For the 2023 Black History Month we are remembering and celebrating the life and works of Gwendolyn Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000). She broke into book publishing in 1945. She had a decades-long career as a poet and was recognized with many honors beyond the Guggenheim Fellowship. Her poetic work includes sonnets ballads and blue rhythm free verse.
Miss Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in May of 1950. She was the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize. She was a prolific writer even at a young age and by the age of 16 she had published approximately 75 poems. Given the social dynamics at that time and the fact that she was in school in an era which did not allow for such things she faced much racial injustice. It must have been that experience and helped her to understand the prejudice, the bias in the systems and institutions that directed her life.
Her poem “The Mother” is a powerful piece where an impoverished mother addresses the reader directly about the stifling act of abortion. The poem becomes almost claustrophobic in its emotional connection. That the decision was hers even though the crime was not. This leads the reader to consider the narrator in the poem from the perspective of a woman in an abusive or oppressive relationship.
