Gwendolyn Brooks: Speaking For The Marginalized Other

Gwendolyn Brooks, a prominent contemporary American poet, is the first African-American writer to win a Pulitzer Prize. Her first book, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), describes the daily lives, disappointments and aspirations of ordinary American blacks in Bronzeville, Chicago, while Annie Allen (1949), a long narrative poem, tells the story of a black woman's journey from childhood to adulthood in Chicago with poverty and discrimination. The Bean Eaters (1960) deals with lynchings, racial integration and the hopelessness of American blacks while In the Mecca (1968) discloses poverty and unfilled dreams of American blacks. Riot (1969) and Family Pictures (1970) examine the social upheavals of the late 1960s with objectivity and compassion. She also published other books such as Beckonings (1975) and To Disembark (1981).This thesis intends to examine Brooks's poems published from 1940 to 1970, which was a turbulent period in American history. During that period, there were the civil rights movement, the women's liberation movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the youth counter-culture movement, the assassination of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and so on in America. Influenced by those turbulences, Brooks vividly depicts the marginalized American blacks and American women in her poems.Blacks and women in America have had the status of the "other" and viocelessness for a long time. They belong to the discourse of internal colonialism, and always struggle to abolish their subservient colonial status and move from voicelessness to voice, from the periphery to the centre. This thesis composed of four parts, analyzes the theme of colonization and decolonization in Brooks's poems.Firstly, this thesis discloses how American whites colonize the black culturally and psychologically. The white construct the black as the "other,"discriminate against and assimilate the black, and repress blacks' resistance to consolidate their supremacy.Then, this thesis analyzes how the black decolonize from white authority. For Brooks, racial integration and fighting are two acceptable means of dismantling the white centre. She combines white form with black content, and adopts black aesthetic senses and blues in her poems to dissolve the white centre in American literature.Besides, this thesis examines how men dominate women physically, economically and psychologically. In patriarchy, men control women's bodies and turn women into victims of male violence and objects of economic exploitation. They also employ patriarchal doctrines to control women's minds and make women disgraced, silenced and passive.Finally, this thesis expounds the deconstruction of the male centre by analyzing the theme of Brooks's poems and her writing techniques. Brooks advocates that men and women live together equally and harmoniously. In order to realize gender equality, women should be independent, should enhance their cognitive ability and resist patriarchal privileges. Brooks herself employs the mock-heroic mode, imagism and synchronicity to dismantle the male centre in modernism.Brooks insistently uses her poems to represent and speak for the "other," that is, American blacks and American women. Her poems illuminate the existence and development of the contemporary marginalized women, minorities and developing countries.