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Gwendolyn Brooks, "To the Diaspora"

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Other poems by Gwendolyn Brooks

Read chronologically the other Brooks poems in your text from Brooks's long, rich career: "First Fight. Then Fiddle." (p. 1054 LIT and p. 802 LIT Shorter); "We Real Cool" (p. 881 LIT and p. 658 LIT Shorter); "The Coora Flower" (p. 1252 LIT). Note how the poet has responded to changing ideas about poetic forms and their connection to her place as an African American woman. What similarities and differences do you see in the poems? Do these differences represent substantial changes or primarily changes in emphasis, cultural context, or experience?

Brooks was profoundly affected by the black solidarity movement, particularly after attending the Fisk University Writers' Conference in 1967. She also traveled to Africa several times in the 1970s. You might read more about the environment that shaped African American writers during these decades in books such as The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism by Houston A. Baker, Jr.

The rhetoric of the poem

Gwendolyn Brooks speaks often of writing "preachments," hoping to call out to African Americans in poetic words they all can understand. One poem, which ends To Disembark, the book in which "To the Diaspora" appears, is entitled "Another Preachment to Blacks":

Your singing
your pulse, your ultimate booming in
the not-so-narrow temples of your Power—
call all that, that is your Poem, AFRIKA

The poem ends with:

It is too easy to cry 'AFRIKA!'
and shock thy street; and purse thy mouth
and go home to thy 'Gunsmoke', to
thy 'Gilligan's Island' and the NFL.

What preachments is Brooks calling out in this poem? In "To the Diaspora"? Are they effective both poetically and rhetorically? How much does the poem reflect ideas of the 1970s? Of today?

Brooks and other writers

The need for community and empowerment is a strong theme in the featured works of two other African American writers who were contemporaries of Brooks and who are explored on this Website: Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin. Consider the different perspectives each writer presents. Each work is in a different genre; how do those generic differences shape what these writers can say?

Africa, as continent and symbol, is the subject of many poems by African American writers today. Compare this poem with three others in your text (pp. 1159–61 LIT and pp. 894–95 LIT Shorter): "Africa" by Maya Angelou, "A Far Cry from Africa" by Derek Walcott, and (in LIT only) "I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra" by Ishmael Reed.

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