Boy Breaking Glass

Brooks explains in one of her memoirs that Marc Crawford, a highly respected Black editor, prompted her to write “Boy Breaking Glass” with the question of “[h]ow ghetto blacks, overwhelmed by inequity and white power, manage to live. Does a black boy […] turn his eyes away from the Statue of Liberty? How does he talk to himself to comfort himself? What beauties are at his disposal?” (Brooks, Gwendolyn. Report, p. 190). In “Boy Breaking Glass,” Brooks explores possible answers to that question. Brooks relies on imagery, diction, and ambiguity to make the case that art in its present state is inadequate to represent the struggle of the dispossessed.

The poem’s title parodies traditional Western art, which represents subordinate people—women, exoticized Others, laborers, and people of color—as objects for the consumption of a privileged viewer. The dedication to Marc Crawford, “from whom the commission” (Line ii), calls attention to the poem as a work of art, something a cultural gatekeeper asked the writer to create. The voice in the early part of the poem belongs to an observer, one trained to look at art critically.

In Lines 1-4, the speaker focuses on the subject—the broken window, not the “Boy Breaking Glass”—causing the boy to disappear momentarily from a poem that is ostensibly about him. When the speaker describes the window and the sound its breaking makes, the word choices are rooted in aesthetic judgment—“elegance” (Line 3), “is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed première” (Line 4). Those word choices communicate an admiration for what the broken window says about the boy’s expressive powers.

Only then does the speaker return to a characterization of the boy with the proprietary “Our” (Lines 5, 6), with the implication that the speaker and the reader are complicit in making the boy into an object. That objectifying eye diminishes the boy and the window, as the word choices “ornament” (Line 5) and “little” (Line 6) show. The boy is a child, but from the perspective of the speaker, there is something terrifying (“terrible” (Line 5)) about a child who is knowledgeable (“old-eyed” (Line 4)) about his status in the world. With these word choices, the tone shifts. The speaker loses the distance that aesthetic appreciation of the broken window offers. That shift anticipates the next two lines of the poem.

Brooks relies on her art to force that observer (and the reader) to contemplate the boy who breaks the window, with Lines 7-15 being full of the voice of the boy. Ironically, those lines are full of negatives (seven of them in one form or another). Other images for absence also appear, including “a hole” (Line 7), “no extension” (Line 12), and the boy’s lament—“now I am no longer there” (Line 15). If the only means the boy has of expressing himself is a breaking window, then the message of that art is that he is invisible and unknown. That is the boy’s voice.

In Lines 16-19, the voice of the observer—or perhaps the voice of traditional artists and critics—appears again. The rhythm is sing-song, with some of that quality achieved with alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. There are also imperfect rhymes such as “sanity” and “tea” (Line 16) and “other” (Line 18) / “weather” (Line 19). The lines are also short. Brooks’s choices in these lines suggest that people judging the artistic merits of a breaking window are facile, too shallow to judge the import of the boy breaking the window.

By contrast, the boy’s lines in Lines 20-21 are assertive and sprawling, reinforcing the anger behind his direct accusation of the “you” in Line 20. The boy may be a vandal, but the people who created his world are thieves. These thieves stole the boy’s “name” (Line 21), which may be a reference to the enslavement of the boy’s ancestors; one of the first steps of psychological domination of enslaved people was the stripping or distortion of their names, which linked them to their African origins. The boy speaks with moral authority by making the connection between the past and the present. His breaking of the window cannot be removed from the context of history by reading the broken window from a purely aesthetic perspective.

The final movement in the poem is like the matching book-end to the first few lines, only now, the speaker is keenly aware of all the boy does not have. The speaker is less certain about what it is they are seeing and hearing with the breaking window. Brooks relies on a series of nouns—all word choices rife with ambiguity—to communicate uncertainty about all the things the boy or the window might be. A “snare” (Line 27) is a drum that can signal a call to march. It is also a trap. The boy and his window might be a warning about the cost of making the boy invisible, but it could just as well be a call to action to protect the future of this Black child. The boy is a threat to white readers who fear the boy, but he is something different to interested Black readers.

“Exceeding sun” (Line 27) is the final ambiguous image. A sun that exceeds its margins will violently burn the Earth. If the boy breaking glass is this, then his despair may be enough to destroy everything. “To exceed” is also to step over boundaries, and “sun” (Line 27) may well be a play on the word “son”; the boy has already exceeded what an oppressive society grants him by expressing himself through the breaking glass. From the perspective of the militant Black politics of the era, exceeding the bounds of a racist society is all for the good. Breaking glass is just the first moment of a revolutionary consciousness.