by Hooks, Bell
bh: In her film, Privilege, Yvonne Rainer shows how the white medical establishment dealt with menopause and how women were constructed as hysterical, sick, breaking-down human beings. She also ties that to how we look at race and difference.
R/SP: As a response to this society, which is so unhealthy, anyone with any sensitivity at all has to embody some form of madness.
bh: Absolutely, and I’ve written a lot about the necessity for black people to decolonize our minds. One of the things that happens when you decolonize your mind is that it becomes hard to function in the society, because you’re no longer behaving in ways people feel comfortable with. For example, white people are often much more comfortable with a black person who doesn’t ask any direct questions, who acts like they don’t know anything—who appears dumb—in the same way that men are often more comfortable with a woman who doesn’t appear to have knowledge, strength, power, or what have you—who assumes a positionality of,“Oh, I don’t know what I’m doing.” And when that person becomes empowered, it can totally freak out the people that they’re with, and around, and work for.
On the other hand, when you begin to move out of the dysfunctionality (as we know from our movements of recovery) … when you begin to change toward health in a dysfunctional setting, it becomes almost impossible to remain in that setting … yet here we are in a whole dysfunctional society with nowhere to go! So I feel that we have to create what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “communities of resistance”—so that there are places where we can recover, and return to ourselves more fully.
R/SP: Can you explain this more?
bh: Well, he’s created this village in France called Plum Village. It’s a place where different people go and grow things, and live a “mindful” life together. Sometimes I get really distressed by the extent to which we, in the United States, have moved away from the idea of communities—of people trying to have different world views and value systems. In the 60s there was a lot of focus on such communities, but that sort of died out, and a refocus on the nuclear family emerged.
In fact, the whole focus on “yuppiedom” was really like a public announcement: “If you want to be cool, you’ll return to the patriarchal nuclear family!” And we know that small alternative communities of people still exist, but they don’t get a lot of attention. If I think about the communities that have gotten a lot of attention from the mass media (such as Rajneesh town in Oregon), it was always negative … never attention on shared worship, shared eating of vegetables (and not being meateaters), or being peace-loving—that’s not the attention it got. But whenever something goes wrong …
R/SP: … the media are right there to report it. However, many “alternative” societies in the 60s brought their same dualistic oppressional thinking to their would-be “paradise”—they just inverted it a little, but it became just as oppressive.
bh: Even then, though, the question becomes: “Do you give up on making the beloved community … or do you realize that you must make it a different way?” Because I feel what happened was: a lot of people took the failures of the 60s as a sign that, “See—you cannot really make an alternative space.” Whereas I’m convinced that you can … if, as you say, you have changed your consciousness and your actions prior to trying to create that space.
I think that when we enter those new spaces with the same old negative baggage, then of course we don’t produce something new and different in those spaces! It’s like—I remember going to this town and working with a number of other black women. I said to them. “We should buy a building together. Why should we all be paying rent to some nasty white landlord?” And they all looked at me and said weird shit like, “Why would we want to live in the same space? What about privacy?” They raised all these negative issues and I realized, “These people would rather be victimized than think about taking some agency or control over their lives.” And all the values that were being raised (such as “privacy” or “individualism”) were really myths—I mean, what privacy do we really have? I didn’t feel I had any privacy in my little building where my landlady watched my comings and goings like a hawk. I didn’t feel I had any autonomous existence there. Because this wasn’t a helpful watching—it wasn’t like someone who cared about me was watching me, wanting my life to be richer and fuller, you know?
R/SP: Right. “Privacy” in this country is usually just a euphemism for extreme loneliness, alienation, and fragmentation.
bh: And privacy becomes a way of saying, “I don’t want to have to attend to something outside of myself.” So it really becomes a screen for a profound narcissism. And people “privilege” this narcissism as though it represents the “good life.” A lot of people will say to me, “How can you live in this small town of 8,000? It would just drive me nuts for people to know me and to run into people.” And I say, “Well, you know, if you live your life in the open …”
I love that pulp book by M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled. He has an incredible fun section on lying, where he says that if you are dedicated to truth and you live your life without shame, then you don’t really have to care whether your neighbors can see what you’re doing … I feel I don’t really care if people can see how I live, because I believe in how I live, I believe that there is beauty, and joy, and much that is worthy of being witnessed in how I live. And I consider it a sign of trouble and confusion when I start needing “privacy” or to hide.
I think about how privacy is so connected to a politics of domination. I think that’s why there’s such an emphasis in my work on the confessional, because I know that in a way we’re never going to end the forms of domination if we’re not willing to challenge the notion of public and private … if we’re not willing to break down the walls that say, “There should always be this separation between domestic space/intimate space and the world outside.” Because, in fact, why shouldn’t we have intimacy in the world outside as well?
R/SP: I really believe in the idea that people break down the power structure through the confessional … that just telling the truth in a society that’s based on lies, is a radical act.
bh: Yes—a culture of lies.
R/SP: And truth is also liberatory. The very thing one lies about is usually something one is ashamed about. And this shame basically enslaves people to the status quo. For example, in the 50s blacks were trying to be white; they were actually ashamed of their blackness, whereas racism should have been the thing to be ashamed of. Or, take a woman who is ashamed of being sexually active and feels “used.”
bh: Also, I think that only in a truly supportive environment can we know the real meaning of privacy or “aloneness.” Because the real meaning is not about secrets or clandestine activity: I think that “real” (I’m struggling with the word “real”) or “authentic” privacy has to do with being capable of being alone with one’s self. And one of the sadnesses of a culture of lies and domination is so many people cannot be alone with themselves. They always need the TV, the phone, the stereo—something … because to be alone with the self is to possibly have to see all the stuff we spend so much of our time trying not to face.
R/SP: Right. It’s the things we don’t want to face that enslave us. So it’s very liberatory to say, “Well, this is who I am.” There’s something very cathartic and transformative in accepting all the victimizations we’ve gone through. Somebody described their incest as a “wall of shame.” It’s incredibly liberatory to “come out” of the closet of shame.
bh: That’s why I like that book Shame: The Power of Caring, by Gershen Kaufman, because one of the things the author says is: There’s no experience that we cannot heal … there is no space where we cannot be reconciled … but we can never be reconciled as long as we exist in the realm of denial, because denial is always about insanity. And sanity is so tied to our capacity to face reality.
I remember when I was really struggling around my own issues with men and with my father. One day I called up my mother (I think I was 22) and was cryi
ng, “Daddy didn’t love me!” Usually my mother would say, “Of course he loved you: he did this and that …” But this time, after an hour of tortuous conversation, she suddenly said, “You’re right—he didn’t love you, and I never understood why.” And that moment of her acknowledging the truth of what I had experienced was such a moment of relief! The moment she affirmed the reality of what had taken place, I was released, because somehow what we all know in our wounded childhood experiences (what the Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller tried to teach us) is: it’s the act of living the fiction that produces the torturous angst and the anguish … the feeling that you’re mind-fucked. I was watching Hitchcock’s Spellbound again and I love it when that moment of truth—breaking through denial and reentering one’s true reality—becomes the hopeful moment, the promise: when we can know ourselves and not live this life of running in flight from reality.
R/SP: When you were talking about being raised in the black community, I was reminded of Philippe Ariès’ Centuries of Childhood.
bh: One of my favorite books in the world.
R/SP: In the Middle Ages, children weren’t raised in a nuclear family, but in a healthier extended family.
bh: Something I think a lot about is the question of destiny. It seems that this technological society tries to wipe out cultures who believe in forces of destiny … who believe there are forces moving in our lives beyond ourselves. Because such beliefs suggest that one could never be con-fined to the realm of one’s skin, or one’s nuclear family, or one’s biological sexuality (or what have you), because one has so much awareness that there are forces beyond at work upon us in the universe. And I think that part of what man’s technological society tries to do is to deny and crush our knowing of that, so that we lose ourselves so easily.
I think that ironically, despite all its flaws, religion was one of those places that expanded our existence. The very fact that in the Christian religion Jesus made miracles, well, kids growing up in the Christian Church may learn all this other reactionary dogma, but they’ll also learn something of an appreciation for mystery and magic. I was talking to an Indian Hindu woman friend whose son is fascinated with Christianity, and I said, “Yeah, those stories fascinated me, too!” He’s into David and Goliath, Moses parting the Red Sea … Not only are those stories fascinating, but they also keep you in touch with the idea that there are forces at work on our lives beyond our world of “reason” and the intellect. So this turning away from religion (in black culture from traditional black religion) has also meant a turning away from a realm of the sacred—a realm of mystery—that has been deeply helpful to us as a people.
This is not to say that one only finds a sense of the sacred in traditional Christian faiths, because I find this in the realm of spirituality and in the realm of occult thinking as well. It just seems to be a very tragic loss when we assimilate the values of a technocratic culture that does not acknowledge those high forms of mystery or even try to make sense of them.
Part of what people like Fritjof Capra (author of The Tao of Physics) are doing is reminding us that a true technological world has respect for mystery. I think they’re trying to reclaim the aspect of physics and science that in a sense was suppressed by the forces, the mentality, that would only dominate and conquer.
R/SP: “New science” seems almost to be confirming older occult postulations. The newest physics, astronomy, or “super string” theories sound so much like cabalistic notions.
bh: Absolutely! Historically, when we study the lives of someone like Madame Curie, we discover that in fact it isn’t just logical scientific methodology that allows her to make her “grand discovery,” but the work of the imagination. And with Einstein, we see the role of mystery in the discovery of things as opposed to this notion that everything can be worked out in a logical paradigm.
R/SP: Some writers like Evelyn Fox Keller (Reflections on Gender and Science) and Donna Haraway discuss how the philosophy of science has been informed by a patriarchal colonialist mentality, and how that’s being reformulated by different perspectives like feminism … I wanted to talk more about black community.
bh: One of the more important things I want to say is it wasn’t just that I grew up in a black community, but that I grew up in a caring black community—again, we don’t want to get stuck in false essentialisms … I don’t want to suggest that something magical took place there because everyone was black—it took place because of what we did together as black people.
I was in Claremont, California with a black cultural critic from England. Every day we would take walks, and be the only people on the street. I felt like we were in the Twilight Zone, because there were all these grand houses with lovely porches, but we never saw any people. And I was reminded of growing up in a small town of black people, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, on the black side of town where if you went walking you would always be able to greet people on their porches and talk with them and spread messages. Some elderly person might say, “When you get to so-and-so’s house, tell them I need a cup of sugar!” There was this whole sense of being connected through that experience of journeying, of taking a walk.
But where I live now, when I walk to my friend’s house I won’t see people out. Even though this is a small town and everyone has these grand porches, people will not be outside—the whole bourgeois notion of “privacy” means they don’t want to be seen—and they particularly don’t want to have to talk to strangers. Yet at least we have more communication around issues of “race” and “difference” than in most Midwestern towns, because of the Underground Railroad having gone through here, and the old black community that still exists in Oberlin, Ohio. Nevertheless, a lot of people who come here to college from New York City or other cities just think it’s horrifying to be seen daily by the same people.
R/SP: Yet if you walk through a lot of ethnic, Jewish, Hispanic, or black neighborhoods in New York, usually the older people still take their chairs and sit out on the street with their coolers—that’s their living room. They talk to people, and it’s really quite wonderful and relaxed.
bh: I struggle a great deal with the phone, because I think the telephone is very dangerous to our lives in that it gives us such an illusory sense that we are connecting. I always think about those telephone commercials (“reach out and touch someone!”) and that becomes such a false reality— even in my own life I have to remind myself that talking to someone on the phone is not the same as having a conversation where you see them and smell them.
I think that the phone has really helped people become more privatized in that it gives them an illusion of connection which denies looking at someone. Telephone commercials can be “great” because they actually let us see that person on the other end—see how they respond and give of this warmth that is never really conveyed just through the phone, so that we’re not just having a diminished experience of the nonperson you don’t really see on the other end. And it’s hard to always remember this—because we’re seduced. I love Baudrillard’s book Seduction, because he talks a lot about the way we’re seduced by technologies of alienation. We know that all technologies are not alienating, so I think it’s good to have a phrase like “technologies of alienation” so that we can distinguish between those ways of transmitting knowledge, information, etc. and other ways of knowing that are more fully meaningful to us.
R/SP: Don’t you think that in our addictive culture, these seductions set up addictions which can never be satisfied? The telephone gives this impossible promise of connections; its “900” numbers promise a simulation of friendship and community (like a long-distance nightclub) which can never be fulfilled. An incredible sense of longing and desire is evoked.
bh: Absolutely. When I spoke at a conference on the “War on Drugs, “I tried to talk about how a culture of domination is necessarily a culture of addiction, because you in fact take away from people their sense of agency. And what restores to people that sense of power and capacity? Well, working in
an auto factory in America right now gives few workers a sense of empowerment. So how do you give them an illusory sense of empowerment? We could go to any major plant in America and look at what people do. And a lot of what people do when they get off work is drink. Many of the forms of “community” (set up to counteract the forces of alienation on the job) are tied to addiction. Because the fact is it’s simply not gratifying to work fuckin’ hard ten hours a day for low wages and not really be able to get the thing you need materially in life.
In fact, if people weren’t seduced by certain forms of addiction, they might rebel! They might be depressed, they might start saying, “Why should any of us work ten hours a day? Why shouldn’t we share jobs and work four hours a day and be able to spend more quality time for ourselves and our families? Why shouldn’t workers who don’t know how to read be able to go to a job where you spend four hours working and another four hours looking at movies and having critical discussions?” I don’t know of any industry that has tried to implement those kinds of self-actualization moments in the experience of workers engaged in industrial work in this society.
R/SP: What do you think are the underlying mechanisms of the “Drug War”?
bh: I think the mechanisms of the Drug War have so much to do with the mechanisms of capitalism and money-making. Also, many people have shown the ways in which our state and our government are linked to the bringing in of masses of drugs to pacify people—starting with drugs like aspirin which make people feel like “you shouldn’t have any pain in your life” and that “pain means you’re not living a successful life.” And I think this is particularly hard to take. Black people and the black community have really been hurt by buying into the notion that “If I’m in pain, I must be a miserable person,” rather than, “Pain can be a fruitful place of transformation.”