We Will Continue to Learn: Remembering bell hooks
“Contemplating death has always been a subject that leads me back to love. Significantly, I began to think more about the meaning of love as I witnessed the deaths of many friends, comrades, and acquaintances, many of them dying young and unexpectedly.” (2000: xxii)1
(Originally published by Ruckus Journal)
bell hooks
bell hooks’ passing feels personal to so many of us. I sit with the grief, knowing that she, like so many other Black feminist artists, writers, and activists, left this world too soon. I think about the health conditions that caused Audre Lorde to die at 58, June Jordan at 65, Barbara Christian at 56, and how that may have been exacerbated by the structural violence each faced during her lifetime. Grace Hong names these women, among others, as she responds to James Baldwin’s call to “bring out your dead”.2 Hong writes, “To bring out your dead is to say that these deaths are not unimportant or forgotten, or worse, coincidental. It is to say that these deaths are systemic, structural. To bring out your dead is not a memorial, but a challenge, not an act of grief, but of defiance, not a register of mortality and decline, but of the possibility of struggle and survival” (2008:97).3 To bring out your dead is both an interrogation of the systems of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy that hooks so aptly identified and a practice of love. As I process bell hooks’ death, I lift her name up against a world that creates condemning conditions for Black women and femmes to survive.
hooks’ words have echoed so clearly in my mind since I first read her writing. They move me, as she balances a voice of conviction while sharing aspects of her own life with generous vulnerability. Each piece forges a space of self-reflection, asking the reader to sit with both her thoughts and your own. The self is the starting point of growth and change. In “Toward a Revolutionary Feminist Pedagogy,” bell hooks asks us, “to see ourselves first and foremost as striving for wholeness, for unity of heart, mind, body, and spirit” (1989:49).4 I approach the journey for wholeness as a continual process focused on seeking alignment and listening to your spirit. hooks often returned to things she had written about earlier in her life, made alterations and confronted herself in the work, emphasizing that mistakes are made and can be an opportunity for growth. As a writer that honesty means so much, to give myself grace and know that the words I put to page are not static thoughts. We are always allowed to redact, revise, and transform.
In the same essay, she remarks on her favorite teacher, Miss Annie Mae Moore, who taught her while in grade school in Kentucky and employed, “a pedagogy of liberation… that would address and confront our realities as black children growing up in the segregated South…to teach us an oppositional worldview different from that of our exploiters and oppressors” (1989:49).5 A pedagogy of liberation supports the articulation of the self and gives access to the tools of critique and critical engagement. hooks emphasizes pedagogy as a site of possibility to make meaning of one’s experiences amidst discourses that seek to marginalize difference. The importance of this pedagogy for Black folks in the U.S. South was evident, as was her love for Kentucky. She was the Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies at Berea College and maintained that the South will always be a site of invaluable knowledge.
She was an artist and visual critic who understood art as integral to pedagogy. hooks urged Black folks to embrace creativity, giving ourselves permission to experiment and engage with art as a “practice of freedom”. In Art on my Mind, she pushes us to see differently, writing, “For more black folks to identify with art, we must shift conventional ways of thinking about the function of art. There must be a revolution in the way we see, the way we look” (4).6 That revolution will always be spurred by questions, attending to the ways art makes us think and feel. She signals art not just as a product through creation, but as modes of envisioning what cannot yet, or should not be defined.
When I learnt about her passing, I immediately texted two of my close friends, Michell and Candice or the bell hooks’ aunties as we often referred to ourselves. For us, it was hooks’ investment in ethics and grappling with real world material impacts that always resonated. She believed in the power of theory to provide frameworks to better comprehend the world we live in and to serve as scaffolding to build the world we want to see. For hooks, abstract concepts and everyday life are always intertwined, flowing into each other. In “On Self-Recovery”, she writes, “All theory as I see it emerges in the realm of abstraction, even that which emerges from the most concrete of everyday experiences. My goal as a feminist thinker and theorist is to take that abstraction and articulate it in a language that renders it accessible-not less complex or rigorous-but simply more accessible” (1989: 39).7 Her commitment to writing that welcomes a range of readers and the belief that theory emerges from everyday life are political stances which hooks reiterated throughout her life.
bell hooks is a Black queer feminist who understood that queerness extended beyond thinking about sexuality and desire, towards a more expansive understanding of the erotic as interrogating the oppressive confines of “normativity” and individualism, thinking alongside Audre Lorde. In her 2014 discussion “Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body”8 a conversation with Marci Blackman, Shola Lynch and Janet Mock, hooks explained, “queer not as being about who you’re having sex with—that can be a dimension of it—but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and it has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” She positions queerness as a politics of difference that questions power structures, connecting varying experiences of marginalization and is ever shifting. For hooks, as Candice beautifully shared in our conversation, queerness also manifested as an investment in the sensuality of relation, whether that be romantic or friendship.
Recently, I taught a course about Black Feminist perspectives on intimacy, and I included sections of All About Love. We discussed difficult intimacies, meditating on what it means to be in relation to others while living amongst loss, violence, and histories of pain. hooks asks us to face these challenges of relation and turn to love as a way to move through and alongside the traumas we hope to heal. She writes, “when we choose to love we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other” (93).9 Cultivating love is not an antidote to pain and violence, but a key to envisioning other ways of living that prioritize collective wellbeing through practices of care.
bell hooks will always be present in my life and inform my Black feminist politics. Her sense of humor often comes through her work and the way she cut-up with Cornell West as part of her Transgression series is a reminder that in a world of immense trials, we must find space to laugh.10 As she remarked in her interview with George Yancy, “Humor is essential to the integrative balance that we need to deal with diversity and difference and the building of community.”11 hooks viewed curiosity as a gift and affirmed that we each have the power to interrogate oppressive forces. I am grateful for the chance to bring together this collection of notes and consider the ways her work has impacted other writers, scholars, artists and activists.
-
Citations:
bell hooks. All About Love: New Visions. Harper, 2000.
James Baldwin. The Evidence of Things Not Seen. Henry Holt, 1985.
Grace Kyungwon Hong. “‘The Future of Our Worlds’: Black Feminism and the Politics of Knowledge in the University Under Globalization.” Meridians, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2008.
bell hooks. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. South End Press, 1989.
bell hooks. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. South End Press, 1989.
bell hooks. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. The New Press, 1995.
bell hooks. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. South End Press, 1989.
bell hooks. “Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body.” Public Discussion at The New School, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJk0hNROvzs&ab_channel=TheNewSchool
bell hooks. All About Love: New Visions. Harper, 2000.
bell hooks. “A Public Dialogue Between bell hooks and Cornell West.” Transgression series at The New School, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LL0k6_pPKw
George Yancy and bell hooks. “bell hooks: Buddhism, the Beats and Loving Blackness.” Opinionator in The New York Times, 2015.
bell hooks. “Critical Reflections.” Artforum. November, 1994. p 64-5. Accessed December 2021. https://www.artforum.com/print/199409/critical-reflections-33323
bell hooks, Art On My Mind: Visual Politics. The New Press, New York, New York. 1995. p13. https://monoskop.org/images/7/7b/Hooks_Bell_Art_on_My_Mind_Visual_Politics_1995.pdf