bell hooks three years on from her passing

Abstract

Continue to rest in peace, Gloria Watkins alias bell hooks, almost three years since many colleagues and I were stunned by the devastating news of your departure. Like leaves to trees in autumn are we to life; it sheds us each in turn. It shed you suddenly, you who have made many of us learn to appreciate life itself from different angles and from different standpoints, your voice making us wary of intersectional crossroads. You captured the minds and hearts of many with your simple but not simplistic writing in Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (hooks, 1989) with its lovely lucid essays on various topics and the pain felt with regard to multiple oppressions. They comprise the intersections of race, gender (including sexual orientation and the scourge of homophobia) and social class. The same applies to your acclaimed Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre (hooks, 2014), arguing for intersectionality with other oppressions to do justice to the struggles of women. You found a kindred spirit in Paulo Freire, whom your comrade, the Rev. Cornel West (1993) proclaimed an 'organic intellectual,' despite what you call his (Freire's) "phallocentric paradigm of liberation" (hooks, 1993, 1994b). The two books by him you cite over and over are Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Education for Critical Consciousness. Later, for instance in Teaching Community (hooks, 2003), you bring other more recent texts from Freire into the discussion, notably Pedagogy of the Heart (Freire, 2016) or, to cite it in its Portuguese original, Sombre desta mangueira. You never managed to do a 'talking book' with Paulo even though you admitted that this would have been a consummation devoutly to be wished, to repeat Shakespeare's phrase reserved for Hamlet, given that you love poetry and majored in English at Stanford. What a great conversation this would have been. You took certain white feminists to task with your first A in 'tla Woman (hooks, 1981) which must have incurred the wrath of many but would have won the admiration of others. I recall your writing that you had a hard time finding a publisher for this book which came with the subtitle, "Black Women and Feminism." This struck me as a very powerful, impassioned piece which belied the young age when you wrote it. You come across as unsparing and uncompromising in your critique of everyone you target, some you trounce with devastating, scathing, but cogently argued criticisms of their assumptions and assertions. Others you deal with more prudently and with the respect they deserve, as they are strong allies in the struggle against domination by imperialist white structures, capitalist structures at that. These structures have been relegating many to disposable beings, denied their humanity. If there could have been any doubt as to what constituted one of the greatest examples in history of oppression, then your erudite and historically informed account of the slave trade, dispels this. It is a tour de force of cultural history highlighting its strong sinister side. One feels the weight of history that you carried on your back as a Black working-class woman. It reinforced my view, if it needed any reinforcement, that the much glorified cultural "achievements" of Europe, the continent from which I hail, is heavily tainted by human blood and degradation. And slavery has left its deep-rooted scars as shown by the novels of Toni Morrison among others (see the complex Beloved and the exposure of the international and transnational slave effort in, for instance, A Mercy)-the subject of your doctoral thesis. This aspect of international history reveals a world in which certain humans were and still are projected and treated as 'subhuman,' whose lives are meaningless and whose identities are buried in the heaps of many dead bodies. This, lest we forget, was the case of millions of Jews during the Holocaust under Nazi ruled Germany. It was, and still is, the case of the Indigenous of many Settler Colonial territories. It was and is the case of many Palestinians from the late 1940s onward and today. As I write, their bodies pile up or are scattered beneath the rubble in Gaza, also victims of Settler Colonial rule and made to suffer 'collective punishment.' The same applies to close relatives of the many victims of Hamas's terrorist attack on October 7th, 2023. There is a deep-seated antagonistic disposition on both sides. Your overall message, however, is one of hope, an 'Educated hope' as Giroux would say, not the forlorn hope of the two tramps at the end of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. [excerpt]