17 pages • 34 minutes read
Gwendolyn BrooksThe birth in a narrow room
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1949A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context
At her death in 2000, Gwendolyn Brooks, along with gospel icon Mahalia Jackson and jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, was recognized as the most influential figure in what came to be called Chicago’s Black Renaissance. In that movement, much as in the Harlem Renaissance in New York during the 1920s, a gathering of innovative Black writers, musicians, and visual artists asserted the integrity of the Black community by giving the Black experience a voice, an urgency directed at segregated America. Indeed, one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most respected figures, poet Langston Hughes, recognized the quiet power in the poetry of a young Gwendolyn Brooks.
Two historic realities, however, shaped the emergence of Chicago’s Black Renaissance and in turn shaped the creative heart of Brooks. The first was the Great Migration, the movement north of Black families from the limited economic opportunities and racism of the Deep South. The second was the Great Depression. Brooks grew up within a grim world of limited expectations, routine sacrifice, and the hard-scrapple heroism of just getting by. Poverty, as much as race and gender, impacted her early poetry.
Brooks, like the artists in the Harlem Renaissance, perceived her role as more than using her writing to voice the Black experience. She promoted ambitious community arts programs in Bronzeville. With the inspirational model of her mother, she worked with the children of the South Side, introducing them to the works of Black writers and to the integrity of their African roots and in turn to expose the limits of Black stereotypes within white culture.
In “the birth in a narrow room,” then, Brooks defines and defies her historical context. The character of her Black child, born in that narrow room, has the emotional complexity and creative depth to live broader and wider than white America imagined.
Literary Context
A young Brooks received the enthusiastic support of iconic figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Yet her early poetry—among them the cycle of poems in which “the birth in a narrow room” appeared, published long before her turn to racially militant themes and more extravagant experiments in open verse—reveals Brooks’s literary context is not the jazz-infused syncopated prosody of her generation of Black poets. Her lines are elegant, stately; the diction erudite and considered; the rhythms regular and subtle. They more resembled the careful prosody of British Romantics such as William Wordsworth or, even further back, Alexander Pope. A Black woman living within the oppressive constraints of a white-dominated patriarchy elects to write within the traditional poetry of that very same oppressive culture?
In this, Brooks reveals a literary context she acknowledged, the elegant poetic lines of Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), a poet born in Gambia and brought as a slave to Massachusetts as a child. Educated by the family who bought her, Wheatley was a voracious reader and came to appreciate the intricacies of crafting poetry. She became in 1773 the first African American and only the second American woman to publish a book of poetry. Like Brooks, Wheatley reflected a mastery of the subtleties of the poetic expression of the white culture that enslaved her. For Wheatley and for Brooks, poetry was a grand release, a kind of aesthetic freedom. In this, Brooks’s rendering of the bleak realities of Chicago’s Bronzeville in the very poetic devices of the white culture that created Bronzeville reveals at once her confidence in her identity and her defiance of that culture. Anything you can do, she says in all but words, I can do better.
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