The Gwendolyn Brooks Poems - Essay Example

? The Gwendolyn Brooks Poems Introduction Poems mirror the life of a community many years ago. Gwendolyn Brooks was no different in her prose, aiming to define an era’s vivid lifestyle in her poems. Those very poems are the subject of this research. The research delves into the scrutiny of a few sequential poems from her book A Street in Bronzeville (Brooks). The African American author penned societal joys, pains, frustrations, and triumphs of her community and time period into poetic literary masterpieces. The aim of this paper is to espouse the notion that the underlying theme of A Street in Bronzeville poems enhances Gwendolyn Brook’s theory that challenges and obstacles hinder the individual’s hope of fulfilling one’s dreams. Analysis of ‘The Kitchenette Building’ The poem, Kitchenette Building, is correctly depicted by the author as a place of impoverished community (Brooks 20). The people meet and make new friends in the kitchenette. Residents live in kitchenette type buildings. The neighborhood is described as a city within a city, the segregated African American community within the bigger White dominated Chicago environment. The buildings are small enough fit the poverty needs of the segregated Chicago neighborhood. The kitchenette is also depicted as a place of sadness. The poet’s initial dry hours, involuntary pain, and other related lines rightfully depict the economic situation of the poor mothers. The mothers are forced to abort their unborn child because the poor mothers cannot afford to bring up a child into the discriminated African American Chicago world (Gayles & Brooks 35). Brooks calls poor as ‘garbage’ furthering illuminating the disappointed roles that poor are given. She uses the term ‘yesterday’s garbage’ to depict the possible improvement in a poor person’s life if given a chance. She ends the poem with: We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it. The above assertion is a visualization of a poor person’s hopes and thoughts towards improving their lives. Brooks clearly is against the accumulation of wealth by the rich and shows a picture of poor who think of a brighter future and cannot attain it for the lack of resources. Their dreams remain unfulfilled and they remain busy in meeting their basic needs of life. Brooks further highlights these needs by including “rent”, “feeding a wife” and “satisfying a man” as symbolic elements. These bind the poor to earn the basic needs of food, shelter and clothing limiting the prospects of their progress and betterment. Analysis of ‘The Mother’ The author, Gwendolyn Brooks correctly continues with her debate on poverty being a hurdle in fulfilling the dreams of poor. She highlights the issue of abortion in the poverty level conditions of Chicago. The poem rightfully indicates how the abortions are being done (Brooks 21). The poem correctly reminds the mothers that they will never forget their killing of the unborn child. Abortion prevents the mother from experiencing the child sucking his or her thumb. The mother will never see the day when the growing child will ask for a snack because of a hungry stomach. One of the mother’s sufferings will include never beating the grown up child because the child was killed prior to the child’s birth. Because of abortion, the poem points to the abort mother who will miss the child sucking luscious warm sweet milk from her breasts (Gayles & Brooks 5). Brooks’s words are enriched with the feelings of gloom and despair. She relates them with ‘The singers and workers’ who were not given a chance to struggle and find their fortunes. She further asserts that the aborted children will never be ‘neglected or beaten’. The idea of neglecting and beating a child provides enough grounds to understand the shortage of resources that result in aggression and violent behaviors. Furthermore, it may be a taken as a way of soothing the mother’s deepest regrets for aborting her children by providing a weak yet positive view. A child, who is not given a chance to breath, can never face the hardships of life. Brooks, however, exposes that the mother will never get a chance to buy a candy or ‘scuttle off the ghosts’ that children fear. This certainly highlights how a mother is deprived of the right to prove her motherhood and love her child. The poem provides ample grounds to understand that abortion is not a choice but the last resort as per the conditions that prevailed. The last lines “Believe me, I loved you all” depict the love that mothers had and points towards the force that bound them on killing their own children. This poem provides a multidimensional picture of how poor are forced to act against their will. Firstly, mothers kill their children for having issues raising them with the limited resources. These issues deprive the mothers with the right to love, nurture and raise their children. On the other hand, the children are not given a chance to live, work and have a future. Their chance of attaining success and struggling is taken away with their breath. Analysis of ‘Southeast Corner’ Gwendolyn Brooks rightfully described what she plainly sees in the Southeast Corner poem (Brooks 23). The author does not impose judgment on the people of urban Chicago. The author does not criticize how the depicted residents live. The author does not impose a standard process or life on the people. Instead, the author rightfully leaves to readers of the poems to create their own culturally diverse conclusions. The author simply shows that the previously busy and popular beauty school has been transformed into a tavern. Likewise, the same poem shows that time had changed many aspects of the people’s lives. Life’s change is vividly shown as to include the madam’s current location is several feet underground, in a grave site. The Madam left behind the vibrant life of Chicago. The poem shows how the elderly people of Chicago lived as captive prisoners in an isolated and desperate urban living environment, without any possibility of freedom or escape from the White discrimination of the entire Chicago community. The poem exposes the bitter reality of the discrimination that black women face on the basis of their color by the White counterparts of the society. This discrimination leads to place a limit on their ability to flourish and succeed. Analysis of the Soft Man The author correctly shows that soft man must say and do what is required in order to be accepted by society. The soft man has to be cool in order to be popular among the other members of the community. Likewise, the author rightfully shows that the soft man wants to escape the effects of poverty. Poverty entails lack of food. Poverty includes not being able to buy the more luxurious things in life. Being poor means having to make ends meet when funds are not enough to pay for the necessities of life. The poem shows how the poor person tries to escape his hungry world of poverty. The poor person attends religious services with the concept that man does not live by bread alone. Rather, the poor person focuses his attention on religious activities. With his mind fixed on doing religious acts, the person mentally and psychologically relegates one’s poverty as secondary only to serving the religious duties. However, the author rightfully indicates that the poor person has one very good reason for being happy, grinning. The poor person can attend escape being anxious by attending the clean and neat place of escape. The place of escape is the nearby church building. Praying to his God, the poor person’s feelings are leveled up to the spiritual satisfaction level. The person espouses that everyone can escape the problems of being poor by escaping to church service every Sunday. The church person is filled with despair and desperation from being born a poor person in a segregation community. The church person’s use of the dance music terminology, Rhumboogie, evidences that the church person is an African American. The term is the language used by the Chicago- based African American community (Gayles & Brooks 145). The poem depicts the hopes of a poor person to improve his standards of living. Brooks uses ‘garbage cans’ and other symbols to expose the underprivileged conditions that poor face. Analysis of Patent Leather The author Gwendolyn Brooks is right in his opinion about the author’s love for writing love stories. Woman’s love for someone can be very strange. For others, the man may not be eligible to get her love, but for the woman herself he may be the only special person in the whole world. She will gain satisfaction from things which others think are unbearable and in doing so; she has the capability of transforming her man into her idle. In poetic terms, other’s feel that persons with patent leather hair style is not much. The people opined that suitor’s muscle is inferiorly shaped. The people felt that the suitor’s speaking voice is shrill and painful to hear (Gayles & Brooks 44). Further, the author rightfully shows that society’s detractors can be proven wrong. The detractors were surprised to discover that the woman’s heart was reserved for the man using patent leather hair style. The poem rightfully proves that there are exceptions to the general rule of life. The general rule indicates that the woman should not fall in love with the man with the person with the patent leather hair. However, the poem rolls out to show that the woman falls under the exception to the general rule type. The patent leather haired lover describes the woman from Calumet lovingly as the cool chick from Calumet. The poem rightfully depicts the man as one who is eager to fight for what he wants, including winning and keeping the Calumet’s love for himself (Brooks 29). Conclusion Brooks has provided a deep and eye-opening view to the lives of poor and discriminated counterparts of the society. The poems depict distinct views providing a number of characters who show and portray the different phases of the lives of impoverished people. The poem ‘the mother’, for instance, provides a rather emotional stance. On the other hand, the poem ‘southeast corner’ uses a rather cold and stable position towards the depiction of discrimination against black women. Evidently, the sequence of "A Street in Bronzeville” poems vividly explains Gwendolyn Brook’s theory that challenges and obstacles encumber the person’s hopes of fulfilling one’s dreams of an equally better community life. These obstacles, however, may be related to a person’s financial status, gender, sexual orientation, age group or any other factor. The underlying aim is the identification and eradication of factors that limit a person’s, a group’s or a stereotype’s chance to grow, flourish and succeed. Works Cited Brooks, Gwendolyn. Blacks. Chicago: Third World Press, 2001. Print. Gayles, Gloria, Brooks, Gwendolyn. Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks. Oxford : University of Mississippi Press, 2003. Print. Read More