The New Yorker Visits Chicago for No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks

For the New Yorker's "Culture Desk," Doreen St. Félix writes about Chicago poets Eve L. Ewing and Nate Marshall's recent participation in the shadow-box play, No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Chicago theater troupe Manual Cinema performed the play this past November at the Harold Washington Library for the Poetry Foundation's annual Poetry Day celebration. St. Félix notes Gwendolyn Brooks's impact on Chicago's arts and culture intersects with her contributions to social justice causes, remarking, "in Chicago it is her social work—particularly as an educator and an advocate for schoolchildren—that is treasured and understood as a critical part of her artistic legacy. To Brooks, poetry was citizenship. In Chicago, her radicalism is at center stage." More: 

“So many of the spaces that rappers in Chicago use to hone their skills and build their name are the same spaces where poets are doing the same, and so we’re in the same community—and oft times the same people,” Marshall told me recently. “I think a lot of the rappers are influenced by Brooks in their commitment to rendering their own communities with love and complexity.” The very idea of a city arts scene can seem antiquated—rendered unnecessary by the hyper-connectivity of the Internet. But Chicago, a city that was home to a literary renaissance in the early twentieth century, and to the nation’s first black-art gallery (the South Side Community Art Center), and was the birthplace of Poetry magazine, continues to produce cultural works of social realism. Ewing and Marshall are among dozens of celebrated artists—including Chance the Rapper, Mick Jenkins, Noname, Saba, and Jamila Woods—who attended the open-mic nights organized by Young Chicago Authors (an arts-education hub that “exposes young people to hip-hop realist portraiture,” according to its literature) when they were in school, and who went on to make art that is intensely local, rooted in the radical black vernacular. You can hear Brooksian turns of phrase in Chance’s “Sunday Candy,” or in “Holy,” from Woods’s 2016 album, “HEAVN,” (“The lover may leave / The winter may not”).

“There is a Midwestern cultural aspect to it—a cultural norm of sharing and abundance, rather than scarcity and competition,” Ewing told me, shortly before the last production of “No Blue Memories.” (Ewing recently told me that the play will be staged again in Chicago later this year.) We met in the library, under Jacob Lawrence’s mosaic “Events in the Life of Harold Washington,” which depicts the life of Chicago’s first black mayor. Ewing, striking and assertive, her hair dyed the multiple colors of dawn, took off her coat to reveal a marigold jersey that read, “We all we got.”

Read more at the New Yorker.