To The Diaspora

In “To the Diaspora,” Gwendolyn Brooks uses figurative language to represent the quest for Black identity. The first-person speaker describes and re-describes Black identity in an effort to create connections between Black American identity and the identity of all people of the African Diaspora.

In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker describes the “you” (Line 1) as a person who left their home with no destination in mind. That uncertainty is both a historical and figurative reference to what happened during the African Diaspora. People who entered the transatlantic slave trade very frequently had no notion of what awaited them in the holds of slave ships and the end of their journey to the Americas. Referencing that lack of knowledge about the destination allows the speaker to characterize persistence in the face of uncertainty as a central element of what it is to be part of the African Diaspora. There are some certainties, however. The speaker acknowledges that the addressee is “Afrika” (Line 4) and “the Black continent” (Line 5). Brooks’s choice to spell “Afrika” (Line 4) with a “k” distinguishes this Africa from the geographic space that is the African continent. This Africa is an imagined community created through an appreciation of African heritage.

In the second stanza, Brooks develops the notion of Africa as the symbolic space where people of African descent can commune, but this time, she does so through the use of an extended metaphor, one built around a halting, difficult journey down “the road” (Line 10). The “road” (Line 10) is a figure for the struggle to define the Diasporic African self. The “sun” (Lines 8, 19) that flashes on the road is a universal symbol for enlightenment or self-knowledge. This “sun” (Line 8) is one that “come[s] evoking the diamonds / of you, the Black continent” (Lines 11-12). Diamonds are the product of intense, geologic forces on carbon, and they are plentiful deep in the diamond mines of the African continent, most particularly in South Africa. Diamonds are also precious, and they shine. By substituting “diamonds” (Line 11) for the sun, Brooks asks the reader to imagine knowledge as something precious, as something that is born in the dark. That imagery reverses traditional Western aesthetics in which darkness represents ignorance and light represents knowledge. To be of “Afrika” (Line 4) is to encompass both the darkness and the light, and both are equally good.

In the third stanza, the speaker casts themselves as someone making a gesture to the “you” (Line 16), hoping to smooth over some perceived distance between the speaker and the addressee. That distance may be generational, considering that the addressee is “somewhere close / to the heat and youth of the road” (Lines 15-16). If it is a generational gap, the speaker in this stanza is the voice of experience, one that has seen wave after wave of freedom struggles with only incremental progress.

“[T]he heat and youth of the road” (Line 16) may well refer to the distance Black Americans feel from the monumental struggle for freedom during Emancipation and Reconstruction, when securing the benefits of freedom for Black Americans seemed within reach. The addressee may be at a distance from this moment because of the hard years after that first moment of freedom. Given the context in which Brooks was writing, that moment away from the road may be the aftermath of the 1960s, when the same sense that the country had stopped short of revolution prevailed.

No matter what that distance from the road is, the speaker’s goal is to let the addressee know that “[h]ere is some sun. Some” (Line 19), an assurance that the energy of those early struggles after Emancipation and after the 1960s will bear fruit, if only the addressee is willing to work for it. “Some” (Line 19) implies that even with great effort, the speaker’s past experience and understanding of Black people as Africans can be sources—flawed and partial ones—for understanding the true identity of Black Americans.

In the final stanza of the poem, the speaker describes the road again, only this time, it is an inhospitable place. When the speaker says, “Now off” (Line 20), that phrase may be one that speeds the addressee on their way to somewhere the speaker cannot go or has already been. That destination is clouded in uncertainty, and the addressee has to traverse the road “dry, though drowsy, all unwillingly a-wobble” (Line 21), which implies that the addressee may be short of the resilience, alertness, and steadiness they need to make the imagined Africa real. The phrase “dissonant and dangerous crescendo” (Line 22) implies that this part of the journey is a perilous one, in part because of dissonance—the clashing of competing sounds.

Dissonance perfectly captures the situation of veterans of Black liberation movements in the United States, who were far from confident about what to do as the 1980s approached. The speaker doesn’t know, and they aren’t able to tell the addressee either. The final line of the poem implies that, for people of the African Diaspora, freedom never stays won and that certainty about what it looks like isn’t necessary for fighting for it. The final line also implies a stiffening of resolve, one that gets its strength from the persistence of both the speaker and the addressee.