Dear reader,

I want write more often about teachers I've learned from.  It has been on my mind. Especially right now, with a lot of elders and teachers passing on.

This is teacher bell hooks, who died December 15th, 2021. She was 69 years old. 

What do you think of when you hear her name? When I think of bell hooks, I think.... now that was someone who had a lot to say. You know she wrote like 50 books?!

If you don't know her, bell hooks is a writer and scholar most often associated with black feminist thought. She had words, lots of words, very specific words. As hooks describes it "In my early twenties and thirties, I was most obsessed with finding words to describe systems of domination."

Maybe you have heard that we live under a system of "imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy"? Yes? Maybe? hooks coined this term, which is sometimes written with dashes in between: imperialist-white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy. It was a way to say these power structures aren't separate, in fact, they are so connected they become a single term.

A lot of people have expanded this to include other systems of power (abelism, colonialism, cissexism, heteronormativity,) etc etc but the fact that the wordy terminology continues until today shows that it resonated. I guess this stuff is so entangled and slippery that sometimes we need REALLY BIG words to try and hold it.

hooks wrote in many other directions as well. She wrote memoirs, poetry, and children's books. She wrote about education and teaching, she wrote about media and popular culture and I guess she talked about these topics a lot too which got her in trouble with the beyhive that one time (around 27 min) when she said beyonce was anti-feminist. Let's see what else? hooks wrote about land, place, and home, she wrote about class and economics, she wrote about anger, she wrote about masculinity, she wrote about love and relationships, and so on and so on. Each time I read a new bell hooks book (there are still many I haven't gotten to yet) I smile to myself and think, "damn and she wrote about that too???".  It's not that I agree with everything I've read. But I sincerely appreciate and need the work, the sheer scope of it, and all the ideas she has put out there for discussion. It is a good example.

To me, what draws her writings together is her voice. Her voice (in writing and real life) is very recognizable. It might be sharp or soft, angry or mild, but it is always direct, like she is talking right to you. It is a voice that you recognize, even if the quality of it changes over time.

The first books I read of hers were Black Looks and Ain't I a Women?. I was eighteen. These books made me question my commitments. In particular, I started to interrogate my own self image. How did I see myself and how did others see me? Where did my self image come from, and what narratives had I consumed and digested unknowingly? For so long I had been more focused on controlling my image than trying to understand where it came from.

“For how does one overthrow, change or even challenge a system that you have been taught to admire, to love, to believe in?” - bell hooks,  Aint' I a Woman

A few years later, I wandered my way through her trilogy on love (All About Love, Salvation, Communion). The "love books", as I started calling them, seemed intimate. Through reading those books, bell hooks became less of a faraway academic to me – she was someone who fell in and out of relationships, who had struggles in love.

I later discovered her writing could take on spiritual topics. I saw she wrote essays in Buddhist magazines, for example. That surprised me at first, but it is just ironic to me now because all of us have complexity. Why should bell hooks be any different? She, like me, can talk about decolonization one day and universal love the next.

I'll finish here with some more of her words...