Thursday
bell hooks, the noted African American culture critic, feminist, social activist and professor died last week at 69. To honor her, I am running two excerpts from an exchange she had with poet Maya Angelou since, between them, they say much about the importance of literature in the world.
According to her Wikipedia biography, hooks grew up in segregated Kentucky (she was born in 1952), the daughter of a janitor and a maid. She was an avid reader, her favorite authors being poets William Wordsworth, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Gwendolyn Brooks.
At age 19, at Stanford, she began writing Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, the work that would make her famous when it was published ten years later.
The exchange between hooks and Angelou occurred in 1998, six years after Angelou delivered her poem “On the Pulse of the Morning” at Bill Clinton’s inauguration. It was moderated by Melvin Mcleod and appeared in the journal Lion’s Roar: Buddhist Wisdom for Our Time.
In one interchange, hooks and Angelou talk about the importance of art in breaking down barriers between people:
bell hooks: In your book of essays, Even the Stars Look Lonesome, you say, “We need art to live fully and to grow healthy.” Talk about that.
Maya Angelou: That’s true. I do believe that art is as important to the human psyche and physical body as air is, as oxygen, as water. And alas, because it’s not something we can quantify reliably, we tend to think art is a luxury.
Art is not a luxury. The artist is so necessary in our lives. The artist explains to us, or at least asks the questions which must be asked. And when there’s a question asked, there’s an answer somewhere. I don’t believe a question can be asked which doesn’t have an answer somewhere in the universe. That’s what the artist is supposed to do, to liberate us from our ignorance.
bell hooks: You’re constantly encouraging people to read, and not just to read your books but to read a wide variety of writers—to read the great white male writers, to read the great African-American writers of both genders. I think that’s a force that we see in everything you’ve done—praise for the power of reading to transform our lives.
Maya Angelou: I remember myself as a young girl in Arkansas in the lynching days of the thirties. One man was lynched in my town and people took pieces of his skin for souvenirs, because he was burned after he was lynched. My grandmother was kind of the mother of the town, mother of the black part of town, and she heard about this and we prayed and prayed and prayed. Every time she’d think about it—”On your knees.”
In the meantime, I was reading Charles Dickens, and Dickens liberated me from hating all whites all the time. I knew that I liked some of these people, because I felt for Oliver, and I felt for Tim. I read the Bronte sisters and I felt for those people. I decided that the people in my town were a different race than the whites on the moors and in the poor people’s homes and in orphanages and prisons. So I was saved from hating all whites, you see.
bell hooks: When I read Wuthering Heights as a working class girl struggling to find herself, an outsider, I felt that Heathcliff was me, you know? He was symbolic to me of a kind of black race: he was outcast, he was not allowed into the center of things. I transposed my own drama of living in the apartheid south onto this world of Wuthering Heights and felt myself in harmony with those characters.
Maya Angelou: Absolutely.
Melvin McLeod: It strikes me you are suggesting that reading is a more powerful way to develop empathy with people of different races or classes or times than even our normal day to day relationships.
bell hooks: Well, this is so because reading requires that you have to use your imagination. When I’m reading Wuthering Heights I have to imagine what Heathcliff looks like, I have to imagine what Katherine is like. I have to imagine and so my mind has to be working.
Because they believe literature has this power, both women decry those who contend that one cannot cross demographic lines:
bell hooks I’m so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer. I think the worst thing that can happen to us is to lose sight of the power of empathy and compassion.
Maya Angelou: Absolutely. Then we become brutes. Then we risk being consumed by brutism….
I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance. When I finish lecturing, I find that the whole audience, black and white, is a little bit changed, because I will have recited Sonya Sanchez, Anne Marie Evans, and probably Eugene Redmond, and Amiri Baraka, and Shakespeare and Emerson, and maybe talk about Norman Mailer a little bit, because he writes English, and Joan Didion, who writes this language. People see something. I don’t know how long the change maintains, but if you have changed at all, you’ve changed all, at least for a little while.
I’ll just note that philosopher Martha Nussbaum, fighting a similar fight, arrives at the same conclusion:
But the great contribution literature has to make to the life of the citizen is its ability to wrest from our frequently obtuse and blunted imaginations an acknowledgement of those who are other than ourselves, both in concrete circumstances and even in thought and emotion. As [Ralph] Ellison put it, a work of fiction may contribute “to defeat this national tendency to deny the common humanity shared by my character and those who might happen to read of his experience.” This contribution makes it a key element in higher education.
Never one to avoid a battle, bell hooks spent her career challenging us to open our minds. Her knowledge of literature gave her a powerful base from which to speak.