On Reading bell hooks and Community Study as Grief Ritual
Community Study helped me grieve the loss of bell hooks, and return to her words. I treasured bell’s words and the connections she wove with them to help us better see ourselves and the world around us—always delivered with her signature blend of sharp wit, humor, and vulnerability. I have always related to her work deeply, and it has carried me through many stages of my life. In every moment of transition or triumph, bell was there as a mirror to show me something and help me navigate the deep waters of society and my own psyche.
It was bell hooks who carried me through the hazy postpartum days following the birth of my first child. I will never forget the feeling of being cooped up in a stuffy apartment with no one to talk to but a baby for hours on end. I craved ideas and grownup conversation, and I felt isolated as I adjusted to my new life as a mother. That period was when bell’s 2014 residency at The New School began live streaming. And I was enthralled! My exhausted mama brain was celebrating, basking in the glow of bell’s conversations with Laverne Cox, Cornel West, Bettina Love, and so many others. Those conversations nourished my mind and helped me come back to myself. There was a big world out there and I was part of it.
“It was bell hooks who carried me through the hazy postpartum days following the birth of my first child…My exhausted mama brain was celebrating, basking in the glow of bell’s conversations with Laverne Cox, Cornel West, Bettina Love, and so many others. ”
bell’s words remained a constant companion and inspiration to me as I navigated the waters of work, motherhood, marriage, and divorce. When I questioned whether I’d be able to stay in the library paraprofessional position I loved as a single mom (living on a paraprofessional’s salary is stressful anywhere, and in the Bay Area it feels almost laughable) I turned to bell’s chapter on work in Sisters of the Yam. “The black women I talked with about work tended to see jobs primarily as a means to an end, as a way to make money to provide for material needs. Since so many working black women often have dependents…they enter the workforce with the realistic conviction that they need to make money for survival purposes. This attitude coupled with the reality of a job market that remains deeply shaped by racism and sexism means that as black women we often end up working jobs that we do not like. Many of us feel we do not have a lot of options.” (hooks, p. 30) After reading this chapter I started to look at my options differently. I decided that doing work that I was passionate about was worth fighting for, so I began to advocate for myself at work. I was able to expand my position and increase my salary.
bell also introduced me to the work of environmental scholar Dr. Carolyn Finney. bell was in conversation with Finney around Black folks’ connections to land, the environment, and our access to nature and green spaces. I began to see the outdoors differently after this talk. Why didn’t I see more Black people on the hiking trails or at the scenic beaches in our area? And what is our relationship to nature? What green spaces are accessible to us, and where do we feel welcome? These questions culminated in an altar installation I created for the 2017 exhibit The Black Woman is God in San Francisco. It featured quotes from Carolyn Finney, Alice Walker, and some of the Black environmentalists whose work I was introduced to in bell’s talk, such as MaVynne “The Beach Lady” Betsch. It also contained pictures of the women in my family engaging with the outdoors, and paintings of African deities associated with different elements of nature. bell’s work is often at the root of my creative thought process.
bell’s death seemed to come out of nowhere since her health struggles in recent years were not widely known. It felt as though she disappeared from sight (which did not ring any alarm bells due to the pandemic), and then suddenly she was gone. To know that I would no longer hear that distinctive, piercing voice of hers reminding an audience to “ask a question, don’t give a speech” during question and answer sessions, or her thoughts on all that was currently unfolding with our world in the throes of the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy was too much to bear. I was too grief-stricken to read bell’s books or listen to any of her talks for quite some time.
bell hooks altar photo
Community Study helped me find my way back to sitting with bell’s words again. When the announcement went out I was still in silent denial that bell was gone. In my sadness I felt that maybe if I didn’t engage with her work then I wouldn’t have to face the fact that she had joined the ancestors. I signed up for Community Study to force myself out of the denial stage of grief. Communing with other folks around bell’s ideas and having the flow and structure of weekly readings made revisiting bell’s work much less daunting.
“Bone Black was a reminder of how interconnected Black women’s lives and stories are, and how our spirits are carried on through our storytelling.”
As soon as I jumped into our first reading, selections from Ain’t I A Woman, I felt like I was home again. It was such a comfort to read a wide range of her work and gather every week to discuss the ideas bell put forth, the historical context in which they were published, and how they related to our lives and our world. The reading I found most impactful was Bone Black. I was struck by bell’s vulnerability and the beautiful structure of this memoir; each chapter felt like a poem. There were so many parallels between bell’s life and my mother and grandmother’s lives as well, which made reading this memoir in the wake of bell’s passing very moving and eased some of my grief. Bone Black was a reminder of how interconnected Black women’s lives and stories are, and how our spirits are carried on through our storytelling. In the midst of Community Study, I was finally able to take some of my other favorite bell hooks titles off the shelf again. I opened Art on My Mind and Sisters of the Yam and read them with a sense of deep gratitude.
bell hooks left us with many gifts in the form of words, ideas, and love. I want to end with the greatest gift she gave me: A reminder to honor and care for my work and my own legacy.I hope these words inspire you to honor and care for your own work as well. This comes from bell’s April 2017 speech at Berea college after donating her papers to the school’s Hutchins Library:
“When our sister Theresa died unexpectedly, it broke my heart. I can’t even talk about it without feeling that heartache because she was emblematic of the type of Black women we’ve been talking about: invisible, silenced, prey to addiction and violence, all of those things, and bad health that led to her death way too soon. It seems very telling that in the wake of her near deathness, they took out her voicebox. When we last saw her, she was unable to speak. Her hands were strapped down. It was such a sad representation of the silencing that Black women have known all our lives. Her death lead me to think deeply about my own legacy, about the fact that so many Black writers, male and female, have gone to dying without taking care of their work.
We live in the cognitive dissonance of domination because on one hand we can talk about imperialist white supremacist capitalist partiarchy, but on the other hand we’re surprised when the white people don’t wanna take care of our work, don’t wanna praise it and husband it and hoard it as they do other thinkers and writers…
Many of us at Berea have recently lost friends, acquaintances, and colleagues to cancer, AIDS, or unexplained catastrophe, and we are aware of death in our midst. That it is as the slaves once said, an old friend. To know this is to know that it is important how we are living right now. Many of you have been drifting for years because you have so incorporated into your thinking and values the idea that life takes place in the future, in the real world. Remember that the life you have must take place where you are in the present. My mother was fond of saying to us as children “Life is not promised,” words which usually prefaced her urging some action we were reluctant to take. It is a radical political response to living in modernity to courageously acknowledge the reality of death. It is the courageous acknowledging of my own death that has led to the protection of my legacy, of my decision to give and to work with my papers here at the Hutchins Library...”
Before hearing this speech, there were many times I felt invisible as an artist and a writer. I have a house filled to the brim with my drawings, paintings, and writings. I questioned what it was all for. After hearing bell’s words, I began to view my house full of work as an archive. A place with stories worth preserving. I thought of my great grandmother who was a contralto opera singer in San Francisco in the 1920s. One of my most beloved possessions is a scrapbook where she saved the programs from every single concert she gave. She cared for her work. When we take the time to preserve and document our legacy and our journey, it becomes medicine for future generations in ways we could never imagine. bell understood this, and she left us with so much to carry forward. In her own work she was forever extending her hand and inviting us to join the conversation.
References
HowdyIzzy. (2016, November). bell hooks Donates Papers to Berea College [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d8FX7n6THY&t=1s
hooks, bell. (2015). Sisters of the Yam. Routledge.