Gwendolyn Brooks’ “the mother”

The problem with trying to write about a book of poetry is the approach. Do you write about one poem? Five? Ten? The so-called themes of the entire life-long collection? I really have no idea, but I do know I can’t do justice to much more than a couple of poems at any one time, so here goes:

“Believe me, I loved you all./ Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I love, I love you/ All.”

The poems are Gwendolyn Brooks are disturbing – some are funny the way Dave Chappell is funny: you know that when you laugh you are really the butt of the joke. And some are bothersome because they challenge you to call your own moral assumptions into question. And some are irritating because you want to rail against the injustice of it all. And a few are almost too sad for words.

“the mother” is almost too sad for words. Here is a poem specifically questioning identity creation through roles. The mother is an archetypal figure who births and then cares for her young and by extension the rest of the world. Brooks’ narrator – being childless – is not this archetypal mother, though it is the role by which she judges herself. In the poem, the mother has aborted her children and is haunted by these abortions: “I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.” These children haunt her because she never became that which the archetype (and the title) demands. How can she possibly be a mother when she chose to abort her children? But how can she not? “…how is the truth to be said?/ You were born, you had body, you died./ It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.”

These children missed life because the mother “stole” them: “Your stilted and lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths.” Her moral judgment is clear. She damns her decisions with her own guilt. But how can she be damned? She “was not deliberate”; she never intended pain. And it is only she who has pain. Finally, the reader cannot bear to judge her when he sees how harshly she judges herself, and the reader is very relieved to hear that even the mother has a defense against her own harsh judgment: she loved them all. And, ultimately, isn’t the love for her children the basic foundation of any mother?