SOURCE: "Anger So Flat: Gwendolyn's Brooks's Annie Allen," in A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, edited by Maria K. Mootry and Gary Smith, University of Illinois Press, 1987, pp. 140-52.

[In the following essay. Tate examines the form, structure, and heroine of Annie Allen. As Tate notes, Brooks presents "an emotionally charged satirical comment about the tragedy of a woman's inactive life, a tragedy compounded by racial prejudice."]

In 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks became the first black American to receive a Pulitzer Prize for literature for Annie Allen (1949), a collection of rigorously technical poems, replete with lofty diction, intricate word play, and complicated concatenations of phrases. One particular poem, "The Anniad," which constitutes the second of three sections in the collection, is especially characteristic of Brooks's fascination with "the mysteries and magic of technique." In fact, "The Anniad" seems to possess an inordinate amount of word mystery and magic. Brooks readily admits that "The Anniad" is a "labored" poem, although she also says that she derived a great deal of satisfaction from writing it: "What a pleasure it was to write that poem!… I was just very conscious of every word; I wanted every phrase to be beautiful, and yet to contribute to the whole … effect."

Perhaps the delight she took in creating "The Anniad" was responsible for her indulgence in the complicated techniques that densely pattern the poem's texture, as well as those in the other two sections of the book, "Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood" and "The Womanhood."

The complicated techniques in Annie Allen produce virtual curiosity pieces of intellectual verse, which her critics consistently mention as prize-worthy. But by the same token, these critics seldom focus full critical attention on this book; instead, they discuss those collections that employ subtle social commentary and realistic depictions of urban settings. As a result, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), The Bean Eaters (1960), Selected Poems (1963), and In the Mecca (1968) receive the lion's share of critical coverage. By contrast, Annie Allen seems peculiarly abstract and extremely esoteric. These characteristics are responsible for that collection being labeled "intellectual" and "academic," and they are also responsible for its smaller allotment of critical attention.

When we examine the surface texture of the poems that map out the events in the poetic life of Annie Allen, the imaginary focal character who is the namesake for this collection, we find no explicit social statement regarding race, caste, or gender. These poems are found in the first two sections of the book, "Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood" and "The Anniad," and specifically include "the birth in a narrow room," "Maxie Allen," "the parents: people like our marriage Maxie and Andrew," "Sunday Chicken," "the relative," "downtown vaudeville," "the ballad of late Annie," "do not be afraid of no," "my own sweet good," "The Anniad," and "Appendix to the Anniad." Moreover, the verbal complexity of these poems seems to work at cross-purposes with the simplicity and habitual passivity of Annie's life, in that her life reflects a virtual absence of acts of conscious volition and emotional complexity. In fact, her life seems to be comprised of her deliberate refusal both to act decisively and to reveal her emotional responses. Events in her life seem only to happen to her; seldom does she appear to be an active agent, precipitating them. Moreover, the methods used to communicate the series of incidents themselves are extremely commonplace. Hence, there is a marked disparity between the elaborate structural techniques that create the poem and the content of Annie's life that the poem depicts. This discordance constitutes curious features in the text of the poem, which compels me to ask whether the poem is simply veneered in artifice or whether the elaborate techniques that texture the poem contain interpretative significance in their own right.

I suggest that "The Anniad," as well as the poems in "Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood," are not merely cloaked in elaborate surface design, but rather, that the structural formats for the poems, in and of themselves, communicate discursive content about Annie's life, specifically her emotional response to the series of events that constitute her life. Moreover, formal devices such as diction, imagery, and meter, create the mood and atmosphere for the poems. These techniques express the author's attitude toward her subject in place of her explicit comment. Brooks combines these devices with conventional forms of satirical verse. These verse forms inherently dictate how the subject is to be regarded, that is, whether the subject is to be viewed sympathetically or critically. She further blends this technique with another source of tension found between what is said and how it is said. In literary terms, she combines satirical format with the tension created between content and its communicative image. This duality between content and its corresponding imagery converges, does not fully synthesize, into a unified interpretation. The content seems to be consistently at odds with its expression, and the resulting tension contours and concatenates each poem.

For example, we frequently find that Brooks seems to be ridiculing aspects of Annie's life, but Brooks does not do so by employing explicitly critical, descriptive language. To the contrary, she employs conventional, formal, satirical techniques for expressing her attitude toward her subject. Instead of outwardly criticizing Annie's mother, we find the mother-daughter relationship depicted in "Maxie Allen" rendered in doggerel. Doggerel is a satirical form that inherently suggests ridicule independent of content. Thus, the loose meter itself informs us that Brooks is censuring the poem's narrative content. This technique of using form to communicate content is repeatedly employed in both "Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood" and "The Anniad." In fact, this tension climaxes in "The Anniad," where Brooks relies on mock-heroic conventions in order to underscore the gravity of her criticism of Annie's adult life.

On first meeting Annie Allen, we find her described as an ordinary black girl, born in an urban ghetto in the early 1900s. Her parents, Maxie and Andrew Allen, are hardworking, decent, very moralistic people, who believe that their kindness, simplicity, and humility will merit them their just rewards. All they need to do is wait patiently for their receipt. Annie is the necessary product of such a union. She is a docile, well-behaved child, whose total dependence on her mother's dispensation of approval and subsequent affection shapes her life. Maxie has suppressed the possibility of disobedience in her daughter. Maxie has also eliminated the outward expression of Annie's longings in the process by insisting that she be thankful for what she has instead of yearning for what she does not possess. In most social circles Maxie would be credited with having successfully raised a daughter: however, on close observation, we notice that her maternal wisdom has stifled Annie's willfulness and driven her imagination underground.

Brooks expresses her criticism for Maxie's ultimate failure as a mother by rendering the poem in doggerel. Here, technique, rather than merely explicit comment, is the vehicle for censuring, even ridiculing the mother's inability to nurture Annie's emerging imaginative spirit:

     Maxie Allen always taught her
     Stipendiary little daughter
     To thank her Lord and lucky star
     For eye that let her see so far,
     For throat enabling her to eat
     Her Quaker Oats and Cream-of-Wheat,
     For tongue to tantrum for the penny,
     For ear to hear the haven't-any,
     For arm to toss, for leg to chance,
     For heart to hanker for romance.

Brooks reduces all the lessons that this mother must teach her daughter in order to promote her survival and happiness to lessons in gratitude for possessions that are not adequate to nurture Annie's emotional development—Quaker Oats, Cream-of-Wheat, and a penny. In this manner the subject is trivialized and combined with the monotonous doggerel meter. These techniques communicate Brooks's criticism of Annie's mother. Moreover, whenever desire surfaces in Annie's consciousness, her response is to suppress this desire. As a result, her anger, resentment, and guilt arise, but these emotions cannot be revealed as well. Consequently, Annie represses all of her emotional responses and denies them expression by flattening them out until only her gratitude is perceptible. These repressed emotions only resurface in her daydreams. But in this imaginary realm, her desire for adventure is transformed into the wish for someone else to enact her plans. Someone else must engage her wish, and this person, we are told, is a husband.

Brooks also describes Annie as an "unembroidered," "chocolate" brown-skin girl, who is plain in appearance and excessively complaint. Yet in the place where surface pattern would be if she were pretty or spirited is her wondrous and "stupendous" imagination that fancies a private life for which she has no outward expression:

     Sweet Annie tried to teach her mother
     There was somewhat of something other….
     ...
     She did not know; but tried to tell.

Rather than try unsuccessfully to explain the life of her imagination and her longings to her mother, she conceals them within herself, again by flattening them out and, thereby, denying them visible surface expression. But no matter how hard she tries to suppress her imaginary world, it inevitably confronts the real circumstances of her life, and this confrontation creates a sense of vague dissatisfaction.

When we recall the first poem in Annie Allen, "the birth in a narrow room," not only do we note Annie's humility, reflected in the lower case letters of the title, but we also see that this poem foreshadows the inevitable conflict between the real circumstances of her submissive life and her imaginary projections of adventure:

     "I am not anything and I have got
     Not anything, or anything to do!"—
     But prances nevertheless with gods and fairies
     Blithely about the pump and then beneath
     The elms and grapevines, then in darling endeavor
     By privy foyer, where the screenings stand
     And where the bugs buzz by in private cars
     Across old peach cans and old jelly jars.

Annie's admission of her feelings of personal inadequacies do not incite physical activity, but they do cause her to frolic with imaginary sprites. In this way she finds adventure among embellished commonplace objects, in the recesses of her mind. Hence, the first poem in the collection foreshadows the emerging duality in Annie's character, which is composite of her outward expression of inactivity, acquiescence, and resignation (a role prescribed for her by her mother as well as by society at large) and her inner life of fantastic, willful adventure. This type of duality develops throughout the collection to poem XV in "The Motherhood," where imaginative and suppressed longings verge upon conscious assertion, ultimately to become new directives for living.

But until that time, the only occasion when Annie demonstrates filial rebellion occurs at the funeral of a relative. Here, she displays her contrary feelings, but only when no one can witness her transgression:

     She went in there to muse on being rid
     Of relative beneath the coffin lid.
     No one was by. She stuck her tongue out; slid.
 
     Since for a week she must not play "Charmaine"
     Or "Honey Bunch," or "Singing in the Rain."

Her resentment is hidden beyond the sight of disapproval. Rather than face parental rejection for impudence, she squeezes herself into that "pinchy" space, where "[her] own sweet good[ness]" dominates her personality, and where her rebelliousness cannot be observed. Annie's behavior demonstrates that she is acutely aware of the struggle between the dual sides of her character—her external, exaggerated "sweet good[ness]" and her internal desire to create a "stupendous," autonomous self. But in order to make her dreams real, she knows she must exercise a "darling endeavor" and cast off others' expectations with the adamantly audible "no."

Brooks records Annie's attempt to say no in "do not be afraid of no." In this poem Annie admits that

      To say yes is to die
      A lot or a little….
      ...
      It is brave to be involved,
      To be not fearful to be unresolved.

But instead of enacting her decision to say "no" and live, she elects another way to say what she thinks is "no," although she does not realize the implications of her choice. Hence, not only does she not say "no," but she does not elect to be either involved or resolved in any course of action. She merely continues essentially as she had before. But instead of enacting her decision to say no and live, that is, to utter the word and externalize her internal life, she elects a new wish that is merely another way of saying yes: "Her new wish was to smile / When answers took no airships, walked a while." Rather than reply with the audible no, she smiles sweetly and sighs with the hope that her reluctance to speak would be perceived as the unuttered "no." But her choice of action is not effective. She forfeits the possibility of independence and continues to spin bits of an imaginary life in her daydreams, described as "spilling pretty cherries."

For Annie, there is only one acceptable way to escape from saying yes to her mother and to grasp a life of her own. That course is outlined in "the ballad of late Annie":

     Late Annie in her bower lay,
     Though sun was up and spinning.
     The blush-brown shoulder was so bare,
     Blush-brown lip was winning.
 
     Out then shrieked the mother-dear,
     "Be I to fetch and carry?
     Get a broom to whish the doors
     Or get a man to marry."

Annie's mother literally tells her to obey her orders or to get married (which is the only proper course to freedom beyond a mother's reign for a young woman in Annie's day). Because Annie cannot say "no" in an audible voice, her choice is to use her "own sweet good[ness]" in order to secure a man worthy of her fancying spirit. In this manner, she plans to flee her mother's dominion and establish her own kingdom with the help of a suitable mate. Moreover, the text of the poem itself is veiled in coded meaning, which can be explained by examining the act of sleeping, which is both the dominant event and the unifying, figurative motif in the poem. Here, the act of sleeping underscores Annie's languid, dormant, and unresisting character. The events described in this poem—her oversleeping and the resulting chastisement—both serve as a paradigm for Annie's thwarted emotional development and foreshadow the events described in the poetic discourse of "The Anniad."

We recall that Annie has not learned to say "no," but instead says nothing with a smile and a sigh. We surmise that this behavior is repeatedly misunderstood as an expression for "yes," which she has already equated with death. Then when we recall the multiple meanings of the word "late" in "the ballad of late Annie," we note that not only has Annie overslept, but also that the entire poem addresses her as if she were deceased, that is as if the poem were an elegy for the unresisting Annie. Although Annie is not, in fact, dead, her defeat is clearly predicted, and this ominous shadow of defeat falls across Annie's effort to establish her domestic kingdom in "The Anniad."

"The Anniad" is a long poem which Brooks says deliberately alludes to Homer's Iliad. Although "The Anniad" is not of book-length proportions, like its analogue, it is an episodic, narrative poem that is long by contemporary standards. Although "The Anniad" does not employ a setting that is remote in time and place, and the major character does not possess heroic stature, "The Anniad" does conform to other epic conventions. The poem focuses on a universal problem, the deteriorating relationship between men and women. Furthermore, the poem reveals the consequences of the intervention of fate, in the form of world war, on these relationships. In addition, when we refer to The Iliad, we are mindful that both poems concentrate on the activity of brooding. The Iliad depicts Achilles' physical inactivity while he externalizes his anger and refuses to fight. "The Anniad," on the other hand, depicts Annie's deliberate refusal to act with conscious volition, while she simultaneously suppresses the outward show of both her emotions and desires by relegating them to the internal region of her daydreams. The very complicated "Anniad" also recalls the somewhat legendary events surrounding the marriage ritual. The poem records Annie's anticipated courtship, its actuality, her marriage, separation because of war, her husband's return, his temporary infidelity, their reconciliation, followed by his permanent desertion. In other words, the poem recounts a series of girl wins boy episodes, and her ultimate loss.

Throughout these domestic crises, Annie remains sweet, good, and polite, believing that these virtues alone will ultimately merit her happiness. Therefore, in the face of turbulent domestic activity, Annie remains virtually inert and exhibits no perceivable emotional response. In fact, the absence of her emotions seems to work at cross-purposes with the complex expression that gives the details of her life their expression. Her life, although particularly eventful, seems peculiarly emotionally static. Moreover, her inability to say "no" seems to exaggerate the passivity of her inactive life. Events seem to happen to her, and her only response is to wait for these events to have occurred.

At the beginning of "The Anniad," Annie is described as a brown-skin girl, reclining on her bed, daydreaming about her virgin knight. He represents freedom from her parental abode:

     Think of sweet and chocolate,
     Left to folly or to fate,
     Whom the higher gods forgot,
     Whom the lower gods berate;
     Physical and underfed
     Fancying on the featherbed
     What was never and is not.
     ...
     Watching for the paladin
     Which no woman ever had,…

Annie endows her knight with fullness of character and the will to act, aspects that she is aware of but does not possess or seem to desire herself. Her imagined suitor is "paradisiacal and sad"; thus, he has broad expanses of emotions and intellect. In addition, he has height, breadth, and depth of moral as well as physical vigor. He is "Ruralist and rather bad / Cosmopolitan and kind." Hence, her potential mate possesses a full 360 degrees of character. He can say both "yes" and "no," whereas she is a flat 180 degrees of "yes," or silence with a sighing smile. She is described as a "thaumaturgic lass", her brilliance has been dulled, her height has been leveled, and her will has been rendered inactive by conventional codes of decorum. The only way she can hold onto some bit of her former thaumaturgy, brilliance, "stupendous" self, is by "Printing bastard roses [her ill-conceived daydreams] there" on her image in the looking glass. The anger and resentment she feels, because she cannot reveal the vitality of her internal life, is patted down, suppressed, and flattened like her unruly hair:

     Then emotionally aware
     Of the black and boisterous hair,
     Taming all that anger down.

Again, flattening and silencing her displeasure are the ways in which she responds to the circumstances of her life. Such responses function to inhibit the possibility of her resolving to act decisively with full conscious volition.

Annie's emotional and intellectual lives, therefore, neither synthesize nor achieve autonomy. As a result these aspects of her character retain their duality. One side surfaces as contortions of virtual physical inertia, while the other side is dynamic but remains submerged in her internal life. She counteracts the possibility of the latter surfacing by tensing her face in a hard, tight smile and by flattening the unruly volume of her "boisterous" hair. In other words, she flattens the angry contours of her face into a sighing smile, and smooths the expanding height of her rebellious, voluminous hair into a composed, compressed, and compliant style.

Our expectations for the conventional, heroic character conflict with the submissiveness of Annie's life. "The Anniad"'s impelling form and erudite diction seem peculiarly inappropriate for describing her inert life. Moreover, the missing expression or exalted emotions, typically found in the epic, are startling in their absence. These aspects, in juxtaposition, function to accentuate one another, disturbing us as we try to make form and content synthesize into a unified structure. As a result, first, we are forced to look beyond the description of Annie's submissive life, as seen in the narrative content of the poem, in order to determine if her emotional life is given expression in other ways. And second, we are compelled to look beyond the surface texture of the poem in order to reevaluate the suitability of epic format for the poem.

During this reevaluation process, we recall that there has consistently been a clear separation between Annie's two selves in all of the poems in the first two sections. On one hand, Annie's internal emotional complexity appears in the textual activity in the poems that depict her life; on the other hand, her external, inert life is depicted in the narrative content of "The Anniad." Thus, a system of reversals operates throughout the poem relating to the conflict between the content and the manner of its expression. In this context, Annie is much like a landscape of fertile hills and valleys that has been leveled to ordinary starkness. Whereas she once possessed contours of character, she has now been flattened out into a smooth plane. Whereas she was once a "stupendous" being, she has now been squeezed into a too-small, restricted space. As a result her splendor has literally been choked out of her:

     Now, weeks and years will go before she thinks
     "How pinchy is my room! how can I breathe!
     I am not anything and I have got
     Not anything, or anything to do!"—

When the reader understands the results of Annie's careful maternal and social nurturing, which are described above, the anger that Annie suppresses is located. It originates in Brooks and is transferred to the reader. Brooks incites our response not only by revealing Annie's fate of unhappiness and loneliness, but Brooks also compounds our disturbance by inciting our impatience with the poem's extreme artifice and with the seeming inappropriateness of the epic format. Thus, the erudite descriptions are, in themselves, indirect expressions of Brooks's anger, which has been suppressed and flattened out into complex, static language. In this manner, Brooks supplies Annie and her readers with the missing anger. The anger, therefore, is simply not in the narrative of the poem but in the work at large, which is the product of "the convergence of the text and the reader's response."

When we read "The Anniad" in this manner, the poem cannot be regarded as an epic poem, as the allusion to The Iliad might suggest. "The Anniad" is not a poem that depicts heroic character or events. To the contrary, I contend that "The Anniad" is a mock-heroic satire, in that commonplace characters and events have been elevated in a ceremonious manner by using lofty diction and complicated techniques. It bears repeating that this literary form is, in itself, also the embodiment of Brooks's indirect expression for anger. Hence, Brooks deliberately cloaks her own anger, arising from the events she represents in the poem, in satire as the vehicle for expressing Annie's suppressed anger. By using satire, Brooks does not have to engage in a severely direct and explicit form of censorship. The form inherently ridicules; it ridicules the destructive domestic forces in the life of a young black woman as well as those in the lives of most women. By relying on this literary form, Brooks uses it to communicate not only emotional content, but also social and moral criticism.

Although marriage, in and of itself, is not described as a destructive force in the poem, it can become the site on which the fullness of a woman's evolving character and ambitions are sacrificed. In this manner, maturity and ambitions are often exchanged for "domestic bliss." And domestic bliss is often nothing more than one spouse electing either to say "yes" or to smile in silence with a sigh. This tragic scenario is both recorded and severely ridiculed by relying on the literary form of mock-heroic satire.

The text of "The Anniad," when seen as a literary work, becomes a powerful statement about the cost of extreme forms of role-playing. Consequently, the work becomes an emotionally charged satirical comment about the tragedy of a woman's inactive life, a tragedy compounded by racial prejudice. In fact, the high epic allusion is nothing more than an inversion of the epic form, and although mock-heroic satire is normally associated with a burlesque or comic presentation of its subject, here the mockery is bitter, that is, Juvenalian, in nature. This satire operates by not only relying on the narrative content of the poem, but also and more importantly by using a literary form as a vehicle for communicating both emotional and factual content.

When "The Anniad" is seen as a literary work that must be responded to in order to attain its interpretative significance, the work becomes a powerful statement about the cost of subscribing to extreme forms of role-definition. In this way, the poem ceases merely to be a complex, intellectual exercise, but becomes a serious statement about the destructive social and domestic rituals that are unquestioningly followed. Moreover, when we heed the color codes interwoven throughout the poem, we discern that Brooks is also criticizing the color caste system that further circumscribes Annie's life within barriers of racial prejudice. The reader's response to this woman—and to the social contingencies that design her life—is anger; this anger converges with Brooks's own, and both forms occupy the place where Annie's absent emotional response should be.

When we regard "The Anniad" as a satire, not only do we see the poem as an expression of cloaked anger, but we also understand how the other poems in the collection are to be read. We see that Brooks has crowded Annie's anger back into "pinchy" obscurity of form in poem after poem, where she contends it takes a little bit of patience to see the rage.

Once we have located the rage, encoded on Annie's tightly smiling face and patted-down hair, Brooks does not abandon us. She suggests a route for her sisters in spirit to take in order to escape Annie's fate and cross the "screaming weed" of desperation, referred to in the last poem of the collection, XV in "Womanhood." Here, the unidentified speaker declares that it is all right to acknowledge openly her pain:

     Men of careful turns, haters of forks in the road,
     ...
     Grant me that I am human, that I hurt,
     That I can cry.

She contends that after the pain has been acknowledged, she must celebrate by affirming her life in the presence of other women, despite the fact that she has arrived late both to this level of self-awareness (an internal region) and to this party of women (an external event):

      Open my rooms, let in the light and air.
      ...
      And let the joy continue. Do not hoard silence
      For the moment when I enter, tardily,
      To enjoy my height among you. And to love you.
      ...

When she is asked to sit down and be quiet, she is compelled to demand "a chair, but the one with broken straw," so that she might sit, but sit uncomfortably in order to be compelled to stand. When she is told "intelligence / Can sugar up our prejudice with politeness …," she remembers to "extend [her] hand and teeth" in a tight, sighing smile, which is an indirect expression of anger. And finally, Brooks has her speaker demand that her sisters stand and join hands to map out new expectations:

      … Rise.
      Let us combine. There are no magics or elves
      Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost,
      must
      Wizard a track through our own screaming weed.

The word "wizard" of Gwendolyn Brooks's Annie Allen maps out the route for Annie's sisters not to take and points, instead, to another. In "wizard[ing] a track through [their] own screaming weed," they locate the untrodden course, which leads to discovering and learning how to nurture themselves.