A Tribute To bell hooks
Image: Wikimedia Commons
““Awakening to love can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination.””
On January 15th, 2022, Black feminist thinker, activist, and professor, bell hooks died in her home in Berea, Kentucky. When I opened my Twitter on this day, my feed was filled with tweets that read something along the lines of “bell hooks saved my life.” And it wasn’t an exaggeration. It was true. For many of us, bell hooks’ critical understanding of race, gender, and class changed the way we navigated and viewed society. Her work includes over 40 books and explores topics that range from Black feminism to reminders that centering love in our lives is a revolutionary act. Her book All About Love, remains a favourite on the latter and continues to shape activist spaces, relationships, and understandings of self-love. All About Love was the first of bell hooks’ books I’ve read. It has changed the way I view love, affection, and relationships and continues to offer direction and clarity on what love should feel like.
In May 2020, two months after we officially went into lockdown, I organized a virtual book club with three friends. We had no idea how the pandemic would impact our lives, but we decided that to get ahead of the isolation, we would commit to meeting once a week to talk about what brought up the most joy: books. Our first read, or re-read for most of us, was All About Love. What had come up often in our virtual meetings was the importance of seeing bell hooks’ words on the page that reassured us in many ways. For me, the significance of seeing words like,
“One of the most important social myths we must debunk if we are to become a more loving culture is the one that teaches parents that abuse and neglect can coexist with love. Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively. Yet parents do this all the time in our culture. Children are told that they are loved even though they are being abused.” - bell hooks, All About Love
I reconnected with a friend who attended our book club to speak about this passage from the book a bit further. Here’s what she had to say:
“All About Love gave me the words to process the ways I internalized affection as a child. In chapter two she talks about how we learn about love in our childhood, especially through uur relationship with our parents. What I still remember is how bell hooks eloquently explained how we come to understand feelings of affection and love even before we start talking. And that still has me thinking, especially when I meet new people. Communication is important but there are so many ways to check in with people you care about. What does that look like? How can we move with and beyond words to show that we care? I think about this all the time.”
I’ve heard someone say that people don’t remember what you said to them or even what you gave them whether it be expensive gifts or experiences, but rather, they remember how you made them feel. In my disability studies class last semester, my professor mentioned that some words have meaning, and other words have a feeling. Both thoughts stayed with me, as I re-read All About Love again this year. bell books, who was skilled in evoking these feelings in the ways she wrote, also showed us that the lack of clarity often found in academia jargon was not necessary to make an impact on readers. The clarity of her writing allowed her work to be accessible and easy to move through. That itself felt like love, rooted in liberation and care.
I say liberation because bell hooks removed the barriers upheld by academic institutions to keep Black, Indigenous, and racialized people on the margins. Through her writing she not only reached so many people, but she let so many of us enter feminist theory and liberatory politics from where we were. The clarity in her writing remains an important skill that I hope academics take up in their work. In All About Love, hooks writes about this clarity in words further. The title of the first chapter makes it clear: Clarity: Give Love Words. In this chapter hook urges readers to think beyond the strict binaries of man and woman by assigning rigid ways in which they think about and act on love. In this chapter bell hooks writes,
“Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up. As we move toward our desired destination we chart the journey, creating a map. We need a map to guide us on our journey to love—starting with the place where we know what we mean when we speak of love.” -All About Love
