Hello Friends,
In October/November of 1987, when today's poem was published in Poetry Magazine, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was still referring to the African National Congress as a terrorist organization — the same social democratic political party that would go on to elect Nelson Mandela in 1994 and that has continued to rule post-apartheid South Africa to this day. By this time in 1987, Winnie Mandela had survived imprisonment, solitary confinement, interrogations, police raids, house arrest, surveillance, and exile. Some consider her to have endured more suffering than her husband imprisoned for 27 years because she was much more exposed. She was targeted because of her political power, serving as her husband's public face and conveying his message to her nation and the world.
Although her life is far from uncontroversial, especially in the years after this poem was written, Winnie Mandela was and is revered as the "Mother of the Nation." Gwendolyn Brooks holds Winnie's elevated position in world politics and in the Black cultural imagination in tension with her existence as just a woman with a childhood and everyday human feelings.
Notice also Brooks' unusual choice to give the poem a narrator in the very last line. Would this change how you hear the poem if you read it over again?
Enjoy.
Ellen
Winnie Mandela, she
the non-fiction statement, the flight into resolving fiction,
vivid over the landscape, a sumptuous sun
for our warming, ointment at the gap of our wounding,
sometimes
would like to be a little girl again.
Skipping down a country road, singing.
Or a young woman, flirting,
no cares beyond curl-braids and paint
and effecting no change, no swerve, no jangle.
But Winnie Mandela, she,
the She of our vision, the Code,
the articulate rehearsal, the founding mother, shall
direct our choir of makers and wide music.
Think of plants and beautiful weeds in the Wilderness.
They can't do a thing about it (they are told)
when trash is dumped at their roots.
Have no doubt they're indignant and daunted.
It is not what they wanted.
Winnie Mandela, she
is there to be vivid: there
to assemble, to conduct the old magic,
the frightened beauty, the trapped wild loveliness, the
crippled reach,
interrupted order, the stalled clarity.
Listen, my Sisters, Brothers, all ye
that dance on the brink of Blackness,
never falling in:
your vision your Code your Winnie is woman grown.
I Nelson the Mandela tell you so.
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Poet Gwendolyn Brooks was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 29, 2010.