Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

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Gwendolyn Brooks
baby tears and your games, / Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults,
your marriages, aches, and your deaths . . .” (17–19). She asks them to
understand that though she is responsible for having these abortions,
her choice was an equivocal one: “Believe that in my deliberateness I
was not deliberate”(21). She haltingly tries to find words to convey the
complexity of her choice and its aftermath: “But that too, I’m afraid, /
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?” (27–28). The
speaker concludes with a mournful and desperate adjuration: “Believe
me, I loved you all” (31).
The speaker, doubtless poor, lives in Bronzeville, a black neighborhood
located on Chicago’s South Side. Bronzeville was a mecca for
southern blacks, especially during the 1940’s, when mechanization
made agricultural jobs scarce. The swelling population in Bronzeville
made for a cultural vitality as well as all the urban ills associated with
substandard housing and overcrowding. Brooks lived in Bronzeville
and gave poetic voice to the experience of marginalized blacks whose
chances and choices were limited by poverty and racism. She surveyed
her South Side community from a window in a small “kitchenette”
apartment and found poems “walking or running, fighting or
screaming or singing” wherever she looked (“Part One” 69). “[T]he
mother” exposes the hard reality of many women’s lives by breaking
the silence and making the private, often shameful act of abortion
dramatically public, while confronting the taboo subject of women’s
sexuality and lack of reproductive control. Brooks read “the mother,”
still a provocative choice in 1980, when she was invited by President
Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter to the White House for “A Salute
to Poetry and American Poets,” which, writes D.H. Melhem with some
understatement, “one might interpret as a feminist gesture” (14).
There is no delicacy of expression, no euphemistic tact, no way
of broaching the subject of abortion without conjuring a politicized
psycho-spiritual hornet’s nest. The poem begins with a bald declaration:
“Abortions will not let you forget”—an unnervingly confessional
statement, aggressive in its shocking matter-of-factness. The mother
gives voice to what is still considered by many to be publicly unspeakable.
A 2004 article in the New York Times, for example, calls abortion
“television’s most persistent taboo,” even given the unbridled sexual
content on hosts of mainstream programs (Aurthur 27). In 1945, the
subject and the act were avowedly taboo—and certainly not likely
matters for poetic treatment. Richard Wright, who was asked to