Gwendolyn Brooks is an African American poet and was born in Topeka Kansas on
7th of June 1917 and brought up in Chicago since her childhood. As an African
lady in America the racial issue affected her a lot. But with her creativity
she could overcome the color bar barrier in America. Gwendolyn won
numerous awards including Pulitzer Prize for her strong role as a "black
poet". The major struggle that she had to face was to win her life as an
African American Poet with liberation.
This is a lyric
poem and falls into the category of Shakespearian sonnet form with a rhyme
scheme of ababcdcdefefgg. The rhyming words are quite different from standard
English as she followed the language belong to the English spoken African
people in America. According to Brooks this poem belongs to the category of
‘folksy narrative’ with first person narration.
The poem
reflects on the experience gained by the African American people in between two
cultures. One is the root/ native or the indigenous African culture and the
other is the American culture where they got alienated. They suffered due to
loss of identity, they became more patriotic and they were inspired to go back
to their root culture. The poem ‘My dreams, my works…’ represents the
narrator’s journey of hardship to the root culture. According to the narrator
the present world is a ‘hell’. With a tone of despair the narrator is
struggling to survive in a world that keeps holding her back. She or he endures
much to be back at his or her roots to fulfill his or her hunger with ‘bread’
and ‘honey’. And at the same time make him/her as a complete. The speaker works
hard and waits anxiously to achieve the goal. The goal can be the loss of
identity. Most probably the narrator can be the poet. The hunger she has may be
the hunger to write with her own identity. The social restrictions and barriers
might have made her to lock up her desires which are represented through the
metaphor of food. And the person is waiting by turning the face to a ‘puny
light’ which shows the uncertainty of the time. Yet we see the perseverance,
determination, endurance and the commitment of the person. The person’s
imagination to go back to ‘home’ is clearly evident. Here the word ‘home’
suggests the narrator’s roots. This can be taken as a poem that celebrates the
black identity or negritude metaphorically. Hunger and incompleteness in the
present world are juxtaposed with taste and sensitivity of future with an
indication of positive future for them. Moreover the comparison between ‘hell’
with ‘devil days’ and ‘home’ with ‘honey’ and ‘bread’ too indicates the same
view. The poem can also remind us the words of a great leader ‘Martin Luther
King’.
D.N.
Aloysius
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