Identity, Words, Desire
The writing of Minnie Bruce Pratt (1946–2023)
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[I]n the work that is my poetry, and my writing, I am beginning to understand that I can effect material change. … I can speak and write in ways that can make something possible that has not existed before. My words are not deeds, but they can lead me toward another reality.
Minnie Bruce Pratt, “My Mother’s Questions”
Like many lesbians I know from my generation, I first came to the writing of Minnie Bruce Pratt through the essay “Identity: Skin Blood Heart”. Published in 1984 in a volume cowritten with Elly Bulkin and Barbara Smith, Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism, the essay has since become something of classic, often taught in Women’s and Gender Studies courses as a powerful example of feminist situated knowledge.
Though I’ve followed Pratt’s poetry and other writing on gender and sexuality, anti-racism and anti-capitalist struggle over the decades, news of her death last month took me back to the eighties, the decade when I came out and when I first discovered Pratt’s work. As I reread the pieces in the volume Rebellion: Essays 1980 to 1991, I realised that this desire to return to my early encounters with Pratt’s writing was oddly synchronistic with the writing itself. For Pratt’s writing is always circling back, not to a fantasised place of origin, but to the multiple locations that shaped her as a person, poet, and activist.
Pratt’s activism and writing were constantly struggling against what she described as “self-enclosed thinking”. At their heart lies a series of political questions about inequality, power and justice, questions she returns to time and again, always with new information that challenges not only received wisdom and oppressive ways of thinking, but her own worldview. She takes her experiences as a starting point, recognising her individuality but refusing individualism or the belief that her actions alone can change the world.
In the title essay of Rebellion, Pratt writes about learning, through education, writing, and the women’s movement, to “live and write” as a white Southern woman beyond the stories of the white male heroes she was taught to admire as a child. The concluding sentence says of the woman she has become:
She can live and write a new kind of honor, the daily, conscious actions of true women in rebellion.
As I reread, I too see new things. I see how much Pratt grappled with the very concept of “identity”, how she never took the meaning of words for granted. In “My Mother’s Questions” Pratt writes of the challenges of going beyond the abstractions of words like racism, class inequalities, sexism, privilege to consciousness through witnessing the “crushing poverty” that surrounded her as a girl growing up in segregated rural North Carolina, poverty that disproportionately impacted Black women and children. She later comes to awareness of the causes of this oppression through the civil rights, women’s, and lesbian and gay movements. As an adult she is increasingly preoccupied by what we might call the economics of the everyday within a wider context of capitalist exploitation. Pratt writes about the small acts of budgeting time and money, making time for writing and also for political action, setting aside part of her small writing and teaching salary to donate to political organisations.
Maybe because I was in my twenties when I first read Pratt’s work, the meditations on money did not feel urgent to me then, the way her thoughts on lesbianism and racism did. Perhaps it was because I was privileged enough to have some money, and as a student I was not yet grappling with the practical and ethical challenges of earning a living. Yet reading today, I can see that Pratt’s interest in money is inextricable from her lesbian experience and anti-racist commitment. She wrote not just about how she and her lover struggled to make ends meet and find a stable place to live, but also the wider social urgency of how to make the distribution of money more equitable, how to be accountable for her spending, how her actions – something as basic as moving house – were entwined in wider economic relations that exploited others’ labour.
In “Money and the Shape of Things” Pratt recognises the feminists and lesbian and gay activists who came before her, helping to develop spaces where teachers and writers like her could work. She wonders how she can give back to her community, concluding with the question:
[How] do we learn to change the shape of things so that money is not what determines how people live, or if they die, or whether we live our life out bent to someone else’s use, instead of in meaningful work and in joy?
Words too are grounded in the realities of the world. The essay “Books in the Closet, in the Attic, Boxes, Secrets” opens with a childhood memory of the books Pratt grew up and moves to a consideration of the material and political conditions of reading and writing. Pratt writes of the despair she sometimes feels when writing alone in the attic, when her words start to feel predictable. But, typical of Pratt, she never stays with the isolated individual for long. She returns to the collective, to community, and especially to the women who have taught her what she knows. She reflects on the necessity not only of finding time and space to write, to sit with the challenges it brings, but of listening. She recalls a meeting she helped to organise with other lesbians she had invited to her house:
I was thrilled that they were there – and I didn’t listen to a thing that they were saying. I thought that I knew what we should be doing, and impatiently thought about how I would instruct them in this plan all the while they spoke. … I didn’t listen, really, to any of them, so intent was I on my own way; and now I bitterly regret this.
Through this reflection she comes to see that predictable endings can only be dispelled through “work from other women that is rooted in the messy complexity of our daily lives”.
Pratt came out as a lesbian in the seventies, witnessing and experiencing directly the ferocity of homophobia directed against her, her friends and lovers, and the gay and lesbian community as a whole. She wrote with fury against these forces and fought against them in her activism. Lesbianism was far more than an identity, a lifestyle or a private expression of desire. In her account of protesting and being arrested at the 1987 March for Lesbian and Gay Rights in Washington DC, she calls lesbianism “a love as necessary to our living as breath”.
Pleasure is never far away. After her death, a friend recalled that Pratt had sent a card to a number of her friends with a photo of herself lying fully clothed, smiling blissfully, on a bed, embraced by her long-term lover, the late writer and activist Leslie Feinberg. In this friend’s words, Pratt’s act of sharing such an intensely intimate photo embodied how “[s]he was just brazen in her sexuality”.
Her poems and prose are shot through with this brazenness. In “I Plead Guilty to Being a Lesbian”, Pratt recounts handwriting her short poem “Peach”, from the collection We Say We Love Each Other (1985), on a placard that she then carried at a protest against the censorship of lesbian and gay art:
My tongue, your ass:
the center of a peach,
ripe, soft, pitted, red-fibred flesh,
dissolving toward earth, lust
Eat you? I ask.
Pratt taught Women’s Studies for many years. In “The Maps in my Bible”, about the author’s relationship to antisemitism as a Christian-raised woman, she writes of the struggles she saw her students go through when faced with difficult questions of oppression and privilege in their own lives:
The answer I give is this: We start with ourselves; we stand at the beginning of the maze, in our own bodies, our own lives, and begin to unwind all from there. This is a politics of identity, but I understand identity to include all our identities, our multiple selves, the one who has been hurt, the one who has worked hurt on another, the one who has despised, the one who has gloried in another and in herself.
More than 30 years after Pratt wrote those words, in the midst of an ongoing strike at UK universities that has also raised challenging questions about money, identities and inequalities inside and outside the classroom, I selected one of her poems to read aloud at a student teach-out. I was drawn to “Justice, Come Down” for its devastating images of grief and insistence on the force of justice. I did not know at the time that it is the second poem in Pratt’s 1990 collection Crime Against Nature, written about the devastation of having her two young children taken away from her because she was a lesbian and therefore deemed by the law to be an unfit mother.
This knowledge sheds a different light on the poem. But it does not change it.
This was Pratt’s gift: to write through knowledge gained through experience and witnessing about “terror and power”,[1] oppression and violence, love and justice, in a way that was always grounded in her realities yet always let others in:
Ashamed, people turned their faces away
from the woman ranting, asking: Justice,
stretch out your hand. Come down, glittering,
from where you have hidden yourself away.
Pratt never turned her face away.
[1] “The Child Taken from the Mother” in Crime Against Nature.
Pen in Fist is written by me, C Lou, aka Dr Carrie. You can find my other writing and projects here. You can support my writing further by buying my book or getting me a virtual coffee.
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