by bell hooks
Throughout my writing career some of the most spiteful and careless reviews of my work have been written by fellow black women writers. I want to make a clear distinction here between the huge audience of black women readers who support my work and that tiny minority writing reviews. It is often in the interest of a racially biased marketplace and media to pit us against one another. Black women writers of nonfiction who accept the notion, informed by racist/sexist biases, that there is only one slot, only one of us who can receive meaningful attention at a given moment in time, are primed to make their peers targets. Progressive black women writers resist this manipulation. This means that the will to subject black women’s writing to forms of aggressive policing has to be continually interrogated. While we may disagree and critique one another, respect for the significance of an individual’s writing coupled with awareness of the cultural context enables us to be critically vigilant.
Among my critics, individual black women tend to be the most vociferous in their insistence that I write “too much.” Glibly, Jewelle Gomez began a critique of my thirteenth book by facetiously labeling me “the Joyce Carol Oates of black feminist writing.” Wrongly, she suggested that the book was merely a recyling of already published work. In actuality, it was a collection of twenty-two essays in which six were reprinted. Had they not been included it would still have been a book-length manuscript. A little investigation on her part would have uncovered accurate information. However, possessing the correct information would have militated against glib dismissal. Often the suggestion that I am writing “too much” comes from black women who have either written very little or not as much as they want to write. Fortunately I have never had to write to make a living. As a consequence I have always only written on subjects that intrigue and fascinate me. From girlhood on I have felt that there were many subjects I wanted to write about. Passion for those subjects has inspired sustained writing. Like most writers, I would rather write and publish one well-written book than many poorly written ones. While quantity should never be seen as more important than quality, it is equally true that when the issue is nonfiction by women, particularly black women, there is an abundance of work that needs to be written. Significantly, no black woman writer, or anyone else for that matter, critiqued me for writing too much during the many years when I published books that sold well but did not bring national recognition. The continued success of the writing, the accolades it brings as well as the financial rewards seem to be most disturbing to the critical observers. When work is well conceived and well written it should not matter how many books the author has written.
No black woman writer in this culture can write “too much.” Indeed, no woman writer can write “too much.” Considering the centuries of silence, the genres of writing that have been virtually the sole terrain of men, more contributions by women writers should be both encouraged and welcomed. As a professor I sit in classrooms year after year talking with young women who are uncertain about their voices, who are still grappling with whether they can become “authors.” Many of these young women are afraid to speak, let alone write. When I witness their fear, their silences, I know no woman has written enough. Then there are the exceptional female students who are unable to complete their own writing, who are blocked when it comes to putting their visions on paper, who diligently write work for their male peers or older men who require assistance, yet these females remain too shy to claim their words. When I witness this self-betrayal, I know no woman has written enough.
Feminist activists struggled long and hard to create a space in contemporary culture where a woman writer’s words can matter as much as those of any man. This struggle continues. Even though more women write and publish these days there are still styles and genres of writing we are not yet comfortable with. More recently, women who write against the grain, who challenge conventional assumptions about the female mind are often harshly critiqued by women readers who are discomfited by these new narratives. That discomfort has been registered recently as women critics respond to new novels by women authors where sexual scenes or violent acts are graphically described. Public reception of A. M. Homes’s novel The End of Alice is one example. Works by women writers that challenge conventional sexist understandings of the female imagination tend to disturb readers the most. More frequently than not these works are interrogated by critical readers in ways that actively promote censure and silencing. The tone of reviews suggest these women have stepped out of place.
Unfortunately, more and more women seem all too eager to police female desire for words. I receive the message that it’s fine to write but to be too devoted to writing makes me suspect. After my tenth book I began to notice how often individuals would come up to me and make snide comments about my writing “yet another book.” They never hear me no matter how many times I share with them that writing is my passion. Like all passions it demands discipline and devotion. When I publish collections of essays where pieces are included that have been published elsewhere, reviewers will sometimes suggest that there is nothing new in these works. Yet collections by women who write much less, whose articles may have all been published elsewhere do not get dismissed as mere recycling. And men, no one mentions the absence of “fresh” work in their collections. Women who write a lot and women who write in a manner that transgresses traditional boundaries pose a threat precisely because our work stands as a serious challenge to sexist stereotypes.
While the capitalist marketplace acknowledges the power of women as consumers (white women are primary book buyers), overall the publishing industry continues to uphold patriarchal hegemony. Most books that receive high-paying advances and central attention in mass media are by white male authors. While privileged white women have made great strides, considering their primacy as consumers of books and as workers in the publishing industry more meaningful transformations should be taking place. Instead, without changing the basic belief structures (and that includes the biases of patriarchal thinking) the mainstream publishing industry simply appropriated the awareness of a market for books by and about women that feminist movement generated. Feminists encouraged women to write—to produce the desired commodity. Significantly, it was only after alternative publishing venues, particularly feminist presses, showed that big bucks could be made from the sale of such literature that this appropriation by mainstream publishing took place.
Undoubtedly, as long as market forces recognize that writing by women sells, there will be a plethora of published books. Yet this does not mean that the bulk of that writing will be serious work or that any of it will be writing from a feminist perspective. The more successful antifeminist backlash is, the harder it will be for work that is overtly feminist to gain a hearing. Women readers and our allies in struggle need to remember that writing by and about women is not the same as progressive and/or feminist writing by and about women from a feminist perspective. Indeed, while we have seen an incredible increase in the publication of books by women there is a decline in the number of nonacademic books that are written from a feminist perspective. Even in academic circles it has become much more fashionable to do work on gender rather than work that is distinctly feminist in outlook. Readers need to be mindful of this trend. If the crisis in publishing continues and the need to publish fewer books increases, dissident writing of any sort will find it hard to gain a hearing—that includes work inspired by feminist thinking. Mainstream publishing’s takeover of alternative and/or subversive literatures threatens to silence alternative spaces. Now that masses of readers can buy books by feminist authors at mainstream bookstores many alternative spaces like women’s bookstores have been forced to close. Yet if the audience for such work declines it is likely that mainstream sellers will refuse to house this material as they once did. For this reason supporting alternative publishers and bookstores remains an important gesture of progressive political activism. Most importantly we must not let the commercial success of writing by women lead us to believe that th
e struggle to create and maintain a culture where women’s words will be heard and valued is over. That struggle continues. Hence the importance of women writing whenever we can, saying whatever we have to say, writing as much as we need to write.
If we were not in the midst of mounting antifeminist backlash, all the talk of women writing “too much” or in unacceptable ways could just be ignored. Instead, women writers and all our readers must talk back to all attempts to mock and belittle our commitment to words, to writing. These gestures are strategies of silencing; they devalue and undermine. In these times there should be no need for any female to fear putting words on paper. Although there are many critics who like to proclaim that there is an excess of writing by women—too much confession, too many women telling our stories—the truth remains that there is still much that has not been written by women, and about women’s perspectives and experiences both past and present. There is a world of thoughts and ideas women have yet to write about in nonfiction—whole worlds of writing we need to enter and call home. No woman is writing too much. Women need to write more. We need to know what it feels like to be submerged in language, carried away by the passion of writing words.
remembered rapture
dancing with words
Writing is my passion. It is a way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word ecstasy—“to stand outside”—comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away. The metaphysics of writing has always enchanted me. Experiencing language as a transformative force was not an awareness that I arrived at through writing. I discovered it through performance—dramatically reciting poems or scenes from plays. At our all-black southern segregated schools the art of oration was deemed important. We were taught to perform. At school and at home we entertained one another with talent shows—singing, dancing, acting, reciting poetry. Most recently, I was reminded of these times looking at the faces of audiences watching that moment in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral when the grieving lover recites W. H. Auden’s poem “Funeral Blues.” My favorite verse proclaims: “He was my North, my South, my East and West, / My working week and my Sunday rest, / My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song, / I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.” Those words on paper are powerful. Yet spoken with passion, they are pure magic. They enable the listener to be moved, touched, taken to a place beyond words—transported.
Seduced by the magic of written and spoken words in childhood, I am still transported, carried away by writing and reading. Writing longhand the first drafts of all my work, I read aloud to myself. Performing the words to both hear and feel them, I want to be certain I am grappling with language in a manner where my words live and breathe, where they surface from a passionate place inside me. Had I entered my writing life as a critic, working in this way might not have mattered. Instead, I began writing poems. Standing in our living room, during dark southern nights when the earth was shaken by fierce thunderstorms and all electrical power was down, I performed, reciting poems, either those I had written or the works of favorite poets. During those strange and unpredictable nights I practiced the art of making words matter. In the stark daylight, I learned by heart the words that would be spoken in the shadows of candlelight, words that enchant, seduce—move. Long before criticism had any place in my mind and imagination, I had been taught in the segregated institutions of my childhood church and school that writing and performing should deepen the meaning of words, should illuminate, transfix, and transform.
Back then, I would have grieved deeply had any prophetic eye looked into the future and shared that I would one day become most well known as a critic, not as a writer of poetry or fiction. All the years I spent in college classes studying and reading literary criticism did nothing to convince me that writing criticism could be an act of passion. The criticism we were encouraged to write as students, that received affirmation and approval, sounded dead. However, it was likely to be held in higher esteem if it conveyed a lack of passionate engagement with words. This dispassionate stance was most often heralded as more objective. We were wrongly taught that it was an expression of neutrality. In actuality, it was an assertion of the hierarchical divide separating critic and writer. The critic, we learned, was superior to the writer. We also learned that this position of superiority sanctioned dominance, that it was accorded by virtue of location, by the critical act of looking over and down on the writer. It was the perfect metaphysical dualistic match of mind and body, with there being no doubt which was superior. In the university then, and often now, clear distinctions were made between writer and critic. There was no safe crossing of the boundaries separating the two. Reflecting on this artificial separation in Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, Nancy Mairs declares: “I believe in the reality of work. Period. I do not distinguish betwen creative and critical writing because all writing is creative.… And all writing is critical, requiring the same shifting, selection, scrutiny and judgement of the material at hand. The distinctions are not useful except to people who want to engender an other with whom they can struggle and over whom they can gain power. And because they are useful in that way, they are dangerous.…” Refusing to accept these distinctions was and remains a rebellious act, one that can challenge and disrupt hierarchical structures rooted in a politics of domination both within the academy and in the world outside.
That refusal demarcates. It separates those of us who choose to write as a vocation rather than as an academic practice. All academics write but not all see themselves as writers. Writing to fulfill professional career expectations is not the same as writing that emerges as the fulfillment of a yearning to work with words when there is no clear benefit or reward, when it is the experience of writing that matters. When writing is a desired and accepted calling, the writer is devoted, constant, and committed in a manner that is akin to monastic spiritual practice. I am driven to write, compelled by a constant longing to choreograph, to bring words together in patterns and configurations that move the spirit. As a writer, I seek that moment of ecstasy when I am dancing with words, moving in a circle of love so complete that like the mystical dervish who dances to be one with the Divine, I move toward the infinite. That fulfillment can be realized whether I write poetry, a play, fiction, or critical essays.
My fifteen published books are all works of nonfiction, most of them collections of critical essays. Turning to the short essay form was part of a revolt against the graduate-school tradition of writing the long-winded padded paper. To me the critical essay is the most useful form for the expression of a dialectical engagement with ideas that begins in my head, in my talking back to the books I am reading. It is also a way to extend the conversations I have with other critical thinkers. When I begin writing a critical essay, it is never the starting point for any discussion; it emerges as the site of culmination or a location for prolonged engagement, an invitation to work in a sustained manner with ideas. Since the critical essay can be read in a shorter amount of time than a book, and read again and again, it can offer a body of ideas that the critic and reader can grapple with, come back to. Nancy Mairs’s assertion that she chooses the essay “for its power to both focus and disrupt” resonates with me. The critical essay demands the articulation of an agenda. It is a space where one writes to take a stand, to express and reveal points of view that are particular, specific, and directed—a great place to “throw down,” to confront, interrogate, provoke.
At the heart of the critical essay is an engagement with ideas, with a contemplative realm of thought that is not passive but active. Michel Foucault evokes that active stance in the epigraph to Language, Counter-Memory, Practice with the insistence that this active engagement with ideas emerges first in critical thinking: “Thought is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate and enslave. Even be
fore prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, thought, at the level of its existence, in its very dawning, is in itself an action—a perilous act.” When such thought evolves into a body of ideas in a critical essay that sense of provocation and peril is intensified. A seductive atmosphere of pleasure and danger surrounds the writing process. As a writer, intellectual, and critical thinker, I feel swept away by the process of thinking through certain ideas as well as by their potential to incite and arouse the reader.
Since many of the critical essays I write are used in classroom settings, I often receive tremendous critical feedback about the work, both positive and negative. It was this feedback that intensified my awareness of the power of the essay. A short piece of critical writing can be easily shared (faxed or photocopied). This accessibility makes it a marvelous catalyst for critical exchange that is different from the collective reading of a book. Initially, professors were usually the individuals who shared that a group of students who might not have spoken much about assigned work in a class would be intensely provoked to talk among themselves about an essay I had written. Then I began to hear from other readers. Students shared their pleasure at reading theoretical work that is clear and succinct. Sometimes parents tell me about reading an essay with their children. Women who have been battered, who live for a time or work in shelters, talk and write to me about discussing my work in their groups. One of my favorite critical responses came from an incarcerated black man who shared that the essays I write on sexism were the catalyst for much critical discussion among his peers, so much so that he declared, “Your name has become a household word around this prison.” I write with the intent to share ideas in a manner that makes them accessible to the widest possible audience. This means that I often engage in a thinking and writing process where I am pushing myself to work with ideas in a way that strips them down, that cuts to the chase and does not seek to hide or use language to obscure meaning. The longing to pattern the words and ideas so that they are “in your face”—so that they have an immediacy, a clarity that need not be searched for, that is present right now—allows me to transfer to the act of writing vernacular modes of verbal exchange that surface in the expressive culture of the southern black working class.