A Quest in Vain: Salvaging Hope in Gwendolyn Brooks' In The Mecca (1968)

In her quest to engage with and resist the label of marginal outsider, African-American poet, Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) reveals a minimum degree of restraint in her poetry when confronting issues of ethnicity and womanhood. Brooks is persistent in calling attention to the miserable conditions of blacks, especially black women, in her race-conscious black Chicago community. Her 1968 poetry volume, In the Mecca represents the dramatic quest of a poverty-stricken black woman in search for a lost child who is eventually discovered dead at the hands of Jamaican Edward; a male resident of the dilapidated Chicago Mecca building. The woman’s frantic pilgrimage to retrieve her lost daughter, “Pepita” is infused with anger, compassion and hope. Economic struggle, resulting from racial discrimination, undoubtedly determines the poor woman’s life while survival and conflict rudely foreground the tragedy. As such, Gwendolyn Brooks endeavours in In the Mecca to re-map the identity of her female compatriots – women trapped within adverse social and racial circumstances and, thus, bearing the brunt of discrimination. Together with her protagonist, Brooks willingly embarks upon a journey to disclose and subvert the plight of womanhood in her community. Gwendolyn Brooks situates a new territory on the literary map: the oppression and exclusion of African-American women, and the accompanying representative images of wounding and scarring. A race-conscious American culture reveals these women as paying the heavier price by discriminating racial and gender codes. Yet, it is in the poetic endeavours of women like Brooks; in her search to embody the homeless and placeless women of her black community - to give voice to their real sufferings - that she must open old wounds and point to the scars. This paper is an investigation of this quest.