and technique, and yet knowing the overall tradition. I think he knew the blues tradition, the black folk tradition, but also the European tradition, probably through reading in prison. Moreover, he was also closely respected by people such as Gwendolyn Brooks, who had also come through that tradition. As a matter of fact, I think when Gwendolyn Brooks aligns herself with the Black Arts Movement her poetry loses a fundamental ground, except the book Into the Mecca.²

The correct title of the book Komunyakaa references is In the Mecca, Ms. Brooks’s book-length poem about the Mecca Flats building on Chicago’s South Side, where she worked as a secretary for a spiritual advisor. The poem also functions as an incredibly vivid and imaginative vehicle for her political and cultural shift from integrationist principles to Black nationalism. Though in the above quote it is unclear which specific tradition Knight and Brooks share, as several traditions are mentioned, what is crystal clear is Komunyakaa’s opinion.

The interviewer proffers a follow-up question: "So, you think, in a way, she maybe ideologically wanted to embrace something that wasn’t so much of herself as her earlier poetry?

Komunyakaa responds: I think so. But again, she is reaching out for a community. Reaching out to those individuals who would have denied her existence unless she co-opted herself.³

These are bold assertions. In truth, the interviewer’s question is as vexing as Komunyakaa’s response. The idea that Ms. Brooks was somehow, for a period of her life, not a nappy-headed, dark-skinned Black woman consumed with race, class, gender, community, and craft is absurd. She spent all of her eighty-three years on Chicago’s Black South Side, finding the extraordinary in the ordinary daily struggles and victories of the African American experience, while providing a progressive voice for Black women, from her first book to the volume published posthumously. Yes, she relinquished her perm for an afro, but did her command of language diminish in the process? What ideologically did she embrace that was not herself? Being a Black woman? Growing up, then choosing to stay in Black neighborhoods? Her poem the mother from A Street in Bronzeville (1945) is just as revolutionary as To Those of My Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals from Primer for Blacks (1980), if not more so, given the year in which it was published.

To be fair, some of the Black Arts Movement individuals Brooks is attempting to reach, per Komunyakaa’s response, did in fact question her ideological identity.

Poet, author, scholar, and founder of Third World Press Haki R. Madhubuti writes in his introduction to Honoring Genius: Gwendolyn Brooks:

In her continuing frame of reference, the confusion over social responsibility and art for art’s sake intensified. Even though she didn’t actually see herself in the context of Euro-American poetry, she was being defined in that context. She was always the American poet who happened to be Negro—the definition was always from the negative to the positive. Again, a Euro-American definition; again conditioned to accept the contradictory and the dangerous. If you cannot definitively and positively define yourself in accordance with your historical and cultural traditions, how in the world can you be consciously consistent in the direction your person and your work must take in accordance with that which is ultimately best and natural for you? At this time Gwendolyn Brooks didn’t think of herself as an African or an African American. At best she was a new negro becoming black. Her view of history and struggle was that of the traditional American history and had not been challenged by anyone of black substance.⁴

Madhubuti continues, turning attention to the validity of her early work, particularly the Pulitzer Prize–winning Annie Allen:

Annie Allen (1949), important? Yes. Read by blacks? Not many. Annie Allen, more so than