Remembered Rapture

by bell hooks

  In my own imagination, this process of thinking and writing is affirmed by the Buddhist vision of interior arrangement, where one strives to create a particular atmosphere with aesthetic minimalism, with an eye for simplicity. The point is not to render ideas less complex—the point is to make the complex clear. The outcome should be that the difficult terrain of thought traversed that has enabled one to arrive at certain standpoints or conclusions is not evident. Like too much clutter, it has been cleared away to make that which is most significant more apparent. In her discussion of “Theory’s Contemplative Relation to the World,” Joan Cocks speaks of critical theorizing and writing as a process that reveals “an intrinsic passion for the perverse revelation.” We write “to find secrets in experience that are obscured from ordinary sight: to uncover hidden coherences in what seems to be a mere jumble of unrelated events and details, and incoherences in what appears to be strictly ordered; to make transparent what is opaque, and to expose opacity in what seems transparent.”

  Deconstruction is a useful critical tool to use in this process because it makes essential understanding the multilayered structures that underlie particular discursive formations. Gayatri Spivak has spoken and written quite eloquently about the usefulness of deconstructive awareness as a standpoint that compels critical vigilance: “Deconstruction points out that in constructing any kind of an argument we must move from implied premises, that must necessarily obliterate or finesse certain possibilities that question the availability of these premises in an absolutely justifiable way. Deconstruction teaches us to look at these limits and questions.” When deconstruction is seen as a tool and not an end in itself, it constructively imposes an incredibly rigorous will to examine, critique, and analyze that moves the insurgent critical thinker away from attachment to a particular rhetoric or set of critical paradigms that it is easy to be seduced into stating again and again. One of the primary challenges of critical theorizing is the inherent demand that ideas make as they act upon the critical mind, internally challenging the critic to be continually moving from fixed positions. To me that means that we are not just writing but changing the way we are writing given what we are saying and whom we hope to speak with and to. Spivak makes me laugh with recognition when she warns against intellectuals trying to “save the masses,” speak for and describe them, urging us instead “to learn to speak in such a way that the masses will not regard as bullshit.” When critics write to engage wider diverse audiences, we confront the limitations of discourse, of the languages we use. It becomes ruthlessly apparent that unless we are able to speak and write in many different voices, using a variety of styles and forms, allowing the work to change and be changed by specific settings, there is no way to converse across borders, to speak to and with diverse communities.

  Contemporary cultural critics, particularly those of us who write about popular culture, must be ever vigilant in our work because it is all too easy to end up writing in an ethnographic self-serving manner about topics that do not engage us in a sustained dialogue with the cultural producers and audiences providing us with the “texts” we discuss. This diminishes the power of our work to make meaningful critical interventions in theory and practice for anyone. As Joan Cocks reminds us in The Oppositional Imagination: “There can be a faddishness to theory, so that it pursues not the answers to difficult questions but the latest fashionable thinker or thought. It can lose connection altogether with the world and feed like a narcissist off its own concepts and principles.” This is especially true of critical writing on popular culture because it has the appearance of immediacy, of direct contact and engagement. Often merely choosing to write about popular culture can carry with it the assumption that one is “down”—completed divested of attachment to notions of coercive hierarchy and politics of domination. Yet when privileged class groups write about the marginalized and disenfranchised this act alone is not a gesture of political solidarity. It can be as much an act of colonizing appropriation as the more apparent conventional modes of white supremacist capitalist patriarchal dominance.

  Writing cultural criticism to be hip and cool, especially when the subject is popular culture, allows critics to indulge in acts of appropriation without risk. Fascinating, titillating cultural criticism that looks at the popular without engaging a radical or revolutionary political agenda really does not disrupt and challenge traditional uses of theory; it helps maintain the existing barriers and cultural hierarchies of domination. Critical writing counts for very little when critics speak about ending domination, eradicating racism, sexism (which includes the structure of heterosexism), class elitism in our work without changing individual habits of being, without allowing those ideas to work in our lives and on our souls in a manner that transforms.

  To engage a politics of transformation we surrender the need to occupy a space of hedonistic intellectual “cool” that covertly embraces old notions of objectivity and neutrality. Certainly, I and my work are often seen as not cool enough precisely because there is always an insistence on framing ideas politically and calling for active resistance. A lot of new, fashionable cultural criticism, whether it is postcolonial, multicultural, queer theory, or some combination of categories, gains a hearing precisely because of the dissenting voices of intellectuals who were not and/or are not afraid to take political stands in our work even though we risk being dismissed as not being theoretical “enough,” intellectual “enough.” And it should not surprise anyone that it is often the “cool” cultural critics who both labor in the academy and depend on its structures of valuation for regard and reward who most invest in the production of new hierarchies that still keep in place patterns of coercive competition and domination. A really good example of this tendency is a lot of the critical writing that intellectual elites of all races do that focuses on underclass and poor black experience. It is as though black popular culture has become the latest frontier to be colonized, occupied, and made over in the interests of the colonizer. Being “down” does not mean that any of us have surrendered our will to colonize.

  As a cultural worker on the left, I labor to critically think and write in a manner that clearly names the concrete strategies for radical and/or revolutionary interventions I use in everyday life to resist politics of domination. As a conscious strategic choice, this practice makes it possible for my life and work to embody a politics of transformation that addresses the concerns of individuals and communities in resistance. This means that the work of critical thinking and theorizing is itself an expression of political praxis that constructs a foundation wherein individual action can be united with collective struggle. The mutual interplay between critic and reader is a site for contestation and confrontation. It calls us to be critically aware, to not become lazy or sloppy in our thinking.

  Dissenting critical voices are easily co-opted by the longing to be both heard and admired, our words longed for and affirmed. Subculture stardom can be as seductive a distraction as speaking in the interests of mainstream cultural politics of domination. Critical writing that remains on the edge, able to shift paradigms, to move in new directions, subverts this tendency. It demands of critics fundamental intellectual allegiance to radical openness, to free thinking. In Technical Difficulties, June Jordan declares, “If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.” I was reminded of this recently when I was not invited to a conference celebrating and critically engaging the work of my close comrade Cornel West. When I asked an “insider” why I was excluded I was told, “You insist on being an independent thinker. You’re a ‘wild card.’ No one knows what you will say. You’re too unpredictable.” My presence would have threatened presumably because it was feared that I might be critical of West’s work and thought. Exclusion and isolation, whether they occur through overt or covert acts, have always been useful tactics of terrorism, a powerful way to coerce individuals to conform, to change. No insurgent intellectual, no dissenting critical voice in this society escapes the pres
sure to conform. This is especially true of any dissenting voice that remains within a hierarchial institution founded on structures of domination where rewards and benefits are awarded in relation to service rendered. However, irrespective of our locations, we are all vulnerable. We can all be had, co-opted, bought. There is no special grace that rescues any of us. There is only a constant struggle to keep the faith, to relentlessly rejoice in an engagement with critical ideas that is itself liberatory, a practice of freedom.

  That moment when I whirl with words, when I dance in that ecstatic circle of love surrounded by ideas, is a space of transgression. There are no binding limitations; everything can be both held and left behind—race, gender, class. It is this intensely intimate moment of passionate transcendence that is the experiential reality that deepens my commitment to a progressive politics of transformation. Writing these words, I look down at passages from the work of the Sufi mystic and poet Rumi taped to my desk. They challenge me: “Do you want the words or will you live what you know? Which is real, is it the theoretical knowledge?… Do you want the words or will you live what you know?” I write to live.

  writing without labels

  When I was a girl longing to be a writer, the writer whose work touched my soul, reaching into the innermost places where much within me had gone unrecognized and unloved, was Emily Dickinson. Even though I had my card game Authors, which gave me a visual portrait of her, I never saw her as a white woman. Reading her work I never thought about race or sex. Even though I was stealing away to the privacy of our attic rooms to hold her words close in a real world of racial apartheid that affected my life daily, determining even where I could walk and eat and sit (the colored-only section at the movie theater), when it came to words on the page all this was forgotten. Intuitively, I understood that the persona of the writer was not as important as the words that grip, hold, and transform. I read other women writers. Their work did not speak to me. Clearly, I had not chosen Emily Dickinson because she had been born woman. Her vision resonated with mine. She evoked those emotions I felt but could not talk about with anyone. It was all there in her words.

  The girl I was who longed to be a writer had been well schooled in the belief that art transcends categories. In our black segregated schools we never made a writer’s race primary. It was always the work that mattered. Even if it was noted that we should give special attention to Langston Hughes’s work because he was writing about a world we knew intimately, we also knew that shared racial identity and even common experience would not lead one to produce great writing. To become a great writer one had to be able to move deep into experience, into emotion, into life. Dickinson’s field of vision made contemplation of metaphysics, of religion and nature the space where she experienced life to the fullest. While her race, gender, and class had shaped the outer boundaries of her experience, inside she lived unbounded. She lived in service to the imagination. She had surrendered. That was the mark of the great writer: the willingness to surrender to the power of the imagination.

  When I begin writing poetry in girlhood utterly under the influence of William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Emily Dickinson, I dwelled only on the big issues, the universal concerns of life—death, love, sorrow, joy. Writing was a place where I could leave behind the ordinary mundane pain of my life. Imagination allowed me to move through and beyond this pain. I did not want writing to be the place where I told my story, where I confessed—I wanted it to be the paradise where I could forget the daily experiences that led me to certain emotional states. It was the emotional state that was the place where the imagination would find its treasures, not concrete experience. This is the reason I did not focus too intently on race, gender, or class.

  In the realm of the concrete I did confront being black, female, and working class. I confronted it in the privacy of a domestic world where my longing to read these poets from another time and faraway places was not fully understood. I confronted it all the more when I let it be known that I wanted to become a writer. No one tried to dissuade me from writing; they simply talked about what I would do to make a living. Writing, in their eyes, could be done when one came home from work. It was not that they did not respect writing. It was that they saw it as having nothing to do with real life. To everyone in our world words on paper were magical. They filled me and those around me with awe. Even then I understood that doing the real work of the imagination required time—space to dream, contemplate, and talk with spirits, space to prepare oneself for the sacred rite of putting words on paper. I was not at all interested in making a living. I thought then that my destiny could be just like Emily Dickinson’s. I could stay alone in my little house and write. Of course as a young girl believing in magic I did not think in concrete terms about how I would acquire the house, the means to survive. I thought it would happen like magic. I let no one dissuade me from my dream of becoming a writer.

  I held on to that dream even as the concrete world of race, class, and gender begin to impinge upon that imaginary space I created for myself where all was possible. In the all-black schools of my childhood there had never been any doubt that we had equal access to the world of the imaginary. No teacher had ever looked upon my love of reading and my longing to write with scorn, ridicule, or contempt. No one had ever suggested that being black, female, or working-class would stand in my way. No wonder then that I cherish the memory of those all-black schools where no one ever thought my love of Dickinson and Wordsworth was strange, where no one ever questioned my right to love great literature no matter who had written it. Racial desegregation changed all that. In the white school smart black people were suspect. Even though my teachers nurtured my longing to write, it was there that I first learned that I would confront barriers—that there would be folks who would not be able to take writing by a black author seriously.

  In high school, I began my search for black writers. To this day I remember the incredible sense of ecstasy that I felt when I first found an edited volume of poetry by black writers. There in that slim little book I read sonnets by Countee Cullen and Claude McKay. I read the short beautiful poems of Georgia Douglas Johnson, a kindred spirit who I knew in my heart must have read and loved Dickinson as I read and loved her. Finding the work of these black poets affirmed that I was not a freak, a special aberration. It was so inspiring. It is truly difficult to find words that will adequately convey what it was like to suddenly be forced to study in a world of white authority figures challenging everything about the world I had known before coming into their power. That white world made me doubt myself. And in the space of that doubt I needed proof that they were all wrong—that there are great writers who happened to be black, just as my beloved Emily Dickinson happened to be white. Despite the fact that it was hard to find published writings by black authors, I found my proof and I was set free.

  I often think about this time in my life when I hear contemporary debates about whether the identity of the writer matters. Rarely are those who want to insist that it is only great literature that matters willing to acknowledge that in a culture defined and organized around principles of race, gender, and class domination, identity matters simply because structures that silence and shut out are already in place to assault the consciousness of anyone who dares to live by the belief that we are always more than labels. It was not the world of segregated blackness that sought to deny me a place of transcendence where the content of my writing would be deemed more important than the color of my skin. The world of whiteness imposed rigid barriers. The logic of that world, of white supremacy, had to be resisted. To the extent that I was always struggling against racism, race mattered. Making sure that it did not become the issue that mattered most or the only issue that mattered was the burden placed on me. Assimilating into mainstream white culture would have been the easiest way to flee these difficulties. I could simply live as though I were white. Issues of race and racism could be conveniently ignored or dismissed as irrelevant. One of my favorite writ
ers, Jean Toomer, had tried to escape the burden of racial identity by passing. Ironically, this choice blocked and deadened his creative imagination.

  When I am at my desk writing, I always think of myself as a writer who is a black woman. I never think: I am a black woman writer. Race and gender are made to come first in the world outside, where if one is from a marginalized group anything about you that does not conform to white male norms is acknowledged first and foremost. Even when a black and/or woman writer is praised for not calling attention to race or gender, these categories are still being highlighted. Deviance from expectation is no escape. Writers from marginalized groups are usually faced with two options: overidentification with an identity or disidentification. In actuality our realities encompass the complexity of being both a writer in the best and most transcendent understanding of that vocation and being individuals whose work is informed by the specifics of race, class, and gender. William Faulkner is a traditionally accepted “great” writer who is one of my favorites. As a professor of American literature talking about his work I usually emphasize the larger themes of that work: death and dying, lost love, failure to achieve desired dreams. Yet there would be no way to adequately talk about his vision without also acknowledging that the perspective of the fictional South he created was definitely shaped by his race, gender, and class. Clearly, those identifying labels matter; the fact is they do not matter in some absolute way. Writers who seek to flee any reference to identifying labels of race, gender, class, or sexual practice often do so because the tendency is to make too much of them. Yet to act as though they have no importance whatsoever denies all of us the opportunity to have an expansive understanding of the influences and passions at work in the writer’s imagination.