eveningsout
Poetry narrative tells of a 17-year spiritual journey
by Dawn E. Leach
Seventeen years ago, poet Minnie Bruce Pratt began to feel so anguished by the cultural divisions she experienced in her life that she felt like she was beginning to disintegrate.
"I felt like I was breaking into pieces and I had to put them back together,” Pratt said. She began chronicling a spiritual journey, writing to try to work through some of the internal struggles she was feeling.
Now, seventeen years later, she has published this work in a collection called Walking Back Up Depot Street.
Through a series of poems, Pratt narrates the story of Beatrice, a fictional white lesbian raised in the deep South. Each poem is laid against a background of pain and conflict Beatrice experiences because of the racism and sexism that surrounds her.
"It is very tragic and agonized terrain, the terrain of these poems," Pratt said. “It definitely chronicles a journey out of despair and poverty and isolation to joining with other people."
Pratt said that it took her 17 years to write the book, because it wasn't until she found her own peace that she could bring the story to an honest resolution.
"You can't just say, 'Now I'm going to write about it all getting better.' History doesn't happen that way," Pratt said.
One of her own life experiences which she borrowed for her book was voting for the first time.
She lived in a small Alabama town of about 2,000 people. The townspeople cast their votes at the courthouse with no voting booths and no privacy.
"I had completely not been involved in civil rights did not want to think about it," Pratt recalled. "I'm sitting with a card in my hand, and on the ballot is this party that was started, a black freedom party. Their symbol was a black panther."
With a white rooster as her other choice, Pratt marked the box next to the black panther.
"I thought, I'm with them. Finally, I was able to say I'm with them," she said. “My father looked over my shoulder and said 'You can't do that,' and I said 'Oh yes I can.' It was my first step down that road."
Curbside
TROUBLE
MAN
1999
BY
Pratt pointed out that the South is not the only place where racism thrives.
"Writing about the South is metaphoric," Pratt said. "It exists parallel to a lot of other places where people have grown up."
However, her writings came out of her own realization of how pervasive and harmful racism was in the Southern culture where she grew up. It was a very painful awakening.
"It shattered me," she said. "Thank goodness that it shattered me, because I was leading an incredibly limited life."
She said that the process of working to overcome racism, while arduous, “you will become more truly human."
"I think the challenge is not to stay overwhelmed by that pain, but to see it as the pain of birth and recreation to say I'm going to join the others in creating a new way to be."
Pratt emphasized repeatedly the importance of finding other people for human connection and healing to help in the journey.
"You can't do it by yourself," she said. "Unless you put yourself in an organization, a cluster of people who are moving towards change, with all your good intentions, you can't do it."
"That goes especially for us queer LGBT folks," Pratt said, adding that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people have always had to struggle to find their own community.
Pratt said that the struggles against racism and sexism and homophobia are not the same, "but sometimes there are these parallel moments."
That is why she tried not to separate the issues in her book.
"When we talk about it, it's like we make a list. It's so abstract," Pratt said.
She wanted to explore not just the intellectual challenge, but how making that spiritual journey impacts someone "in a daily way, when it's all tied up around love and family,” Pratt said.
Pratt said that she believes that everyone already has the knowledge and the experience that they need to make the journey to recognize and overcome cultural divisions.
"It's not like we don't know anything. We've been living it. We just may not know what the it is," Pratt said. "I really wanted this
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book to be a tool for people to gain access to their own knowledge."
Pratt will make two public appearances in Ohio to read from Walking Back Up Depot Street: On April 30, she will be at the Crazy Ladies Bookstore in Cincinnati for a 8 pm reading, and on May 2 she will read at An Open Book in Columbus at 4 pm.
Ohio feels like a second home to Pratt, who is on the graduate faculty at Cincinnati's Union Institute. Also, a favorite cousin, whom she based parts of her book on, lives in Columbus.
Pratt said she has a great deal of admiration for the Ohio lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities. "Organizing
in Ohio against
MINNIE BRUCE PRATT
Walking Back Upt Depot Street
the right wing has been inspiring to me," Pratt said, "specifically around the work to defend queer culture.”
When the Cincinnati community rallied in defense of Robert Mapplethorpe and gay bookstores against vice squad attacks, she felt gratified.
"I have felt that the LGBT people in Ohio have stood up for me as a lesbian artist when they stood up against the right,” she said. “I want to thank them for that."
Pratt said she hopes that people who may be feeling worn down from the struggle for civil rights will come to the reading for spiritual nourishment.
"That is something that hopefully art that is soaked with politics does," Pratt said. “I hope it will feed people's souls."
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