Blog Post #3 - Elizabeth Roberti

Minnie Bruce Pratt

 

Minnie Bruce Pratt is an amazing woman who expresses her writing to be a continuation of women who have spoken and written before her.  She says “I need all the voices of the women who have been destined for despisal, anonymity or death, but who, defiant, have survived, and lived to tell their triumph.”  She speaks of those women who won’t be able to speak for themselves, who must write anonymously but instead tell their stories and are proud of doing so.  Minnie was born in Alabama and had two sons, she moved and was a military wife and wasn’t happy so she went back to school and realized she was a lesbiam.  She left her husband and became very involved in feminist writing. 

 

One poem in particular called “Poem for My Sons” was beautiful and shows the passion that she feels as a mother and that just because she was a lesbian doesn’t take anything away from how she feels for her family or who she is as a person and writer.  She says...

 

“When you were born,

my first,

what I thought was milk:

my breasts sore,

engorged,

but not enough when you woke.” 

 

I loved how she calls him her first, similarly to how my mother calls me her baby.  She expresses that it wasn’t easy breast feeding and the sacrifices she gave up for her children, but when she looked into their eyes it didn’t feel like a sacrifice anymore but in a way a blessing to have the priviledge of breast feeding, and giving things up for such a beautiful child, her own.  Then she goes on to say...

 

“With you,

my youngest,

I did not think:

my head unraised for three days,

mind-dead from waist-down anesthetic labor,

saddle block,

no walking either.”

 

She talks as if it’s a love story for her children, she was exhausted but loved them so much and in that time with them hoped that she could teach them all the things she wanted them to be, the things she wanted to teach them about men and about women and the differences between the two and how they were never to be the typical man that she knew. 

 

“Now I have spoken, my self, I can ask for you: that you’ll know evil when you smell it; that you’ll know good and do it, and see how both run loose through your lives; that then you’ll remember you come from dirt and history; that you’ll choose memory, not anesthesia; that you’ll have work you love, hindering no one, a path crossing at boundary markers where you question power’ that your loves will match you thought for thought in the long heat of blood and fact of bone.”

 

Minnie wants the best for her sons like parents all want the best for their children but she wants them to have all they want in a way that keeps them from the evils of the world, the traditions and the stigmas of what should and should not be.  She wants them as men to flourish but not in the ways that they are hindering others.  Pratt's writing inspired me and showed what a strong and powerful woman she is as a mother, a woman and a writer.