Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

126
Gwendolyn Brooks
mother-eye” (5, 9, 10). The grim irony of these contradictory impulses
in the wake of the speaker’s abortions is disturbingly multi-layered.
John Gery asserts that Brooks’ title “demonstrates both the importance
and impotence of conventional motherhood for a woman in
the ghetto” (51). She is prey to her own ungovernable inner forces
as well as to the pressures of poverty. “Yet,” Gery argues, “what
emerges, in both the poem’s imagery and its voice, is more deeply
ironic, in that the speaker is in fact a parody of ‘the mother’ to the
extent that she expresses exactly the emotions archetypally associated
with motherhood” (51). These emotions, says Gery, culminate in “the
poem’s horror [which] registers not only the vacuum left by abortion
but also, in a grotesquely condensed manner, the delusion of power
every mother is liable to experience, and then inevitably suffer from,
at the loss of a child at whatever stage of its life” (51).The true horror
of this poem reveals itself in the mother’s self-absorption. This is her
story and is titled as such. This mother archetype can never know her
children as beings individuated from herself—which may well be a
fundamental existential dilemma, an irony at the heart of all motherchild
relationships.
The mother in this poem is symbolic of a more insidious taboo that
Brooks’ poems expose and break: our societal refusal to see members
of our underclasses as fully sentient, fully human, and fully credible.
Brooks gives this mother an achingly self-reproachful maternal
fortitude and a hungry solicitude for her destroyed children that belie
her (presumably) childless state and status. The poem moves through
pregnancy, childbirth, and the lives and deaths of the speaker’s imagined
children, encapsulating the flux of the street life in Chicago’s
Bronzeville where many an aborted life is ineffectually mourned.
The mother of the poem is wistful, appropriately self-recriminatory,
perhaps self-serving, and jarringly insistent on her sacrificial love. In the
contemporary wake of Toni Morrison’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning
horror story, Beloved, a backward glance at Brooks’ Bronzeville mother
gives evidence of a woman who has been forced (as she suggests when
she asks herself: “Though why should I whine, / Whine that the crime
was other than mine?” 23–24) to abort her children, perhaps to save
them from a life of grinding poverty and despair. Brooks herself wrote
of the persona in her poem: “Hardly your crowned and praised and
‘customary’ Mother; but a Mother not unfamiliar, who decides that
she, rather than her World, will kill her children. The decision is not