3

Gwendolyn Brooks’
Racialization of the Persephone
and Demeter Myth in “The
Anniad” and “In the Mecca”

After the Harlem Renaissance most Black writers of the 1940s and
1950s traded the fantasy of the mythical world for realism and nat-
uralism.1 Despite this move away from Greco-Roman mythology,
however, writers like Ralph Ellison, Robert Hayden, Leon Forrest,
and Gwendolyn Brooks continued looking to the classics for literary
inspiration, often marrying Western classical myth with contempo-
rary cultural mythology. “The Anniad” (1949) and “In the Mecca”
(1968), are two examples of how Brooks experiments with the clas-
sics. In these poems she rewrites the traditional archetypal epic to
reflect the experiences of two Black female protagonists who, like
the protagonists of Greek myth, suffer trauma and victimization at
the hands of men and the larger society. In addition to appropriat-
ing classical myth she also tackles cultural myths concerning
romanticized notions of love, European standards of beauty, and
utopian ideals of the American dream.
Brooks’ awareness of the classics came as a result of her own
informal training as a poet. In her autobiography, Report from Part
Two, Brooks says her parents’ bookshelf gave her access to The
Harvard Classics, a selection of major classical texts. Brooks says: “I
shall never forget . . . over and over selecting this and that dark
green, gold-lettered volume for spellbound study. Oh those mira-
cles. Nine Greek Dramas . . . White [W]hite [W]hite. I inherited these
White treasures” (12). Brooks first tried her hand at classical
T. L. Walters, African American Literature and the Classicist Tradition
© Tracey L. Walters 2007
68 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE CLASSICIST TRADITION

revision while she was in high school. Michele Ronnick observes

that in 1934 Brooks “made a rhymed and a prose translation of the
Aeneid, Book III, lines 1–444 [Aeneas in Crete, meets the Harpies
and is told about the Sibyl who entrusts signs and symbols to
leaves], a prose and lyric translation of lines 472–77 [Anchises sets
sail]” (3). Ronnick also notes that Brooks wrote a mock lament
entitled “To Publius Vergilius Maro”(3). Brooks’ interest in rework-
ing classical narratives probably began after James Weldon
Johnson encouraged her to read the poetry of modernist authors
T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and E. E. Cummings. Brooks was mainly
inspired by the modernists’ technique of deconstructing pre-exist-
ing narratives, infusing several classical works into a single text,
and combining the classical world with modern reality. The
chaotic era of World War I had presented modernist writers with
an attitude of uncertainty. Modernists looked to the classics for a
sense of order and structure. In a review of James Joyce’s Ulysses,
for example, T. S. Eliot said myth was “a way of controlling, of
ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense
panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”
(62). During World War II, Brooks also found that the classics pro-
vided a solid structural framework for writing about her percep-
tion of a chaotic world. The two poems “The Anniad” and “In the
Mecca” illustrate how Brooks effectively fuses the classical world
with the frenzy of modern urban America.

“The Anniad”

“The Anniad” is a complex forty-three-stanza epic that constitutes

the second section of the three-part narrative Annie Allen. The
narrative is a poetic bildungsroman chronicling the experiences of
Annie Allen from childhood to womanhood. In the first section,
“Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood,” Brooks places
emphasis on imagery and symbolism. The poems in this section—
mostly sonnets and ballads—describe Annie’s entrance into the
world, her perception of her parents, images of Sunday dinners,
portraits of deceased relatives, memories of afternoons at vaude-
ville shows, and a blossoming romance. In the third section, “The