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Double Consciousness, Modernism, and Womanist Themes in Gwendolyn Brooks's "The Anniad" - African American poet
MELUS, Fall, 1998 by A. Yemisi Jimoh
Later, however, tan man returns from the war dismayed to find that he is still just another black man in the United States. He must now face "this white and greater chess" (103) of racism. Such a situation "baffles tan man" (103). He didn't expect to continue his overseas war games (fighting for freedom) when he returned.
The benefits of being a World War II veteran, he learns, will not give him an equal position in society; he decides that "woman fits for recompense" (104). As for Annie Allen, tan man says, "Not that woman! (Not that room! / Not that dusted demi-gloom!)" (104). So the respectable Annie who, when tan man went to war had retreated to a "... lowly room. / Which she makes a chapel of. / Where she genuflects to love" (101) is rejected by a newly aware and bitter "tan man." He chooses "Nothing limpid, nothing meek. / But a gorgeous and gold shriek, a "maple banshee," and a "sleek slit-eyed gypsy moan" (21-22). Clearly tan man is self destructive; he, thus, prefers each "random bacchanalian lass / That his random passion has" (104) to Annie's feigned ornaments of coyness. Annie's " ... paladin / Which no woman ever had, / Paradisiacal and sad" (99) is an example of her idealized and unreal concept of male and female gender roles. She, however, does get tan man, whom she loves and perhaps feels fortunate to have, but she loses him after his return from the war leaves him infirm and disillusioned.
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