Minnie Bruce Pratt

Minnie Bruce Pratt (born September 12, 1946, Alabama, USA; died July 2, 2023, New York) was a poet, educator, activist, and essayist.

Quotes

I begin to understand that a white woman of the South can live and write, but not of the dead heroes. She can live and write a new kind of honor, the daily, conscious actions of women in true rebellion. ("Rebellion")

I understood finally that this heroic will to endure is still not the same as the will to change, the true rebellion. ("Rebellion")

1998 book edited by Janet Palmer Mullaney

It's important to deal directly with lesbian issues, whether or not one does that as an open lesbian teacher. It's important not to just shove lesbian issues to one side but to deal with them head on in the classroom, especially if one is teaching women's studies. The controversy right now is over a woman teacher bringing lesbian issues into the classroom. In another era you couldn't be a married woman and teach. It really is about what's acceptable to do as a woman occupying a position in an educational system that's supposed to be a replication of heterosexuality. Before you even start talking about what books you're going to use, you have to be ready to address that root premise.

I don't think about my writing as being about fame. I think of it in a communal context. Yet it's naive and apolitical to deny that elements of privilege accrue to visibility. Certainly, a visibly lesbian artist is doing something that many lesbians can't do in their own work lives. That visibility is the result of community building, of something that is given to the lesbian artist from the lesbian community. When I think about these issues, it seems all the more reason to be scrupulous about how to return things to the community and to place my life in perspective. I've worked hard, but I certainly could not be doing this by myself. The other thing I know about power is what I've learned from Audre Lorde, who said that if we don't use our power, it will be turned against us. I think there is an important distinction between power over and power with. I'm interested in how we develop power with others. I think it's important that my having access to my own power in my writing doesn't mean draining it away from the community or using it in opposition to others but, rather, using my power collectively with others to build a transformative future.

I wrote that poem ["All the Women Caught in Flaring Light"] because, at the time I was writing the book [Crime Against Nature], I would read at women's cultural spaces and lesbians would come up and tell me heartrending stories. I felt a responsibility to tell some of them. I guess it's what happens when you're a writer in a culture of repressed groups...I think the concept of writing or art as just self-expression or self-fulfillment is a Eurocentric and sterile patriarchal idea...Because it goes only one way. And it's not a way of conceiving of art that acknowledges that you are able to make art only because things come to you from your community. The image of the individualistic, egocentric artist-white, male, and heterosexual-is premised on him creating all by himself in defiance of his culture. But that's not how I have made my art, nor is it how most people in repressed cultures create. You make art only in the matrix of your community and you're pretty foolish if you don't think that that's true. Responsibility isn't a grim thing, you know, in that context. It's just what's real You are fed, and you feed.