I completed an essay a couple months back for a course at Mills College which was an in-depth analysis of Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story". It is a gorgeous poem, and moves me in the quietest corners of my heart. As challenging as it was, I enjoyed pulling this apart and digging into her work. For reference, the original poem is cited in my "Inspiration" section.
What follows is the analyzation by me:
In Fear of Trust
Gwendolyn
Brooks illustrates the motif of trust versus distrust in her poem, “when you
have forgotten Sunday: the love story”.
In this she shows the distrust of her former love’s* oral/written
expression by not believing - or not being willing to believe - the statements
that we, as readers, are under the impression the mystery character and Brooks have
previously exchanged. In order to
fortify the premise that Brooks is untrusting it’s important to address that she
must inversely be trusting of something.
We can relate that she trusts, 1) the notion that her former lover could
only forget her, and their relationship, if the former lover successfully
forgets Sunday and everything it represents and, 2) in Brooks’ own concept of
Sunday; how powerful it is a metaphor and what this metaphor represents.
Brooks
distrusts the validity of her lost love’s expression and feels that them being
over her is basically false. In
order for her former lover to achieve this, they would have had to entirely
forget Sunday, which is synonymous to Brooks.
* for the sake of clarity, I will
refer to the person about which Brooks writes as the following: former love,
mystery character, and lost love.
She does not trust her former
love’s statement that s/he is no longer invested in their relationship for how
could her lost love simply forget the entire repeated experience that was
Sunday? Brooks views it as an
audacious statement on her former love’s part.
To
distrust someone’s words is understandable enough. To distrust the words of a
former love is a little trickier to unpack. On one hand, we assume a previous partner
would be more trustworthy than just a regular stranger, yet the words of an old
flame hold considerably more weight, as well as murky layers of connotation,
than those of the stranger. Not
only does Brooks not trust this person, but she appears to be unwilling to
trust them unless they can fulfill the task she later alludes to being almost
impossible. Her experience can
then be seen as a fundamental refusal to allow this person to get over
her. Within the parameters she has
constructed, this former love must not only defy the overwhelming odds against
him/her to carry out the said task, but s/he must also succeed in convincing
Brooks that s/he speaks the truth.
In effect, s/he is not allowed to be over Brooks until they satisfy her
requirements.
As
we are speaking so much of this former love, we come to wonder who in the world
is this mystery character? Let’s exclude such aspects as sex, race, and
political preference and consider more along the lines of: What does this
character represent?
S/he
is a bold representation of Brooks’ inability to trust. But why would Brooks distrust her
former love? For one, she believes
it to be ridiculous of her lost love to even fathom forgetting her and the
relationship. To Brooks, in order for her them to detach from what they had together s/he would
have to fully erase from memory one of the best parts of their relationship. Or
perhaps, Brooks is simply in denial.
These
possibilities directly tie into the premise of distrust. Considering we know the mystery
character only through the image Brooks constructs for us, there is the
possibility for us to distrust Brooks. By not providing any lines from the
mouth of the lost love, we never get more than a 2nd person
perspective of this person and we fail in understanding the emotional
perspective they originate from. It’s
akin to listening to the story of your friend’s breakup and disregarding the
ex’s version. It is important to
remember that Sunday represents a myriad of poignant things for Brooks, joy
being a paramount one - joy in the tranquility - joy in the
“nothing-I-Have-to-do and I’m happy-why?” type of joy (8). This quote exemplifies that she feels
the neutrality and routine predictability of Sunday equal to comfort. What may appear mundane to someone
outside the relationship was, in fact, a source of stability, ease, and perhaps
even, freedom for Brooks. By
speaking of Sunday in the way she does Brooks deems it as a pinnacle of their
union. But we do not know whether
the mystery character mirrors this reverence. Therefore we must assume that it
is Brooks alone who appreciates Sunday as the quintessential representation of
their happiness.
Though
the sensation Brooks possesses for Sunday is clearly palpable – and easily
related to- it does not seal its place in the sphere of reliability. This feeds the notion that Brooks may
be alone in recounting the romance and that her former lover may have had quite
an opposite experience. It trickles
into the concept of Brooks’ reliability as a narrator and again raises the
question, is she simply in denial?
The issue is less that she cannot trust this former love but instead,
that she is essentially unwilling to,
insomuch as it would risk her having to let go of him/her.
Without
the other character’s input, we only know how Brooks feels and we, as readers, must then trust the validity of her experience. By employing this literary
tool, she effectively places the reader in her shoes. We come to understand what it feels like to not entirely
trust the situation before us.
Along this vein, Sunday is then equated to a certain set of sensations
possessed and related to by Brooks only, underlined by the projection that
there is some ultimate failure undermining their relationship; failure at
sustaining it, but more importantly the failure of remembering it. The
concept of forgetting is bold and pervasive through “when you have forgotten…”
The literal description of forgetting is failing to remember and here we see
that motif in the last three lines of the poem which summarize the dualistic
nature of this concept with, “When you have, I say, forgotten all that/ Then
you may tell, / Then I may believe/ You have forgotten me well” (25-8). In this quote, Brooks claims her lost
love has both failed in the past, by prematurely and falsely announcing his/her
forgetting/getting over her, while also projecting that s/he will continue
failing in the future. All is not
lost though, and even while condemning him/her to future failure, Brooks still
holds out for the possibility of an alternative outcome. She creates a game out of it and
prescribes the rules of this game in simple oration: when her former love has
forgotten the image of Brooks resting in comfortable clothes; when s/he fails
to remember getting undressed together
and folding into one-another…then they can forget Brooks. Considering the whole
concept of forgetting is such a blow to Brooks, it is sensible that the entire
poem is a gently winding set of memories aimed at proving why her former love
cannot forget her. What we come to
understand is the word forget represents
finality; the end of her relationship and time and memories with the lost love.
The
fixation of finality and forgetting thus becomes a hindrance to the development
of their situation. Words are
sometimes distractions to the true meaning of their motivating emotion. Brooks
gets stuck on words. Perhaps she has yet to consider those words may not be the
full expression of the mystery character’s feelings. Her psyche craves to summarize the situation and abbreviate
the possibilities in order to rationalize her own emotional expression. We
witness her perpetually considering the infinitesimal possibilities that these
certain strings of words create.
To continue following this path would surely prohibit Brooks from proceeding,
in trust, with any singular route of action.
What
this analysis really boils down to is how the oral/written expressions featured
in “when you have forgotten…” become so problematic. As discussed previously, the perspective from which the
words emerge is from an unreliable narrator while the absence of words from the
mystery character only strengthen the notion that s/he is also unreliable. It is only through the provided medium
of expression –words - that we can
decipher the meaning of this poem, and frustratingly this medium is malleable
and vagarious in it’s shifty emotions and multi-layered connotations. These words we rely upon for comfort and
resolution are constantly up for interpretation, directly relating to the motif
of trust versus distrust.
Brooks
distrusts the words of her lost love - her lost love’s words are never present,
therefore untrustworthy - and words in general are not consistently reliable
vehicles for expression. Well then
does anything do a better job at conveying the claustrophobic stratum of
emotions once words prove inadequate? Yes. Simply put, it’s human
interaction. The type of trust that
human connection has the potential to foster is hyper- relevant to this poem
and paper’s main arguments. The longing
that resounds in her words highlights the absence of authentic connection
between Brooks and the mystery character in “when you have forgotten…”. If
Brooks was able to transcend the microcosm of expression-through-words with her
lost love perhaps there would be less distrust. Throughout this poem there exists a universal sense of
failure through the distrust of oral/written expression. Brooks’ set parameters
embed the deep distrust she harbors for her lost love and make it impossible
for him/her to get over/forget Brooks unless s/he forgets the concept of Sunday
in Brooks’ opinion. The limited
scope from which we must interpret this poem alters our perception of her
former lover and the scene altogether yet it does not diminish the importance,
beauty, or relevancy of Brooks’ expression.
