Carolina QuotesI understood finally that this heroic will to endure is still not the same as the will to change, the true rebellion. ("Rebellion")
Minnie Bruce Pratt Connected to the Carolinas
Source
No citation is recorded for this quotation.
- work
- Rebellion: Essays 1980-1991
- year
- 1980
no citation recorded
Cite this record
“I understood finally that this heroic will to endure is stil…” Minnie Bruce Pratt. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-440D277E20. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/440d277e20
More from Minnie Bruce Pratt
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 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 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.