The Physicality of Dreaming in Gwendolyn Brooks’s “kitchenette building” Brianna Tong College

Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “kitchenette building” was published in 1945 and written in the South Side of Chicago presumably a few years before that, during a time when African-Americans—especially those in Northern urban centers, which were supposed to hold the promise of a better life—were largely left out of the rest of the nation’s booming wartime prosperity. “kitchenette building” seems to be a more intimate, microcosmic reflection of this broader, national scene of black Americans’ unanswered hopes and dreams, centered within a cramped, multi-family tenement-type building called a kitchenette. Brooks’s poem illustrates the intensely physical hopelessness, despair, and griminess that residents in a kitchenette building must live with daily, but it also emphasizes the continued possibility for dreaming by rendering even a dream physical and tangible. In the end, it illustrates how this physicality provides grounds for continued hoping and dreaming, even in a situation of bleak hopelessness, drudgery, and despair.

Brooks’s poem begins by introducing the dreariness of its setting, the kitchenette building, and its inescapable dehumanization of its tenants. Just the first three words of the poem already equate the building’s...