SOURCE: "The Loss of Lyric Space and the Critique of Traditions in Gwendolyn Brooks's In the Mecca," in Kenyon Review, XVII, No. 1, Winter, 1995, pp. 136-47.

[In the following essay, Clarke examines the significance of ambiguity, indeterminacy, and postmodern subjectivity in In the Mecca. According to Clarke, "'In the Mecca' is an enunciation of place, fragmentation, despair, death, and a frantic splitting of the narrative strategies of showing and telling."]

What else is there to say but everything?

In the Mecca

The 1952 razing of Chicago's once magnificent showplace, the Mecca, was an act of erasure, causing Gwendolyn Brooks, by the late 1960s, to reconsider her own location in the tradition of African-American literature. Designed by George Edbrooke, "famous for his ability to utilize aesthetically large spaces," and built by the D. H. Burnham Company in 1891 for the white wealthy of Chicago, the Mecca became one of the early examples of a multifamily dwelling:

… During the Columbian Exposition of 1893 it was one of the places in the city that visitors wanted to see. (Later it was still a tourist attraction, but not because of its beauty.)

By 1912, the Mecca housed the black elite of Chicago. After World War I, the building began its decline. By the Great Depression the once elaborate showplace and tourist attraction had become a crowded slum for poor black people and a symbol of encroaching urban blight—a great hulk of modernity confining thousands of expendable people to the bowels of the city.

The Mecca was girded by three balconies and guarded by ornate wrought iron grillwork. Off these balconies, doors opened to the apartments, "like tiers of cells in a prison cell-block." Hard wood floors splintered, and beneath the balconies the tile was broken in many pieces. The Mecca contained 176 units. Some apartments had seven rooms. After the Depression, no one ever knew how many people lived there at any one time. Estimates of three thousand to nine thousand people have been given. "'You'll find them sleeping in the kitchen under the sink, anywhere they can sleep,'" one tenant is quoted as revealing to a journalist.

Gwendolyn Brooks began to write In the Mecca as a "teenage novel" in 1954. Brooks drew upon her firsthand experience as secretary to "a patent medicine purveyor" during the 1940s. She had walked through its U-shaped great gray hulk, its littered atria; passed by the once-beautiful marble walls and the once plushly carpeted floors; looked up to see the accumulated dirt and grime on the glass of its skylights emitting a kind of unreal light; passed her hand along its rusted wrought iron; mused over what remained of its useless fountains.

Her editors were never enthusiastic about the manuscript, counseled that her training in poetry had ill-prepared her for the "freer area of prose" and discouraged her. Harper's would publish the novella. Maud Martha in 1953, the polemical Bean Eaters in 1960, and the noted Selected Poems in 1963, before Brooks would turn her attention again to In the Mecca—this time conceived as a book-length poem, "2,000 lines or more."

Brooks's entire oeuvre has been studies of black subjectivity, of African-American oral and written traditions, sources of knowledge and faith systems; of the psychic and physical effects of racism on the lives of black and white people; and of the richness of the lyric. Brooks is a strong reader of blackness, a strong poet of place and region (the south side of Chicago), and a strong interpreter.

In the Mecca is Brooks's last book published by Harper's, her publisher of twenty-five years. In many ways In the Mecca marks Brooks's rejection of a safe subject position inside the American literary tradition. Indeed, the Pulitzer Prize winner announced in 1969 that Broadside Press, run by poet and promoter of the new black poetry Dudley Randall, would publish her next book, Riot (1969).

When the collection In the Mecca was published in 1968, the Mecca building had been razed for sixteen years. The poem "In the Mecca" does not attempt to historicize the action within the 1940s or 1950s nor is there any over attempt to inscribe within the narration or the narratives the real history of the 1960s. The poem sits as a gate to the text as if the real Mecca's great gray hulk of brick still filled half the block north of Thirty-fourth Street between State and Dearborn. As "perceptible" metaphor and symbol, the Mecca is a lesson on the spiritual and psychic condition of urban black people in post-modernity.

Brooks had been transformed by the apocalyptic decade of witness and the ringing testimony of the new black consciousness articulated by militant young black poets of the sixties, and sought a place among them. The narrator's authority in the poem parallels Brooks's own subject position as poet and soon-to-be arbiter of the new black arts movement in the Midwest. No longer Hyena, "[t]he striking debutante. / A fancier of firsts," but Esu, perhaps, the androgynous Yoruba god of chance who lurks at gateways, on highways, and at crossroads. Brooks moved her witness out of "her dusty threshold." Like her narrator, Brooks arrives in the wake of destruction; signifying indeterminacy, ambiguity, fluidity, unpredictability, and liminality. Uncertain, ironizing, and critiquing traditions and texts—Brooks's own and others—the poem extends a provisional hope—outside the Mecca. Brooks writes in her notes, "Work Proposed for 'In the Mecca'":

… I wish to present a large variety of personalities against a mosaic of daily affairs, recognizing that the grimmest of these is likely to have a streak or two streaks of sun.

In "In the Mecca," Brooks locates her narrator within a more transgressive space and creates a "speakerly text." "In the Mecca" is an enunciation of place, fragmentation, despair, death, and a frantic splitting of the narrative strategies of showing and telling. "In the Mecca" is a text which "Signifies" on the rich resources of African-American narrative and English poetry.

The movement of the poem's 807 lines winds narrowly with the movement of the narrator/witness/interpreter and the reader (who is reluctant) as if through the corridors of the once splendid dwelling. The poem will be encountered as a text of texts, in which race, sexuality, and gender are deeply implicated. Through a chronological reading of select narrations and narratives, I will also examine Brooks's narrative and rhetorical strategies as a turning to new space. I also read this poem as a post-modern elegy on the place of the lyric in African-American poetry.

As much as they Signify on antecedent texts, Brooks's strategies of shifting subjectivity, dispersed narration, and polyvocality look forward to Toni Morrison's strategies in her revised slave narrative, Beloved. As the enunciated story/mystery of Sethe's murder of her daughter tells itself, the reader must encounter the slave stories of Paul D., Baby Suggs, Stamp Paid, Sethe herself, and numerous other liminal and marginal characters whose accounts of atrocities committed against them are as horrific or more horrific than the ones committed against Sethe or the one Sethe committed against her young daughter. Morrison, nearly twenty years after Brooks's revisionary work, critiques historians—white and black—and undertakes to revise antecedent black (and white) texts in Beloved.

The action of Brooks's poem, on the surface, revolves around the search of Mrs. Sallie Smith, "this low brown butterball," for her missing daughter, Pepita, whom she and the reader ultimately discover is murdered. The reader is confronted with a relentless narrator who compels the reader to hear the stories—in multivoice and multivernacular irony—of characters speaking their own atrocities and failings contextualized/framed by a fictional Mecca, infusing the poem with a Gothic dread.

Full of temporal inversions, "In the Mecca" functions as a mystery, a "narrative-within-a-narrative." The modes of narration split sharply between its "showing" of Mrs. Sallie's desperate, passive search for her missing child, Pepita, and the frantic deployment of polyvocal and multidiscourse tellings. In each mode of narration, the narrator causes in the reader crises of witness, "an anxiety of fragmentation," a cut-off-ness, an isolation which in the poem is enhanced by the indifference of the other characters/subjects to the fate of the missing child and the distancing, elevated rhetoric and speech acts of the narrator, who knows, of course, the outcome of the search for Pepita.

Additionally, the play among narrative modes in the poem critiques and pays homage to the lyric, the ballad, the sermon, the slave narrative, the proverb, the psalm. The narrator enunciates these strategies and they are dispersed throughout the modes of discourse adopted by the other telling subjects. Through the deployment of end rhyme, the location of the lyric passages, the satirizing of the vernacular speech, the revising of African-American storytelling traditions, the poem acknowledges Brooks's "deep and broad familiarity with poetry's technical resources," and embraces and extends the formal, metric, and lyric proficiency of her antecedent texts.

Much of what Gates has said about Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo as "a book about texts and a book of texts, a composite narrative composed of subtexts, pre-texts, post-texts, and narratives-within-narratives," most certainly be said of "In the Mecca." The narrative is a book of texts, and each of the subjects is a text of itself. The narrator—and perhaps Brooks—functions as Esu and is the interpreter of black subjectivity in the poem. The poem is profoundly post-modern.

The movement of the poem, the space it takes on the page, the way it makes the reader go on the search is both telescopic and documentary. The poem evokes hallways, in an almost concrete fashion. The narrator is a film director, commanding attention to her epic production with its epigraph of biblical revision: "Now the way of the Mecca was on this wise."

The reader, like a reluctant viewer, is directed and commanded to "Sit where the light corrupts your face" and to follow the poem's constricted lineation down the corridors of the place to capture a perverse "social panorama." A mediating but unconscious subject led by the narrator, Mrs. Sallie leads the reader through a desolate space ringing with different languages: first as she, home from work, "ascends the sick and influential stair" to her fourth-floor apartment, and then as she winds back through the place in search of Pepita. Through Mrs. Sallie's subjectivity, the reader witnesses the other subjects. Ultimately the narrator, and not Mrs. Sallie, is the one who brings the reader to witness the truth of Pepita's murder.

At the third line of the poem, "the fair fables fall," the narrator tells the reader that this will be no predictable narrative—not Annie Allen nor even Maud Martha. As transgressive as they were, Annie and Maud were the centers. Subjectivity shifts in "In the Mecca."

Indirect discourse predominates and is a function of the narrator's control of the display of language and the more sympathetic subjects. Direct discourse is allowed more sparingly to evoke humor, sarcasm, irony, and realism; and the narrator's distance from the enounced. Free indirect discourse is employed to communicate the more authentic historical horrors and the subjects' interiority—and perhaps the narrator's empathy. Christian devotion, as practiced in the Mecca, is called into question through St. Julia Jones's direct and ostentatious expression of religiosity in her farcical exuberance: "'He hunts up the coffee for my cup. / Oh how I love that Lord.'" The narrator retrieves control to show Prophet Williams, the religious charlatan, "rich with Bible" but whose wife, Ida, "was a skeleton / was a bone" and "died in self-defense" and alone. The narrator's interior eruption, "(Kinswomen! / Kinswomen!)," "Signifies" on the speaker's appeal, "Oh, Kinsmen, we must meet the common foe," in Claude McKay's famous poem, "If We Must Die" and laments the sacrifices of black women's lives, indeed of women's lives (and bodies), and signals further sacrifices to be revealed "on this wise." This eruption is perhaps the only place where the narrator reveals a gender identity and empathy.

There is irreparable damage in this place, and Alfred, an unreliable witness whose subjectivity is conveyed primarily through indirect discourse, contends with the narrator for presence. He is much less reluctant than the reader, is persistent, reappears five times—more than any of the other more than fifty subjects. At times his relationship to the narrator evokes younger black poets' relationship to Brooks; at other times Alfred seems to be a persona for Brooks, apprenticing herself to the younger (male) poets. Alfred has not the narrator's language nor rhetorical power. He has too many masters and is distracted by too many pretenders: "Shakespeare … Joyce or James or Horace, Huxley, Hemingway," "pretty hair," "that golden girl," respectively. Yet he is relentless in his witnessing and will grow from the experience. Will he be able to take the story beyond the Mecca?

Such hope cannot be extended to Mrs. Sallie and eight of her nine children. The narrator shifts her attention from the reader to Yvonne, Melodie Mary, Cap, Casey, Thomas Earl, Tennessee, Emmett, Briggs—all except Pepita. Each child's world is as restricted and dangerous as their names are ambitious and imaginative. Explanatory narratives of impoverishment, sexual exploitation, potential crime and violence, hunger, and isolation interpret each child's psychic and physical space. Yvonne, Mrs. Sallie's oldest, offers a more extended lyric moment as she "prepares for her lover" and ponders and plans a subversive sexuality:

    It is not necessary….
    to have every day him whom
    to the end thereof you will love.

And Mrs. Sallie muses over the space she occupies in two disparate worlds—that of the Mecca where her daughter, "Melody Mary likes roaches" and that of her "Lady's pink convulsion, toy-child … under a shiny tended warp of gold." In lyric parody, in sing-song, slant-rhyme cadence, Mrs. Sallie wishes for a reversal of fortunes:

     "And that would be my baby be my baby….
     And I would be my lady I my lady…."

The lyric cannot exist in the Mecca; neither can the reversal of class and race locations.

The narrator's paradoxical rhetorical gesture, "What else is there to say but everything?" alerts the reader that language will not be impoverished in the showing and the telling. The focus shifts back to Mrs. Sallie as she, "counting noses," asks, in the vernacular, 'WHERE PEPITA BE?' This and variations of it become the strophe for the duration of the poem and extend beyond the question of Pepita's whereabouts to each character's telling of his/her own psychic location/place. Pepita is not the only tragedy here:

      In twos!
      In threes! Knock-knocking down the martyred halls
      at doors behind whose yelling oak or pine
           many flowers start, choke, reach up,
           want help, get it, do not get it,
           rally, bloom, or die on the wasting vine.

Paying homage to and parodying the origins of black narrative traditions, Brooks inverts "space and time" by confronting Mrs. Sallie with "Great-great Gram," her first encounter in the search. Great-great Gram, an ex-slave, renders her testimony, a slave narrative. The performative quality of Great-great Gram's enouncement is unsettling. Though she uses the vernacular minimally, Great-great Gram's rhetorical directness is nearly as caricaturist as St. Julia Jones. On the other hand, conveying Great-great Gram's nostalgic yet realistic recollections of slavery through direct address, Brooks parodies our notion of the conventional, mediated slave narrative. The missing Pepita does not concern Great-great Gram as much as it stirs a childhood memory of younger sister, "Pernie May," who was the "best popper" of that "something that creebled" in the dirt; or the more eloquent reflection:

      … Some slaves had beds of hay
      or straw, with cover-cloth. We six-uns curled
      in corners of the dirt, and closed our eyes,
      and went to sleep—or listened to the rain
      fall inside, felt the drop
      big on our noses, bummies and tum-tums….

This narration is particularly rich as it recalls for the reader the great migrations of the slaves descendants from the South to the North to cities like Chicago, Detroit, New York, Washington, D.C.; and of the real Mecca's history as one of the sites where that history and memory reside. Finally, Brooks collapses historical and present time as Great-great Gram's story of Pernie May refers the reader to Mrs. Sallie's younger daughter, Melodie Mary, who smashes roaches, "in the grind of her rapid heel."

Loam Norton, Mrs. Sallie's next encounter, also a very rich enouncement, has not seen Pepita either. He is preoccupied like Great-great Gram, with a correlative atrocity, "Belsen and Dachau." Using free indirect discourse for the first time, the poem presents Loam. The narrator reads Loam's thoughts, in a cynical revision of the Twenty-third Psalm. The past and present histories of the victims of slavery and the victims of the Holocaust are linked in time-worn signs: "jungles and pastures":

      … The Lord was their shepherd.
      yet they did want.
 
      Joyfully would they have lain in jungles or pastures
      …. Their gaunt
      souls were not restored, their souls were banished.
      In the shadow valley
      they feared the evil, whether with or without God.
      They were comforted by no Rod,
      no Staff, but flayed by, O besieged by, shot aplenty.
      ........................
      Goodness and mercy should follow them
          all the days of their death.

Enhancing the "speakerliness" of the text, the revised Psalm exemplifies the narrator's critical and interpretive functions as Great-great Gram's narrative shows the distance the narrator/interpreter must observe between subject and self. Also, Loam's monologue on the failure of faith calls upon the reader to revisit St. Julia Jones's libidinous exhorting of the Twenty-third Psalm at the beginning of the poem "… And I lie late in the still pastures. And meadows…." Loam asserts to the reader, "I am not remote, / not unconcerned" as if to vindicate himself (and Great-great Gram) for his preoccupation with his own horror.

Even the door becomes a speaker and a witness, questioning Mrs. Sallie's and her children's return: "What are you doing here? and where is Pepita the puny—the halted, glad-sad child?" The speaking door is an odd moment and a parodic comment on the Gothic urges of this mysterious poem: yet this is a place of "martyred halls" and "yelling oak and pine," rife with death and history. As the reader follows the Smiths back into their apartment, the poem breaks and constricts into eight narrow, slant-rhymed lines, mirroring their reentry into the apartment, as they try to "subdue / the legislation of their yoke and devils" with a false lyricality:

      Has just wandered!
      Has just blundered away
      from her own.
      And there's no worry
      that's necessary.
      She
      comes soon alone.

But their hope for Pepita is fractured as they consider how endangered young girls are in the Mecca, a place of female violation/exploitation:

      And that lank fellow looking furtive.
      What
      cold poison could he spew, what stench commit
      upon a little girl, a little lost girl….

The reader's hope is not recuperated either as she witnesses Mrs. Sallie's encounter with "The Law," to whom a missing "Female of the Negro Race" is of less concern than a "paper doll" or a "southern belle." They constrain Mrs. Sallie with "a lariat of questions." The Law leaves. Aunt Dill, a sinister witness, forecasts the accident, the murder of Pepita, as she arrives to give false comfort to the Smiths: "Little gal got / raped and choked to death last week."

Aunt Dill's gratuitous monologue hardly prepares the reader for one of the major crises of fragmentation in the poem: Mrs. Sallie's withdrawal from her subject position and from the narrative. The reader sees Mrs. Sallie and her children no more. The Law returns, and thus begins the second principal part of the poem. The Law proceeds through the place to ultimately uncover the "accident." The narrator has full control of the showing and most of the telling. Introduced to many more language users, whose baffling testimonies are relayed through the narrator, the reader is confronted with unmediated testimonies and interpretations. The reader must bear witness to subjects previously encountered as well as new ones, even more isolated from one another and fragmented by their atrocities and failings.

Alfred appears again—and has not seen Pepita—but offers a paean, in free indirect discourse, to Senghor, "negritude needing" which signals movement beyond his own mediocrity and Western derivativeness. Enhanced by the alliteration in the eighth line, Mazola's interior narration meditates on how easy death is in this place. This passage perhaps also laments the death of lyric within the tradition:

      … the strangest thing is when the stretcher goes!—
      the elegant hucksters bearing the body when the body
      leaves its late lair the last time leaves.
      With no plans for return.

Alfred's paean to Senghor—the major exponent of negritude—is countered by the narrator's competitive paean to Don L. Lee—the eminent black nationalist poet—and reinforces the loss of lyric. This latter enunciation about Lee signifies a turning to new space in the present, the possibility of a new world-view and creative production. The Don Lee exhortation may hold out the prospect of reclamation beyond the "art-lines" of Senghor and also beyond the lyric:

      Don Lee wants …
      new art and anthem: will
      want a new music screaming in the sun.

Now the poem begins to more overtly reflect the black political climate of the sixties, its apocalyptic nature, the turning of blacks toward themselves and against white sanction, acceptance, tutelage, the violent wrenching of an enduring symbiosis.

In the poem's first dialogue, Amos argues with the "gradualist," who says, "Takes time," Amos prays for the purgation of a feminized America. America must be slapped, kicked prostrate, heel ground into "that soft breast" in order that she can rise, recover, "Never to forget." America must be gendered female to be conquered and therefore rehabilitated, "recover[ed]."

"The ballad of Edie Barrow," an intensely formalist moment, announces itself to the reader, and is a "surface divergence." On one level this is Edie's story of how she gives herself to a gentile boy and is rejected by him when he marries one of his own kind. On another level, Brooks is Signifying on her copious use of the ballad form in her earlier poetry. Brooks offers Edie's ballad as a counterpoint to Amos's prayer, and inverts it. The lyricality and alternating end rhyme disguise the cynicism of its narrative. Also, Edie's metonymic lament that her situation as compromised woman will be as a "hungry tooth in my breast" is juxtaposed to Amos's vengeful prayer that "Great-nailed boots … heel-grind that soft breast" of America, the metaphorical woman. Edie's cynical lyric of sex also recalls Yvonne's more naive lyrical moment. Edie, as one of several sexual females, illuminates how the feminine is constructed, remade, and degraded in the Mecca—both as place and as poem. The few lyric moments in the poem are sustained by the female subjects. "The ballad of Edie Barrow" represents more than any other passage the loss of lyric space. Sexuality, throughout this poem, is configured in male and female subjects as a corrupted heterosexuality. This corrupted sexuality is humorously and more cynically revealed when Prophet Williams, that signifier of inauthentic religion, is revisited, but this time as a purveyor of potions and elixirs who has:

     Drawing and Holding Powder, Attraction
     Powder, Black
     Cat Powder, Powerful Serum,
     "Marvelous Potency Number Ninety-one"
     (which stoppeth husbands and lovers from dastardy)

As she continues the frantic pace, through the fragmented community of language-users, the narrator, for the first time, addresses the missing girl, Pepita, directly: "How many care, Pepita?" Not Staley and Lara, Simpson, Bixby and June, "these three Maries," Great-uncle Beer, Wezlyn, Insane Sophie. "How many care, Pepita?… these little care, Pepita, what befalls a / nullified saint or forfeiture (or child)." Who does Pepita become in this moment—without the mediation of Mrs. Sallie? Perhaps she becomes a symbol of Brooks's antecedent texts, her loss of lyric autonomy.

Alfred, having found his own voice, returns and, for the first time, in a direct testimony rejects the tutelage of his white masters, "Not Baudelaire, Bob Browning, no Neruda" and muses aloud:

    "A violent reverse.
    We part from all we thought we knew of love
    and of dismay-with-flags-on. What we know
    is that there are confusion and conclusion.
    Rending.
    Even the hardest parting is a contribution….
    What shall we say?
 
    Farewell. And Hail! Until Farewell again."

"We part from all we thought we knew of love" signals the painful parting with the lyric testament—at least in the Mecca. Lyric is sex, lyric is female, lyric is Western contamination—racial as well as artistic. Again the question of what is there to say, what is the language beyond the ending, beyond "Farewell"? What can be reclaimed or recuperated? Certainly not Pepita—and perhaps not anyone else in the Mecca. There is damage here, irrevocable, as the narrator takes the reader closer to the reality of the "accident."

The narrator reemerges with the startlingly sarcastic narrative of the "sixtyish sisters, the twins with floured faces," who "muffle their Mahler, finish their tea, / stare at the lips of the Law." The sisters exemplify bourgeois intransigence and indifference to the fate of Pepita. They are sharply juxtaposed to an equally satiric narration of Way-out Morgan, a bitter black militant collecting guns, "sinfully lean … fills fearsomely / on visions of Death-to-the-Hordes-of-the-White-Men! Death!" He envisions, like Amos, a vengeful sacrifice. But as an inversion of Amos, for whom sex is a metaphor for conquest, Way-Out "postpones" the real thing, "a yellow woman in his bed … to consider" his vision of "Ruin."

However, the final depiction of Alfred, "lean at the balcony leaning" posits sacrifice and offers hope, and perhaps resurrection.

     … something in Mecca
     continues to call! Substanceless; yet like mountains …
     ................. And steadily
     an essential sanity, black and electric,
     builds to a reportage and redemption
           A hot estrangement.
           A material collapse that is Construction.

Finally dwarfed by Alfred's commanding rhetoric, the narrator presents the body of the murdered Pepita, "beneath the cot" of her murderer, Jamaican Edward. Pepita's body and Jamaican Edward are the last of the more than fifty characters/subjects/witnesses the narrator shows us. Though the reader has never known Pepita, her body provides that "essential sanity," some relief, and a grounding in chaotic space. The narrator quotes Pepita's own childishly lyrical words and rhyming couplet to the reader: "'I touch'—she said once—'petals of a rose. / A silky feeling through me goes!'" The reader, as Alfred in the passage above, must see construction from material collapse, must, in seeking reality, "explore the injury inflicted by it," must find the language ("reportage") to reemerge from the paralysis induced by it, must "move on." It is uncertain the reader can move on.

And finally, Mecca, with all of its historical, metaphorical, cultural, political resonances for African-Americans, is a place/space of dissolution and desolation—a dystopic space despite Malcolm X. The modes of narration remain split, which signify the impossibility of reconciliation. There is a possibility of renascence—outside the Mecca—the possibility of something "black and electric" rising out of the rubble, perhaps even out of the dead Pepita's "chopped chirpings oddly rising." However, the possibility of new space, new speech, and new agency become more realized in "After Mecca," the male-focused space of occasional, exhortatory, eulogistic poems of the second section of the book.