To The Diaspora

In “To the Diaspora,” Gwendolyn Brooks uses figurative language to represent the quest for Black identity. The first-person speaker describes and re-describes Black identity in an effort to create connections between Black American identity and the identity of all people of the African Diaspora.

In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker describes the “you” (Line 1) as a person who left their home with no destination in mind. That uncertainty is both a historical and figurative reference to what happened during the African Diaspora. People who entered the transatlantic slave trade very frequently had no notion of what awaited them in the holds of slave ships and the end of their journey to the Americas. Referencing that lack of knowledge about the destination allows the speaker to characterize persistence in the face of uncertainty as a central element of what it is to be part of the African Diaspora. There are some certainties, however. The speaker acknowledges that the addressee is “Afrika” (Line 4) and “the Black continent” (Line 5). Brooks’s choice to spell “Afrika” (Line 4) with a “k” distinguishes this Africa from the geographic space that is the African continent.