Remembered Rapture

by bell hooks

  Baptized as a girl in the church of my upbringing in the “name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit” I soon became enthralled by the mystical dimensions of religious life. On my way to becoming a feminist thinker, writer, and cultural critic I walked farther and farther away from father and son, but my steps always drew me closer to holy spirit. Its presence could never be rejected or denied. Everywhere I turned in nature I could see and feel the mystery—the wonder of that which could not be accounted for by human reason.

  Spirituality has always been the foundation of my experience as a writer. Most writers know that our visions often emerge from places that are mysterious—far removed from who we are and what we think we know. Faced with this reality again and again as we work with words, we can only acknowledge the presence of an unseen force. Encountering this force was my earliest understanding of what was meant by the evocation of “grace.” In my home church we would sing, “Grace woke me up this morning—grace started me on my way.” This grace was understood as a recognition of the presence of mystery. We trust from childhood on that we can sleep and wake, that we can rise, that our open eyes will see. For many of us this trust is our covenant with godliness—our appreciation of the mystery of holiness.

  In Buddhist practice when we learn to be mindfully aware of our actions in everyday life we are essentially learning to practice spiritual vigilance in such a way that we can actually hear the sounds of mystery. Once our daily actions are infused with a sense of the sacred, we hear the rhythms of grace. Like a silent chant those rhythms help steady the mind and bring us peace. If we are listening and moving with these rhythms every action we take, from rising out of bed to cleaning ourselves, preparing meals, and so forth, reveals to us the sacredness of all life.

  Writing has been for me one of the ways to encounter the divine. As a discipline of mind and heart working with words has become a spiritual practice. Steeped in Christian faith, throughout my young adulthood I would fall on my knees to pray for the “right words”—for an integrity of mind and heart that would lead me to right livelihood in my work with words. Oftentimes I would repeat a prayer that would include the scriptural admonition to “let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable.” Initially, even though I prayed for divine guidance about my work, I was not really wholeheartedly willing to follow a path that was not in tune with my desires. Ultimately, the conditions of my surrender were not complex; my desires often simply did not work. When I gave myself over to the writing I felt called to do, I experienced fulfillment.

  My vision of the writing I would do was informed by a longing to give expression to an inner emotional universe that was mostly self-referential. I began my writing career believing I would be a poet, a bohemian, avant-garde, art-for-art’s-sake writer. All the writing classes I took focused on poetry. My engagement with Buddhism began with poets and poetry. Yet it was the struggle to find my voice as a poet that led me to feminist thinking and feminist politics. Even though I continued to write poetry as I prayed and meditated about my writing future I felt called to write a book about black women and feminism. It is difficult to explain the nature of this calling—what it means to be called by that unseen force I call divine grace.

  During this period of struggle I heard voices calling to me in my dreams, telling me that it was important for me to speak about the experience of black women. My maternal grandmother and great-grandmothers were figures in my dream life urging me to answer this call, telling me that they would help direct my path. Despite my initial resistance I would sit at my desk and find myself seemingly without will, writing just what the voices were telling me to write about.

  Imagine my distress when I answered the call of these voices and committed myself to writing work only to find that writing mocked, that no one wanted to publish it. I was confused. Naively thinking that answering the call of unseen forces would somehow work like magic to ensure the success of my writing, I confronted the reality that we may discover the rightness of our vision and vocation before others do. I wish that I could confess that my faith was so great I did not despair. Indeed, I did. It was with a heavy heart that I took this first manuscript of mine and stored it away in a closet. I took it out again when I accepted more fully that completing the book was my path to fulfillment. Whether or not it would ever be published was another question altogether.

  The serendipitous way that my first book found its publishers seemed to confirm the presence of unseen spirits. I had mentioned to a new friend I met when she was waiting on tables at a museum café that I was working on this book. When we spent time together I shared what it was about. It was she who called to say that she had seen a small ad in a newspaper calling for manuscripts about race and feminism. That ad was placed by South End Press, who would publish this book of mine and many more.

  Writing and publishing my first book was a long-drawn-out test of faith. It was a process that taught me patience. It intensified my awareness that knowing the path we want to take does not mean that it will not be an arduous one or that the difficulty of the journey means potential failure. During this process I not only reaffirmed my commitment to spiritual practice; devotion to this path enhanced my commitment to writing and my ability to write.

  Not much is written about the connection between writing and spirituality. Even though New Age writing describes circumstances where writers receive ideas mysteriously, rarely does anyone talk about the sustained link between spiritual practice and writing. Writers are reluctant to speak about this subject because literary elitism engenders a fear that if we describe “unseen forces” shaping our visions and the structure of our writing we will not be taken seriously. Women writers have been more willing than their male counterparts to speak of visions that serve as a catalyst for the imaginative process. When describing the process of writing The Color Purple, Alice Walker spoke of images appearing in her dreams, of voices, of spirits calling to her.

  Oftentimes men have evoked the muse, whether real or fictive, to talk about those forces beyond the realm of human reason that drive the imagination. Since the male muse was so often imagined as an obscure object of desire, usually a beautiful young female being but sometimes male, this has always been an acceptable way to talk about “spirits” and the creative imagination. Few men attempt to link their muses to spiritual practice. Indeed, the Beat poets in their own rebellious anti-establishment way were among the first modern writers to unabashedly mesh together the spiritual and transgressive creative process.

  It was this unlikely pairing that drew me to the Beat poets. In 1959 Kerouac would tell the world that the heartbeat of his transgressive spirit was triggered in the traditional church. Sharing his perspective on the origin of the Beat perspective he declared: “Yet it was as a Catholic, it was not at the insistence of any of these ‘niks’ and certainly not with their approval either, that I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood (one of them), Ste. Jeanne d’Arc in Lowell Mass., and suddenly with tears in my eyes and had a vision of what I must have really meant with ‘Beat’ anyhow when I heard the holy silence in the church … the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific.…” Kerouac’s transition to Buddhism was engendered by grief from lost love. To cope with his suffering he began reading The Life of Buddha by Ashvagosa.

  I follow the path Kerouac helped forge as I work to mesh my intense Christian upbringing with Buddhist thought. In the late sixties he continued to work through the convergences between these two spiritual paths, juxtaposing Christian teachings with Buddhist writing. Starting with the assumption that “words come from the holy ghost” Kerouac reminded readers that “Mozart and Blake often felt they weren’t pushing their own pens, ‘twas the ‘Muse’ singing and pushing.”

  When I sit down to write I do not imagine my pen will be guided by anything other than the strength of my will, imagination, and intellect. When the spirit moves into that writing, shaping its direction, that is for me a moment of pure mystery.
It is a visitation of the sacred that I cannot call forth at will. I can only hope it will come. This hope is grounded in my own experience that in those moments when I feel my imagination and the words I put together to be touched by the presence of divine spirit my writing is transformed. At such moments I am touched by grace. I am moved both by the writing and by the presence of spirits that make that writing the very best that it can be. When I complete this work I feel intense jubilation and ecstasy. Not all the writing I do is divinely inspired. The difference is tangible. Many writers who have felt guided by unseen spirits testify that the writing poured forth with ease. Much of the time we labor over words.

  More than anything my writing is informed by spiritual practice in relation to the subjects I choose to write about. After my first book I have never written any other without first spending significant time in prayer and meditation about content and the direction of work. Since I always have many ideas, I count on sacred visitation to guide me to the timeliness of work. My reliance on spiritual guidance is connected to the desire I have for the writing to touch the hearts of readers—to speak to their innermost being. Much of my work is written to create a context of healing. Words have the power to heal wounds. Out of the mysterious place where words first come to be “made flesh”—that place which is all holiness—I am given the grace to work with words in a spirit of right livelihood that calls me to peace, reflection, and connectedness with communities of readers whom I may never know or see. Writing becomes then a way to embrace the mysterious, to walk with spirits, and an entry into the realm of the sacred.

  intellectual life

  in and beyond the academy

  Every writer dreams of writing compelling work that will be read, understood, and appreciated. Many writers do not dream of publication or of writing a best-seller. Most do not imagine ever making money from their work. I often feel that there is a world of difference between life experiences of individuals whose vocation is clear to them in childhood and the life experiences of those folks who must search to discover what it is they want to do in life. I knew that I wanted to be a writer as a child. Grown black folks in our household were not that moved by my longings because they did not know any black person who made a living as a writer. They wanted me to be able to take care of myself. The best way for a southern black working-class girl to do that was to become a schoolteacher. Dutifully I went to college to prepare myself to make a living. There is nothing magical about my choice to study English. I loved to read. Studying literature was a way to read and still be on a path that would lead to a job. My class background was such that I did not think about a career. I thought about a job, work that would pay the rent, put food on the table.

  Before me, my mother had loved reading books and dreamed of becoming a writer. Like her, I began to write by creating poems. When my first book was published the dedication read: “For Rosa Bell, my mother—who told me when I was a child that she had once written poems—that I had inherited my love of reading and my longing to write from her.” My mother married as a teenager. She had many babies, one right after the other. She kept house, cooked, cleaned, and nurtured our dreams. Every now and then she worked outside the home as a maid in the houses of white women. Mostly, we lived off the steady income my father received from his job as a janitor at the post office. As children we knew that our mother was beautiful and wonderfully creative—a worker of magic. If you had dreams and longings you could take them to her and she would chart the path to fulfillment. She did this so well that it was only when I was far away from home, a scholarship student at Stanford University, that I began to think critically about her life. In my first women’s studies course, our visiting professor Tillie Olsen, a writer from a working-class background, shared the hardships of trying to make a living, raise children, and write. It was in this class that I first began to think about the dreams my mother had sacrificed as the daily demands of raising seven children and caring for our father’s every whim consumed her time and energy. It was in this class that I began to think critically about feminism and black womanhood. It was a turning point. Shortly after this class ended, I began to write my first book. I was nineteen years old. Ten years later it was published. By then, I fully understood the gift my working-class mother had given to me in choosing to share her dream.

  Initially, I received no money for writing this first book. It was not written for money or fame. It was a pure and passionate expression of my longing to create a space within feminist movement for the voices and visions of black women. This task accomplished, I still needed a job. I went to graduate school to become an English professor. In graduate school my passion for ideas and writing intensified. Yet, I still continued to think of teaching as a job, not as a career. Writing was my true vocation. Teaching was a way for me to continue to write. By the time I finished my doctorate in English at the University of California, I had published my first book and was writing a new work. The career I had begun to pursue in the academy was secondary.

  By the time I was hired to be an assistant professor at Yale University in African-American studies and English, I was constantly walking a tightrope, trying to fulfill the requirements that would lead to tenure while searching for the space to write. The conventional literary criticism that I wrote and published as part of professional expectations did not interest me as much as the polemical essays I continued to write on issues relating to feminism. The wide-ranging, often random, interdisciplinary reading I did provided the intellectual backdrop for my development as a feminist thinker, as did the ongoing debates and discussions I had with other feminist scholars. Early on, there was so little critical work that addressed issues in black life from a feminist standpoint that it was incredibly exciting to be among those women active in feminist movement daring to investigate aspects of our life experiences rendered invisible by race, sex, and class biases. We saw our work in feminist theory as breaking new ground, as cutting-edge. We were trying to create paradigms that would enable us to understand gender from standpoints that would be inclusive of race, gender, and class. Writing progressive feminist theory was so compelling precisely because we knew that the work we were doing, if it was at all useful, would have a meaningful transformative impact on our lives and the lives of women and men both inside and outside the academy. While consistently critiquing the racism of white women within the women’s movement, the way racist standpoints shaped their critical writing on gender, my primary concern was providing analysis and strategies that would enable black women to constructively engage feminism. With messianic zeal, I worked hard to do work that would both illuminate the impact of sexism on the social status of black women and speak to the relevance of feminist movement in black life. In keeping with my politics, I published my books at South End Press, a progressive left publishing collective. I chose them, instead of seeking a larger corporate press that would have given advances and paid royalties consistently, because the women and men at SEP were committed to feminist movement, to ending domination in all its forms—racism, classism, imperialism, etc. None of us made a lot of money. For years, the press struggled to survive, to faithfully pay royalties when the money was there. South End Press was and remains committed to publishing progressive ideas that advance the cause of justice. In the early days, the issue was rarely whether a book would sell but whether it would advance a meaningful cause. This was the perfect union of politics and vocation.

  In the academic world, my colleagues were not impressed by books published by South End Press. This was not a press that had status and prestige. In their eyes it was not “legitimately” academic. After all, those folks were willing to publish books without footnotes, that did not abide by the rules of the MLA style sheet. South End Press was publishing books for the people, trying to bridge the gap between the academy and the world outside. As an intellectual and writer eager to share knowledge, to educate for critical consciousness, I shared this vision. When we began to work together, none of us had any
idea that my work would begin to have a powerful impact on feminist thinking, that it would be used in college classrooms throughout the United States, that in time it would actually make money for both the press and me, not a huge sum but more than I had ever imagined receiving from critical writing. Since I had made my steady income as a professor, I was not that concerned with whether the books made money. The blessing that came was that the books were read, understood, and appreciated. As a direction of feminist theory shifted, and race became central to the discussion, my work became more relevant. My voice and the voices of other black women/women of color were not only gaining a hearing, we were changing the nature of the discourse.

  Feminist movement and women’s studies have been the foundation of my success as a writer and a critical thinker. The seven books I wrote and published with South End were faithfully bought and studied by a progressive audience, composed primarily of feminist readers. Their responses to the work, both critical and celebratory, inspired me to keep writing. These days mainstream interest in the critical writings of black academics/intellectuals has shined a spotlight on “bell hooks” that is quite different from the warm critical engagement that has consistently radiated from that core group of progressive readers who study my work. Ironically, the growing number of press clippings that talk about black intellectuals, that highlight “bell hooks” say little or nothing about my work. Rarely is the word feminism uttered. Articles that say something about the rising star of “bell hooks” place me first and foremost in a discussion that is usually taking place between men about men. I am a token, a nod in the direction of political “correctness.” In his recent polemical attack “What Are the Drums Saying, Booker: The Current Crisis of the Black Intellectual” published in The Village Voice, Adolph Reed included me in his ballistic trashing, making only two observations, neither based on any facts. He claimed that Cornel West and I “gush over each other’s brilliance,” and that I am a hustler, “blending bombast, cliches, psychobabble, and lame guilt tripping in service to the ‘pay me’ principle.” He never mentions the word feminism. The fact that it is feminism that has been the force that catapulted me onto the critical scene and not white mania for black intellectuals would deflect away from his representation of me as one in a long line of darky minstrels working overtime to catch massa’s eye. Reed’s backhand “diss” of me and my work is nothing new. He is dancing perfectly in step with the way mainstream male-dominated discourse about “black intellectuals” has consistently represented me. In the review of my latest books in the New York Times, which for years ignored my work completely, the white male scholar began by identifying me as “the friend of Cornel West.” As though West is the Lone Ranger and I am Tonto. Everything he said about the work was confined to the introduction. Unlike other books by feminist writers reviewed in the Times, which are usually critiqued by feminist thinkers, or at least someone whose discipline and/or interest suggests some knowledge of the field discussed, the two times my work has been given cursory negative review in the Times, it has been by writers who have come out of nowhere, who have no interest in either feminist theory or cultural criticism. Of course, I only began to receive reviews in the Times after several articles appeared in other journals pointing out that they tended to ignore my work and that of other black thinkers on the left, with the exception being Cornel West. This is the type of affirmative-action tokenism that one could do without.