SOURCE: Brydon, Diana. “Reading Dionne Brand's ‘Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater’.” In Inside the Poem: Essays and Poems in Honour of Donald Stephens, edited by W. H. New, pp. 81-7. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992.

In the following excerpt, Brydon suggests that “Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater,” which appears simple and accessible, is a complicated exploration of issues of identity and agency in the construction of the subject.

For the past two years I have been teaching Canadian poetry in the context of issue-oriented courses designed to interrogate the construction and representation of postcolonial women's identities, rather than in the more conventional context of a course specifically organized around genre and nation. Such a focus can change our understanding of Canadian poetic traditions, shifting attention from continuity to disruption and from homogeneity to heterogeneities. Students who may once have seen a poem as an object foreign to their lives...