by bell hooks
My zeal for writing has intensified over the years and the incredible affirming feedback from readers is one catalyst. In my early writing years I thought this zeal was purely a function of will. However I found that rejection by the publishing world really affected my capacity to write. It left me feeling blocked, as though no one wanted to hear my ideas. No writer writes often or well if they despair of ever having an audience for their work. Knowing that readers want to hear my ideas stimulates my writing. While it does not lead me to write if I am uninspired, it does enhance my capacity to work when inspired. Long solitary hours spent writing feel more worthwhile when a writer knows there are eager readers waiting for new work. Oftentimes I write about issues readers have repeatedly asked me questions about at public lectures. My professorial work, which includes both classroom settings and public lectures, keeps me in closer touch with reader response to my work than I might be were I creating work in a more isolated manner. It is equally true that engaged dialogue about ideas is also a stimulant for writing. Sometimes I feel an urgent need to write ideas down on paper to make room for new ideas to arrive, keep my mind from becoming too crowded.
Historically the writers in our culture who were the most prolific were white males. Now this is changing. However, as more writers from marginal groups break silences or barriers that led to the creation of only one work, producing a body of work is often viewed with disdain or disparagement. While it is true that market forces lead the publishing industry to encourage writers to produce books that may simply be repetitive, poorly written, and uninspired simply because anything specific successful writers write will sell, it does not follow from this that every writer who has an ample body of work is merely responding to market-driven demands. Since I have never tried to make a living as a writer, I have had the extreme good fortune to be able to write only what I want to write when I want to write it. Not being at the mercy of the publishing industry to pay the rent or put food on the table has meant that I have had enormous freedom to resist attempts by the industry to “package” my work in ways that would be at odds with my artistic vision. Reflecting on the interplay between writing and the marketplace in Art [Objects], Jeanette Winterson comments: “Integrity is the true writer’s determination not to buckle under market forces, not to strangle her own voice for the sake of a public who prefers its words in whispers. The pressures on young writers to produce to order and to produce more of the same, if they have had a success, is now at overload, and the media act viciously in either ignoring or pillorying any voice that is not their kind of journalese.” When I choose to write an essay book that includes work that may have been published first in magazines, reviewers will often write about the work as though it is stale, nothing new. A book of mine might include ten new essays (which alone could be a book) and four or five pieces that were published elsewhere and a reviewer might insist that there is no new work in the collection. Men can produce collections in which every piece has been published elsewhere and this will not even be mentioned in reviews. This critical generosity cuts across race. Two books that come to mind are Cornel West’s collection Race Matters and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s book Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man. While feminist intervention altered the nature of contemporary women’s writing, it has had little impact on critical evaluations of that work in the mainstream press.
Dissident writing is always more likely to be trashed in mainstream reviews. Rarely do mainstream critiques of my work talk about the content of the writing—the ideas. It took years of writing books that were published by alternative presses for this work to be acknowledged by the mainstream publishing world. Had I stopped writing early on it is unlikely that my books would ever have received any notice in mainstream culture. Ironically, producing a body of work has been one of the reasons it has not been easy for critics to overlook my writing even as they often imply in written critique and conversation that I should write less. Usually these critics are other women. While contemporary feminism highlighted difficulties women writers face by challenging and intervening on institutionalized barriers, it also opened up new possibilities (i.e., women’s presses, more women entering the field of publishing). The incredible success of feminist and/or women’s writing in the marketplace certainly compelled mainstream publishers to reconsider old approaches to writing by and about women. It is simply easier for women writers to write and sell work than ever before. As a consequence it has become more difficult for women to attribute failure to write or sustain creativity solely to sexist biases. These changes have led to conflict and competition between women who write a lot and those who do not, especially when the latter attribute nonproduction to sexist barriers. The harshest critics of my work have been less well-known black women writers and/or individuals who have had difficulty producing new work.
Like other women writers, who face barriers but surmount them to do the work they feel called to do, I find it disheartening when our literary triumphs however grand or small are not seen as part of a significant advance for all women writers. Until the prolific female writer, and more specifically the black female writer, is no longer seen as an anomaly we cannot rest assured that the degree of gender equity that exists currently in the writing and publishing world is here to stay. And while women writers should not be in any way fixated on the notion of quantity, we all should feel utterly free to write as much as time, grace, and the imagination allow.
Time remains a central concern for all women writers. It is not simply a question of finding time to write—one also writes against time, knowing that life is short. Like the poet Donald Hall I was enchanted by the Scripture that admonishes us to “work while it is day for the night cometh when no man can work.” Even as a child these words made an impression. They haunted my own search for discipline as a writer. In his memoir Life Work Hall contemplates the relation between writing and dying, stating that “if work is no antidote to death, nor a denial of it, death is a powerful stimulus to work. Get done what you can.” Annie Dillard urges us to “write as if you were dying.” A large number of black women writers both past and present have gone to early graves. To know their life stories is to be made aware of how death hovers. When I was a young girl I studied the lives of writers I admired hoping to find guidance for my work. One of my favorite literary mentors was the playwright and critical thinker Lorraine Hansberry, who died in her mid-thirties. Her essay “The Negro Writer and His Roots” posed challenging questions for a young writer and intellectual. Hansberry declared: “The foremost enemy of the Negro intelligentsia of the past has been and remains—isolation. No more than can the Negro people afford to imagine themselves removed from the most pressing world issues of our time—war and peace, colonialism, capitalism vs. socialism—can I believe that the Negro writer imagines that he will be exempt from artistic examination of questions which plague the intellect and spirit of man.” Of course, I often pondered the paths Hansberry might have taken had she lived longer. Her death and the early deaths of Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, to name only a few, stand as constant reminders that life is not promised—that it is crucial for a writer to respect time. Without urgency or panic, a writer can use this recognition to both make the necessary time for writing and make much of that time.
Like many writers, I am protective of the time I spend writing. Even though women write more today than ever before, most women writers still grapple with the issue of time. Often writing is the task saved for the end of the day. Not just because it is hard to value writing time, to place it above other demands, but because writing is hard. Oftentimes the writer seeks to avoid the difficulties that must be faced when we work with words. Although I have written many books, writing is still not easy. Writing so much has changed me. I no longer stand in awe of the difficulties faced when working with words, overwhelmed by the feeling of being lost in a strange place unable to find my way or crushed into silence. Now I accept that facing the difficult is part of the heroic journey of writ
ing, a preparation, a ritual of sanctification—that it is through this arduous process of grappling with words that writing becomes my true home, a place of solace and comfort.
a body of work
women labor with words
Charis, my favorite women’s bookstore, is in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s collectively owned and operated. The moment I walk through the doors I feel it’s a place where I belong, a place where I will always be welcomed. I have been buying books there for a long time. Yet I am still awed by the fact that an incredible number of the books on the shelves there by and about women were written in the last twenty years. At the very beginning of contemporary feminist movement a major focus of our critical energy was the recovery of “her-story.” The movement was uncovering layers of writing by women that patriarchal biases in the literary world had long ago buried and forgotten. Revolutionary feminist movement changed all that. It dared to resurrect women’s words. Not only did it encourage the recovery of literature by women that was lost, it encouraged women to write both about the past and present. Work by black woman writer Zora Neale Hurston had long been forgotten before feminist thinkers and publishers called attention to it. Singlehandedly, Alice Walker launched a campaign to restore Hurston to her rightful place in American literature. When this renaissance initially occurred it was incredible. It was as though a hunt for buried treasure was taking place. Beautiful and precious gems were there to be discovered.
I remember sitting at reading groups with other women involved in women’s liberation where some of us wept that books like Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening had been lost because they had not been valued by the male-dominated literary establishment. We wept not only because we had been deprived but also at the miracle of finding these literary treasures in our lifetime. It is awesome to think about the continued gap that would have been sustained in our literary canons if feminist movement had not created a revolution challenging the ways we think about knowledge and women’s place in history.
Feminist movement to recover women’s lost history has been one of the most triumphant aspects of contemporary women’s rights struggle. Even though this profound cultural transformation occurred only twenty years ago, a large body of women’s writing was so quickly unearthed and so much new writing emerged that the reading public has almost forgotten what a new phenomenon the valuation of women’s words and our writing really is. Much of the awe I feel when walking through women’s bookstores across the nation stems from the reality that so many of the books that I see have been written in the last twenty years. Most of these books focus on the experiences of white women in the United States. Even though black women and women of color are publishing more than ever before there is still a dearth of material from our perspectives. Despite all the recent contributions there is still not enough writing by and about black women. More work needs to be uncovered. There are so many lives that need to be written about and many new voices that need to be heard. Whenever I meet black females who have compelling visions, who have knowledge of our collective buried to share or moving personal stories, I urge them to write. I plead with them to put it down somewhere in journal and diaries, just put it somewhere. Not all writing has to be done with immediate publication in mind. We write to leave legacies for the future.
Zora Neale Hurston has become one of the most canonized black women writers in American literature today. Even though she died only a short while ago there is still so much about her personal history that we do not know and will never know. To this day much of who she was and how she lived is still shrouded in mystery. Even though scholars continue searching for material it will take years of research to uncover details about periods in her life that are still a mystery. Despite canonization Hurston’s work still has not received the full range of scholarly attention it deserves. There should be a number of biographies about her work appearing, as well as a body of feminist critical readings of her material, yet there are only a few such books.
One can only speculate about the reasons for this. If indeed the primary audience interested in recuperating lost material about her life and work continues to be primarily progressive scholars, most of whom are women, there are few rewards and incentives for such work. Now that individual thinkers can no longer receive kudos for “rediscovering” Hurston, interest has waned. And of course there are never readily available resources to conduct such work. Concurrently, the scholars who have the best access to these resources are interested in other writers. Hurston’s first biographer was white and male. When his book was published, he openly admitted that he felt there were blind spots in his perspective and stated that he looked forward to the progressive interpretive visions women scholars, particularly black women, could bring to Hurston’s life and work. Such work has yet to appear. As institutions, professors, and students lean in conservative directions, choosing to focus on any woman writer of color is more risky. When this is coupled with the decreasing numbers of black scholars, it is even more doubtful that Hurston will ever receive the wealth of attention necessary for her work to be fully explored and understood. Yet it should never be forgotten that were it not for the passion and power of feminist movement, of women readers as book buyers, Hurston’s work might have simply remained a buried treasure.
Long before mainstream bookstores focused on the growing body of published writing by and about women, the feminist bookstore celebrated and acknowledged this work. Significantly the continued existence of women’s bookstores guards against a return to the days when patriarchal biases in publishing and marketing meant that one had to search hard and long for books by women authors. Another special aspect of the women’s bookstore is the visual impact felt by all of us who enter and see shelves and shelves of women’s writing. It is simply inspiring. However, the recognition that the majority of the books are by and about white women reminds us also that there is still a dearth of writing by and about black women/women of color.
Unfortunately the phenomenal successes of individual black women, writers like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Terry McMillan, and Maya Angelou, lead the reading public to assume that there is a wellspring of published writing by and about black women. In actuality, pulp fiction, self-help, and tabloid-like personal stories written by black women are on the increase. However, there is little significant increase in the publication of serious writing, both fiction and nonfiction, by black female authors. Publishing fifteen nonfiction books that were well received and well read was one of the triumphant moments of my writing career. Nonfiction writing is not regarded by the publishing industry as the strong suit of black women writers. Globally, the most well-known black women writers from this country are novelists. Even though they may write nonfiction, this writing did not gain them national attention. In actuality, throughout the diaspora black female authors mainly receive attention for works of fiction.
With no acknowledged established intellectual traditions, save contemporary ones, and even those are not widely acknowledged, black women writers of nonfiction working within the cultural context of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy have historically needed the interest of white readership to gain a hearing. It is no accident of history that I first established my presence as a writer of nonfiction with feminist work. White women, as a majority book-buying public, were the primary market for that work early on. Just as the rediscovery of Hurston’s writing depended on engagement by white female readers who constituted an already established book-buying market, initially contemporary black women writers doing serious work, whether fiction or non fiction, benefited from feminist demands that women listen to one another’s voices across the boundaries of race and class.
A willingness on the part of a mass audience in this society to take nonfiction writing by black women seriously came in the wake of the success of serious fiction writers, particularly the work of Toni Morrison. In general, the biases of racism and sexism as well as class elitism led the American public
to feel that black women’s voices are the least compelling when serious issues are at stake. While the unprecedented success of Michele Wallace’s first book, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, in the late seventies appeared to usher in a new day for the black writer of nonfiction, the reading public seemed to be mainly interested in her take on black masculinity. Even though she continued to do insightful nonfiction writing about diverse subjects, the work did not capture the attention of a large public. Importantly, Wallace offered a necessary intellectual critique of black female “invisibility” wherein she calls attention to our struggle to come to voice in a society that is not yet prepared to fully receive our words and understand the way in which that poor reception acts to silence and repress.
Despite the clarity of her insight about the workings of race, sex, and class as structures of domination, Wallace has often directed her rage about silencing and denied access at other black women writers as though we control public reception of our work. Much of her work has been about naming this absence of control. Aggressively interviewed in the magazine Konch by a black male writer whose intent was to challenge the notion that black female writing does not gain a fair hearing, Wallace elucidates the various reasons our voices are often not heard or welcomed. She contends: “It’s not only that the mainstream, the dominant society denies us access, we deny ourselves. We deny ourselves because we also feel that certain things should not be spoken in public.” Sadly, Wallace suggests that one of the primary forces of repression that makes it difficult for black women writers to produce work has been unduly harsh responses in the press, citing the impact of reviews of her first book as a prime example. Yet she has written some of the most vicious comments and out-and-out trashings of her writing peers. Nothing diminishes our efforts to gain a greater hearing for nonfiction by black women more than the severe dismissals of this work by black women. It is no accident that periodicals that rarely review such work choose when they do to seek out individuals known to harbor competitive feelings or antipathy towards a writer, as that makes for colorful copy without really challenging the status quo. The white editors who choose individual reviewers and set the guidelines tend to deploy this strategy to ensure against charges of racist and sexist biases.