articles about the mother by gwendolyn brooks

Brooks ultimately questions the premise of abortion storytelling itself as a truthtelling venture: 'oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?' A singular truth implies one way to tell an abortion story, an idea incongruous with the conditional language and shifting temporal frames of the poem. The second stanza, for example, invokes the imaginative power of the subjunctive 'if' as the speaker considers various rhetorics and projections of abortion as a moral or religious wrong - 'if I sinned,' 'if I stole,' 'if I poisoned.' Notably, Brooks does not give these perspectives on abortion the weight of the declarative, instead positioning these more negative affective responses as possible, but not inevitable, responses. We begin with 'the mother' because we share its speaker's impulse to unfold the complex facts and feelings of her abortion story by insisting on this sense of conditional, changing response as central to its storytelling form. One of many persona poems that Brooks gathers in her 1945 collection, A Street in Bronzeville, which chronicles the everyday struggles and daily life of postwar Black life on the South Side of Chicago, 'the mother' refuses to reduce abortion to a single meaning or truth.

Beginning with this powerful declaration, 'the mother' offers a prismatic consideration of abortion not only as fact, but also as experience, memory, source of self-knowledge, and condition of affective response. The opening line of Gwendolyn Brooks's famous poem 'the mother' compels its reader to recognize and remember the fact of abortions now, in the past, and in the future.

Articles about the mother by gwendolyn brooks