19 pages • 38 minutes read
Gwendolyn BrooksTo The Diaspora
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“To the Diaspora” is a poem of 23 lines divided into four stanzas. There is no regular rhyme, rhythm, or stanza length, making the poem free verse. Although the poem is in free verse, it does have an underlying structure. The poem moves from the past, then to the present, and on into the future the speaker projects for Black Americans. The first and second stanzas represent the distant past, when the ancestors of Black Americans entered the routes of the transatlantic slave trade and arrived in the Americas.
The third stanza describes the era during which Black Americans endured the struggle of slavery. The fourth stanza represents the more recent past, during which Black Americans close to “the heat and youth” (Line 16) engaged in a struggle for self-representation.
The last stanza represents that struggle in the contemporary moment, one in which Black Americans are fully engaged in that struggle for identity, although they are “unwillingly a-wobble” (Line 21), meaning they don’t seem fully equipped for the journey. The last line of the poem projects on into the future, when Black Americans will continue to do the work of defining themselves.
There is no regular pattern of rhyme or meter, but Brooks varies line lengths to enhance the meaning of the poem. For example, she uses a one-word line—“Because” (Line 3) and two-word lines—“was you” (Line 7) and “would come” (Line 9)—to point to moments when just what Black American identity is emerges more clearly.
Repetition
In the absence of a regular rhyme scheme, Brooks relies on repetition to unify the stanzas of the poem. In the first stanza, the phrase “you did not know” appears in Lines 2, 3, and 4 to emphasize the uncertainty African ancestors faced as they entered the transatlantic slave trade.
In the second stanza, “would” (Lines 9, 11, 14) and “could” (Line 8) appear four times in total across seven lines, and these word choices emphasize how provisional the future felt to those African ancestors and their descendants as they endured under slavery. “I could not have told you” (Line 8) represents the voice of the speaker looking at the past from the perspective of the present; with the benefit of hindsight, the speaker is now able to see what they could not in the past. “You would not have believed my mouth” (Line 14) isn’t an exact repetition but rather a parallel grammatical structure that encourages the reader to connect the speaker’s inability to articulate what the addressee could be with the addressee’s inability to comprehend what the speaker had to see.
The next significant repetition is of the phrase “some sun” (Lines 8, 19). Those identical phrases emphasize the connection between the past and the present. The last line of the poem shows just what the addressee (and reader) must understand about the past, present, and future. The work of making the self is “to be done to be done to be done” (Line 23). The poem ends there, but the repetition of that phrase could, one imagines, go on forever. Repetition in this case indicates that identity-making is an endless process.
Caesura
A caesura is a stop or pause that occurs somewhere within a poetic line. Brooks indicates caesuras with commas at the ends of lines in the second stanza, an em-dash (—) at the end of Line 12, and full stops/periods in the last stanza.
In the second stanza, the commas interrupt the flow of the lines, underscoring the uncertainty that Black ancestors faced in the wake of enslavement. “[W]ould come, / somewhere over the road,” (Lines 9-10) describes a moment when the speaker imagines they would have been unable to say what the future held for their ancestors.
The em-dash that comes at the end of Line 12 emphasizes the importance of understanding Black identity as “evoking the diamonds of / you, the Black continent—” even in the midst of all the uncertainty in those halting lines.
In Line 19—“Here is some sun. Some.”—the periods indicate the speaker’s belief in the resilience of Black Americans, but those periods also indicate caution. In place of the commas of the second stanza, there are many periods, underscoring the certainty the speaker has about who Black Americans must be now and in the future.
Related Titles
By Gwendolyn Brooks
