Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater by Dionne Brand Essay Example

and definitive, determined to not settle too quickly, if at all. The writing in “Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater” is clean, unmarked by anything other than the most exact and non-interfering language: she knew the patience of one hundred and fifteen years she knew that if she had the patience, to avoid killing a white man that I would see this photograph she waited until it suited her to take this photograph and to put those eyes in it.

The reader's patience as well as the narrator's is rewarded with more details about the photograph and more imagery that is not elaborate or colorful but striking: black, white, feet, marble, red, eyes; her eyes and their subtle suggestion that she was not always patient and not always quiet. The rage that Mammy Prater must have lived is a model for the falling of the poem layer by layer with ease and care, aware that something other than her own perceived inferiority is at stake. The poem concludes with the narrator beginning at the beginning while finetuning the reader’s focus on what Mammy Prater knew—her in-sight and her will.

Concerned and aware of the limits of photography and of writing, Mammy Prater put her whole will in that photograph, will here meaning both agency and last testament. Her agency is her story of patient artistry, a story that becomes an unending gift to the narrator and writer, a poem delivered with perfect photographic velocity. This spiritual of Mammy Prater does not aim to capture her voice but, instead, in its stillness, works to give flesh and movement to a woman whose patience, will, and determination for perfection transcended

photography and writing (language) and yielded her connection to an/other woman yet to come.