Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

128
Gwendolyn Brooks
corner “tavern” (1). Madam made a splash of color in a drab world—
suspect in terms of Brooks’ concern with white images of beauty and
the color line—but a feat no less impressive for all its ambiguities.
Yet the corner still yields to the soporific of drink and the false ease it
brings, the School of Beauty supplanted by the school of hard knocks,
as in the preceding poem, and fertility is supplanted by the false relief
of barrenness.
The second poem, “the kitchenette building,” then, provides both
backdrop and vantage point to the Bronzeville street scene. Reading
the mother’s lament within the context of the collection makes plain
that abortion and squandered fertility are not only the speaker’s
literal experience but also emphatic metaphors for a lusterless,
meager existence. The pathos of the mother “mothers” the vignettes
in “Bronzeville,” showing the aborted “dreams” of “the kitchenette”
and the lives laid waste by “gray” and hopeless happenstance. In “the
kitchenette,” incipient dreams vie with the insistent, unromantic
drama of survival:
But could a dream send up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms,
Even if we were willing to let it in,
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?
The unrealized “dream” in these stanzas becomes in “the mother” the
dream of giving birth and mothering a child, a child who the disconsolate
mother couldn’t “warm” or “keep clean” and who will never “sing
an aria” or even be allowed to “begin.”
With the sober pronouncement of “the mother’s” opening lines,
Brooks’ narrator signals her need to unburden herself, to dignify
herself with the story of her perpetual remorse and grief. The “abortions”
here, as the rest of the poem makes plain, refer to the fetuses
as well as to the procedure of removing the fetuses. In the whole of
the first stanza, the narrator refers to herself in the second person as
a distancing “you”—a device that has the effect of implicating others
as well as suggesting the mother’s initial reluctance to lay complete