Imagining a Humane World

IN “KITCHENETTE BUILDING,” Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, considers the challenge of dreaming in grim places. The setting of this 1945 poem, published as part of Brooks’ first collection, A Street in Bronzeville, is the titular kitchenette building, a housing unit of many cramped, run-down apartments, often rented by Black residents in that era in cities like Chicago. Tenants are “grayed in, and gray,” worn out by systemic injustice and the demands of daily life, such as paying rent and putting food on the table. Still, the speaker — who speaks on the behalf of a collective “we” — wonders if a dream could rise “through onion fumes” and “sing an aria” in the building.

The dream in “kitchenette building” is delicate and “fluttering,” something that requires time and contemplation — luxuries that systemic oppression makes nearly impossible. Brooks’ biographer, Angela Jackson, in A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life & Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks, describes this poignantly: “Life is grim in these kitchenette buildings ... entrapment as in a prison. People here are not people; they are things, dehumanized by the nature of a system they did not volunteer for.” Later, she asserts that kitchenette residents “cannot even consider” a dream greater than a cold bath “[before] a realistic necessity comes up ... They take what they can get.”

Brooks makes it clear, though: Imagination is a vital precursor to liberation. “Kitchenette building” plants seeds in questions: What would happen if dreams of freedom and freshness had space to grow? What would liberation look like for Black communities and the U.S. as a whole?

Brooks, who died in 2000 at the age of 83, seamlessly blended art and activism with poems exploring the intersection of racism, sexism, and economic inequality. Her body of work begins during the Great Depression and extends to the end of the 20th century.

Even 80 years after the publication of “kitchenette building,” the poem remains relevant, as bigotry, inequality, and xenophobia persist in ugly, intractable ways. But Brooks reveals some keys to liberation: Dreams, though fragile and not deemed urgent, are essential to transforming lives and systems.

In another glistening work from Brooks, “A Little Girl’s Poem,” a young child describes her desire to see the thriving of children and families all over the world — from refugee camps to English villages. The pure beauty and hope she senses within herself stands in stark contrast to the global violence and dehumanization that threaten not only survival, but also joy. Yet unlike “kitchenette building,” this poem ends with optimistic resolve: “Life is for us, and is shining. / We have a right to sing.”

The young narrator claims our collective right to dream of a humane world. In the early days of another Trump administration, I am struggling with despair, but Brooks’ work helps renew me. As she shows us, collective liberation begins in the corners of the human heart.