SOURCE: "The Loss of Lyric Space and the Critique of Traditions in Gwendolyn Brooks's In the Mecca," in Kenyon Review, XVII, No. 1, Winter, 1995, pp. 136-47.

In the following essay, Clarke examines the significance of ambiguity, indeterminacy, and postmodern subjectivity in In the Mecca. According to Clarke, "'In the Mecca' is an enunciation of place, fragmentation, despair, death, and a frantic splitting of the narrative strategies of showing and telling."

What else is there to say but everything?

In the Mecca

The 1952 razing of Chicago's once magnificent showplace, the Mecca, was an act of erasure, causing Gwendolyn Brooks, by the late 1960s, to reconsider her own location in the tradition of African-American literature. Designed by George Edbrooke, "famous for his ability to utilize aesthetically large spaces," and built by the D. H. Burnham Company in 1891 for the white wealthy of Chicago, the Mecca became one of the early examples...