Feminists of color in the 1980s such as bell hooks showed that theorizing is not a disconnected, abstract practice, but that it develops in a complex relationship to experience. They centered women of color feminist thought in books and essays mixing non-fiction writing, poetry, and theory. Hooks and others sought to reach a larger public than the academic one through books of short essays grounded in personal experience (Öhman 2010, 286-87). Hooks frequently wrote of the disdain in which her work was often held in academic circles because of her refusal to use footnotes and academic jargon, but she steadfastly held on to her goal of being a public intellectual read in non-academic Black communities rather than remain locked in an ivory tower to which she had always had a very ambivalent relationship (hooks 1997, 230). In the 1990s, hooks shifted to the more directly autobiographical mode in two interconnected works, Bone Black (1996) and Wounds of Passion (1997).
Bone Black is a series of short vignettes of her memories growing up as an internal exile in a family she felt never understood her. In her trademark style, direct and moving, she recalls everyday events, relationships with loved ones, and the racial, sexual, and class politics that contributed to her political awakening. She reveals her sense of desperation and loneliness expressed in anorexia, a condition then typically believed to affect primarily white middle-class girls. The foreword explicitly presents the narrative as the portrait of a writer in the making. Bone Black “reveal[s] the inner life of a girl inventing herself” and “becoming a writer”; therefore, it is “an autobiography of perceptions and ideas” (hooks 1996, xi; xv). Hooks highlights the way in which memories are constructed and can imprint upon the self events that may not even have happened (hook 1996, 21; Vega-González 2001-2002, 238). She also underscores such reconstructions in her collection of essays Remembered Rapture (hooks 1999, 83-84).
In its style and content, Bone Black interestingly calls to mind Zimbabwean author and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga’s first novel, Nervous Conditions (1989), in which the narrator’s cousin, Nyasha, also deals with anorexia, which is related to patriarchal expectations and colonial education. The beginning of hooks’s autobiographical text, “Bone Black . . . is the story of girlhood rebellion, of my struggle to create self and identity distinct from and yet inclusive of the world around me” (1996, xi) resonates with that of Nervous Conditions: “my story is . . . about my escape and Lucia’s; about my mother’s and Maiguru’s entrapment; and about Nyasha’s rebellion” (Dangarembga 1989, 1). Both narrators open their texts by providing the reader with a key to decode and better understand the meaning of their narratives of entrapment, rebellion, identity, and escape. Bone Black explains a number of things for readers of hooks: in particular, it provides context for a richer understanding of one of her most famous essays, “Talking Back” (1989). It illuminates her remarks on parents attempting to break a little girl’s spirit and warning her that talking back and rebelling can bring about isolation and madness (hooks 1989, 7-8; 1996, 99-102).
Although Bone Black and Wounds of Passion are the only books by hooks that are solely autobiographical, they should be read together with her next book, Remembered Rapture (1999), in which the connections between writing and identity continue to be developed. These three books all detail the history of her relationship to writing as her salvation. She focuses on the healing role of writing poetry in the reconstruction of the depressive self. Hooks highlights her relationship to writing in Wounds of Passion, in which she foregrounds elements of her young adult life, including her sex and love life (Cobb 2002, 194). Her purpose there is to explicitly reject this taboo in Black autobiographical writing (hooks 1997, xix), eschewing the politics of Black female respectability (Hammonds 1994, 132-34). Wounds of Passion describes her long-term—committed but open—heterosexual relationship with a Black academic and poet.
The connections between Bone Black and Wounds of Passion are made through repetition of several important elements (the night her father hit her mother, reading pornography, and anorexia). In both books, hooks’s stylistic innovation resides in the regular switch between first- and third-person narration. This switch serves to problematize the narrative of the self and to highlight the sense of alienation experienced by the narrator. It also allows hooks to distance herself from some of the most private revelations she provides about death, religion, spirituality, sexuality, punishment, family dysfunction , violence, abuse, anorexia, and depression. In Wounds of Passion, she explains her use of the third person narration as “that part of myself that is an observer—that bears witness,” “distance[s] myself from the pain,” “enables critical reflection,” and mediates between past and present (hooks 1997, xxii; Cobb 2002, 193).
In a review essay, Annelie Bränström Öhman notes that “in her early work in the 1980s bell hooks had already anticipated some of the dominant shifts of direction within feminism” such as intersectionality and an emphasis on love and emotions (2010, 284-85). To these we can add the current focus on mental health issues in feminist disability studies. Hooks, a thinker for her time and for our time, will continue to inspire us into the future.
References
Cobb, M. L. 2002. “bell hooks (1952- ).” In African American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 192-96. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Dangarembga, T. 1989 [1988]. Nervous Conditions: A Novel. Seattle, WA: Seal Press.
Hammonds, E. 1994. “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, no. 2-3: 126-45.
hooks, bell. 1989. “Talking Back.” In her Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, 5-9. Boston: South End Press.
___. 1996. Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
___. 1997. Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
___. 1999. Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Öhman, A. B. 2010. “bell hooks and the Sustainability of Style.” NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 18, no. 4: 284-89.
Vega-González, S. 2001-2002. “The Dialectics of Belonging in bell hooks’ Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood.” Journal of English Studies 3: 237-48.