18 pages • 36 minutes read
Boy Breaking Glass
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Background
Cultural Context: The Second Black Writers Conference at Fisk
“Boy Breaking Glass” is included in In the Mecca, the first collection of poems Brooks published after attending a conference at Fisk University in May 1967. According to Brooks, attendance at the conference changed her perspective on her art and was the “real turning point” in her belief about the role of the artist in Black revolution (Brooks, Gwendolyn. Report from Part One. Broadside Press, p. 167). Brooks was an established writer by the time she went to the conference, but that reputation didn’t endear her to the young Black writers at the conference. Of the conference, she writes:
I didn’t know what to make of what surrounded me, of what with hot sureness began almost immediately to invade me. I had never been, before, in the general presence of such insouciance, such live firmness, such confident vigor, such determination to mold or carve something DEFINITE. Up against the wall, white man! was the substance of the [Black poet Amiri] Baraka shout, at the evening reading (Report, 84-85).
The assertiveness of the attendees, especially their confidence and refusal to be cowed by the (white) literary establishment, impressed Brooks, and signaled to her that there was some other force at work in popular Black culture and Black representation. Brooks’s output after the conference, including “Boy Breaking Glass,” exhibits greater experimentation with form and foregrounding of the Role of the Black Artist in creating art that would reflect and inspire Black liberation.
Literary Context: In the Mecca and the Black Arts Movement
Attendees at the conference, including writers and editors, were the architects of the Black Arts Movement, the artistic complement to Black liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Proponents of the Black Arts Movement asserted that there was such a thing as a distinctly Black aesthetic and that it could be a powerful counterweight to a white, Western aesthetic, which encouraged self-hatred and acceptance of oppression in Black people.
In this context, the Black artist had to answer to Black people, not critics or institutions dominated by white people. The measure of the Black artist was how well they spoke to the Black experience in America. The audience for Black art was Black people. The distinction between politics and art, often debated in Western aesthetics, had no place in Black art.
Brooks took many of those ideals to heart. In her margin notes in the year leading up to her focused work on In the Mecca, Brooks writes, “My aim, in my next future, is to write poems that will somehow successfully ‘call’ [after a poem by Amiri Baraka imploring Black people to get mobilized] all black people” (Report, 181). “Boy Breaking Glass” first appeared in the June 1967 issue of Negro Digest, which later became known as Black World. The editorial staff and contributors are a roll call of figures engaged in Black liberation struggles and Black art of the day—Martin Luther King, Jr., Hoyt Fuller, selected Franz Fanon, Don Lee (later called Haki Madhubuti), Amiri Baraka, and Etheridge Knight. Brooks was one of the few named female contributors in the number.
In her notes on In the Mecca, Brooks writes that what she was after was a “book-length poem. Two thousand lines or more, based on life in Chicago's old Mecca Building. This poem will not be a statistical report” and would include “murders, loves, lonelinesses, hates, jealousies. Hope occurred, and charity, sainthood, glory, shame, despair, fear, altruism. Theft, material and moral” (Report, 191). Brooks envisioned a work that showed the richness of Black life in the inner city, but also the accompanying despair.
Historically, the Mecca Flats was the shambling, derelict tenement that showed just how little the city of Chicago cared for the people—many of them Black—who lived there. The boy in “Boy Breaking Glass” emerges from that sociocultural context. In placing the boy at the center of the poem, Brooks is seeking to capture the reality of what it is to come of age in such a place. That choice forces the reader to consider what the Status of the Black Child says about the state of the country.
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