Reading Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, in the Meantime

Abstract Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha is neglected twice over. First, it’s poet’s prose, whose theme, of Black womanhood in the mid-century United States, we assume Brooks treated best in verse. Second, the mode of resistance it suggests appears too internal, intellectual, passive—at a remove from structural change. Combining Fred Moten’s theories on Black improvisation with the racialized phonetics of Brent Hayes Edwards, I explore how in Brooks’s prose, networks of sound establish against myriad forms of circumscription and constriction a replenishing, yet never secure, surplus. This isn’t a simple opposition—of, say, Maud Martha’s spiritedness to the entrapping, grey, kitchenette building in which she lives—because she, and Brooks, also take from Whitman a metaphor of stonecutting and sculpture he uses to describe the poet creating new forms for his nation, and which Brooks racializes to depict the challenges faced by the Black artist who would create for her people new traditions permitting a liberated expressiveness.