7 - Synesthetic Embodiment

Summary

The eponymous protagonist of Gwendolyn Brooks’s under-examined 1953 novel Maud Martha becomes acutely attuned to the multisensory dimensions of quotidian experience. As she navigates the intersecting forces of race, gender, class, and color in the public sphere, she begins to conceive of herself as a perceiving subject rather than solely as a perceived object in the private sphere. Drawing on Black feminist scholarship, I theorize synesthetic stillness as an aesthetic strategy that reveals aspects of Black interiority through its exploration of overlapping and intermingling perceptual faculties. In deploying synesthetic stillness, Brooks not only counters dehumanizing sensory stereotypes, but traces a mode of Black resistance that privileges internal sensation rather than external expression.