by Hooks, Bell
I think that early on, in the black communities I grew up in, there was a sense of redemptive suffering. And it’s really problematic for us to lose that sense. James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time that “If you can’t suffer, you can never really grow up—because there’s no real change you go through.” Back to M. Scott Peck who tells us that “All change is a moment of loss.” And usually at a moment of loss we feel some degree of sorrow, grief— pain, even. And if people don’t have the apparatus by which they can bear that pain, there can only be this attempt to avoid it—and that’s where the place of so much addiction and substance abuse is in our life. It’s in the place of “let me not feel it” or “let me take this drug so that I can go through it without having to really feel what I might have had to feel here.” Or, “I can feel it … but I’ll have no memory of it.”
R/SP: And ultimately we go back to the whole issue of anger: to “not feel it so I won’t erupt with the kind of anger that pain has caused.”
bh: I think that’s it precisely. What I see as the promise is: those of us who are willing to break down or go through the walls of denial to build a bridge between illusion and reality so that we can come back to our selves and live more fully in the world.
R/SP: What do you write?
bh: I started out writing plays and poetry, but then felt I’d received this “message from the spirits,” that I really needed to do feminist work which would challenge the universalized category of “woman.” Years ago certain ideas were prevalent in the feminist movement, such as “Women would be liberated if they worked.” And I was thinking, “Gee, every black woman I’ve ever known has worked (outside the home), but this hasn’t necessarily meant liberation.” Obviously, this started me posing questions: “What women are we talking about when we talk about ‘women’?”
So I began doing feminist theory challenging the prevailing construction of womanhood in the feminist movement. I wrote Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, which initially met with tremendous resistance and hostility because it was going against the whole feminist idea that “Women share a common plight.” I was saying that, in fact, women don’t share a common plight solely because we’re women—that our experiences are very, very different. Of course, now that’s become such an accepted notion, but twelve years ago people were really pissed.
I remember people being enraged because the book challenged the whole construction of white woman as victim, or white woman as the symbol of the most oppressed … or woman as the symbol of the most oppressed. Because I was saying, “Wait a minute. What about class differences between women? What about racial differences that in fact make some women more powerful than others?” So that’s how I started out. I continued to do my plays and my poetry, but my feminist theory and writings became better known.
R/SP: And you’re also a professor?
bh: Yeah, although I’m on a leave of absence. It’s funny, lately I’ve been thinking a lot, because I’m having this life crisis right now and I’m just trying to pause for a moment—I call this a “pausitive life crisis” … I’m taking this time to focus more on creative work and on questions of performance. I have a desire to write little mini-plays and performances, dramas that can be acted out in people’s living rooms.
I’m really into the deinstitutionalization of learning and of experience. The more I’ve been in the academy, the more I think about Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison and the whole idea of how institutions work. People have this fantasy (as I did when I was young) of colleges being liberatory institutions, when in fact they’re so much like every other institution in our culture in terms of repression and containment—so that now I feel like I’m trying to break out. And I’ve noticed the similarity between the language I’ve been using, and the language of people who are imprisoned, especially with regard to that sense of what one has to recover after a period of confinement.
R/SP: I like your idea that theory can be liberating, but that so often it’s encased in a language so elitist as to be inaccessible. In the lecture I saw, the ideas you presented seemed so understandable. Plus, it seemed you brought your heart and soul to the “lecture” format.
bh: That’s where I think performance is useful. In traditional black culture, if you get up in front of an audience, you should be performing, you should be capable of moving people, something should take place—there should be some total experience. If you got up in front of an audience and were just passively reading something, well, what’s the point?
R/SP: Right. Why not listen to a tape recording?
bh: There has to be this total engagement, an engagement that also suggests dialogue and reciprocity between the performer and the audience that is hopefully responding. I think about theory; I use words like “deconstruction.” Once someone asked me, “Don’t you think that these words are alienating and cold?” and I said, “You know, I expect to see these words in rap in the next few years!”
In my book, Yearning, I talk about going home to the South and telling my family that I’m a Minimalist … explaining to them what the significance of Minimalism is to me (in terms of space, objects, needs and what have you). Because meanings can be shared—people can take different language and jargon across class and across experiences—but there has to be an intermediary process whereby you take the time to give them a sense of what the meaning of a term is. You’ve got to be able to express that complicated meaning in language that is plainer or translatable. This doesn’t mean that people can’t grasp more complex jargon and utilize it—I think that’s what books like Marx for Beginners had in mind: if you give people a basic outline or sense, then you are giving them a tool with which they can go back to the primary text (which is more “difficult”) and feel more at home with that.
R/SP: Do you feel that you as a black woman are changing things in the academy?
bh: Black women change the process only to the degree that we are in revolt against the prevailing process. However, the vast majority of black women in academe are not in revolt—they seem to be as conservative as the other conservatizing forces there! Why? Because marginalized groups in institutions feel so vulnerable. I’ve been rereading Simon Watney’s Policing Desire, and thinking a lot about how I often feel more policed by other black women who say to me: “How can you be out there on the edge? How can you do certain things, like be wild, be inappropriate? You’re making it harder for the rest of us (who are trying to show that we can be ‘up to snuff’) to be ‘in’ with the mainstream.”
R/SP: So it’s like an assault from both sides. You were talking about the “internalization of the oppressor” in the minds of the colonized.
bh: Simon Watney was talking about marginalized communities who will protest certain forms of domination (like the notion of “exclusion/inclusion” whereby they are excluded) but then invent their own little group wherein the same practices determine who is allowed into their “community.” We see that happening now with the recent return to a black cultural nationalism where a new, well-educated, cool, chic, avant-garde group of black people (who perhaps five years ago had lots of white friends or mixed friends) now say, “I really want to associate only with black people” or “black people and people of color.”
I’m very much into the work of Thich Nhat Hanh; I consider him to be one of my primary teachers and have been reading him for years. He talks a lot about the idea of resistance to the construction of false frontiers—the idea that you make or construct someone as an enemy who you have to oppose, but who in fact may have more in common with you than you realize. However, in this society it’s easier for us to build our sense of “community” around sameness, so we can’t imagine a gay rights movement where eighty percent of the people might be nongay!
I was working from Martin Luther King’s idea of the “beloved community” and asking, “Under what terms do we establish ‘community’?” How do we conceptualize a ‘beloved community’? King’s idea was of a gr
oup of people who have overcome their racism, whereas I think more of communities of people who are not just interested in racism, but in the whole question of domination.
I think it’s more important to ask, “What does it mean to inhabit a space without a culture of domination defining how you live your life?” In Thich Nhat Hanh’s book The Raft Is Not the Shore (1975) he says that “resistance at heart must mean more than resistance against war. It must mean resistance against all things that are like war.” And then he talks about living in modern society … how the way we live threatens our integrity of being, and how people who feel threatened then construct false frontiers: “I can only care about you if you’re like me. I can only show compassion toward you if something in your experience relates to something I’ve experienced.”
We see an expression of this in Richard Rorty’s book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, where he argues that white people in America can be in solidarity with young black youth if they stop seeing them as “young black youth” and look at them as Americans, and declare, “No American should have to live this way.” So it’s a whole notion of “If you can find yourself in the Other in such a way as to wipe out the Otherness, then you can be in harmony.” But a “grander” idea is “Why do we have to wipe out the Otherness in order to experience a notion of Oneness? I’m sort of a freak on the left in that I’m really dedicated to a spiritual practice in my everyday life, yet I’m also interested in transgressive expressions of desire.
R/SP: Like what?
bh: “Like what? she says! Well, for example, I just had this fling with a 22-year-old black male. A lot of people felt, “This is politically incorrect. This person isn’t political; he’s even got a white girlfriend. How can you be non-monogamous in the age of AIDS?” Likewise, if you say you have a spiritual practice, people immediately think you’re plugged into a total good/bad way of reading reality.
R/SP: Or that you can’t have a wild sex life … You’re older and he’s younger, so you’re breaking an “age” taboo?
bh: Actually, less the taboo of age than the taboo of being involved with somebody who isn’t involved with my work, who doesn’t talk, and who’s not politically correct.
R/SP: Almost as if you could be the exploiter?
bh: No! Rather, “You’re letting us down. How could you be involved with a sexist terrorist?!” Because from jump I wasn’t trying to pretend that this guy was a wonderful person—I said he was a “terrorist”—referring to people who are into “gaslighting,” that great old term we should never have abandoned: men who seduce a woman, and just when you think you’re in heaven, they suddenly abandon you. The syndrome of seduce and abandon, seduce and betray. This theme really was popular in Hitchcock movies.
I like that term “gaslighting”; I want to recover it. It makes me think of emotional minefields, of someone you might actually have this ecstatic experience with, someone who inspires in you feelings of belonging and homecoming, you’re walking along and suddenly you get blown up! Some part of you falls away, and you realize that all along this has been part of the other person’s agenda: to give you a sense of belonging and closeness, then disrupt it in some powerful way. Which is what I think sexual terrorism does …
In a more general sense, in this country I always relate terrorism to the idea of sugar-coated fascism: where people really think they are free, but all of a sudden discover that if you cross certain boundaries (for example, decide you don’t want to go fight in that Gulf War), suddenly you find you can be blown up—some part of you can be cut off, shot down, taken away …
I think about the soldiers that people were spitting on—the ones who don’t want to happily get on planes and go kill some Iraqis … just how quickly their whole experience of “America” was altered in the space of, say, even a day. If you juxtapose the notion of “Choice/Freedom of Will” (that mythic projection) against the reality of what it means to say, “Well, I really would like to exercise my freedom in this democracy and say that I don’t really support this war, and I don’t want to go to it!” then WHAM! You find out there really was no such freedom, that you really had signed up to be an agent of White supremacy and White Western Imperialism globally— and that you get punished quickly if you choose against that!
R/SP: This really was a white supremacist war, yet the way it was presented on TV sidestepped that reality.
bh: It’s funny, because I was just talking with a friend about Dances with Wolves. We were disturbed because so many “progressive” people had been seeing this film, crying, and saying what a wonderful film it is. And while it is one of the best Hollywood representations of Native Americans, the fact remains that the overall package is completely pro-war, completely conservative.
I was interested in this, and my book Black Looks: Race and Representation has an essay that examines the whole history of Africans coming to the so-called “New World,” and the kind of bonds that developed between Africans and different nations. All of a sudden we began to think of Native American Indians as lightskinned people with straight hair, whose cultures have nothing to do with African American (or any African) culture … when in fact, in the 1800s and early 1900s, there was still lots of communication—a lot of black people joined Native American nations legally. You could declare yourself a citizen of a particular nation.
R/SP: Do you have any thoughts regarding the presentation of people of color in mass media?
bh: I think one of the dilemmas in film or performance for people of color is it’s not enough for us just to create cultural products in reaction to prevailing archetypes— we must try to create the absences in Hollywood cinema. For example, we think a Spike Lee film is “good” because it has different images from what we’ve seen before. But we need more than merely “positive” images—we need challenging images. When people say to me, “Well, don’t you think that at least Spike Lee’s telling it like it is?” I say, “You know, the function of art is to do more than tell it like it is—it’s to imagine what is possible.”
R/SP: To tell what could be.
bh: Yes. And I think that for all people of color in this culture (because our minds have been so colonized) it’s very hard for us to move out of that location of reacting. Even if I say, “I’m going to create a drama where Asian women’s sexuality is portrayed differently than the racist norm,” I’m still working within that sense of, “We only respond to the existing representation.” Whereas actually, we need some wholesale reenvisioning that’s outside the realm of the merely reactionary!
I’m fascinated by the appearance of transgression in an art form that in fact is no transgression at all. A lot of films appear to be creating a change, but the narrative is always so “sewn up” by an ending which returns us to the status quo—so there’s been no change at all. The underlying message ends up being completely conservative.
R/SP: Can you think of any examples in mass media that work in a positive way?
bh: We haven’t seen enough. Black heterosexuality in cinema and television is always basic, funky, and sexist, like in Mo’ Better Blues by Spike Lee where nothing different takes place—even though we know that people’s real lives can have far more complex constructions. For example, nobody says, “Let’s have different arrangements—I don’t think I want to be monogamous. Let’s reorganize this.” A location where one can imagine possible different constructions is performance art. We think of Whoopi Goldberg’s early performances when she took on many different identities, such as the “bag lady” she gave voice to.
There was a point in my life when I needed a therapist. I was involved in this horrible, bittersweet life with a black male artist/intellectual. There was no one I could go to and say, “This is what’s happening to me, and I have no apparatus for understanding it.” So I invented this figure: this therapist, this healer, and I could get up and do an improvisational performance on this persona. I realized you could invent something you need.
I was just reading a quotation f
rom Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères: “There was a time when you were not a slave,” which evokes the idea of remembering who you were. I was thinking about being in that emotionally abusive, bittersweet relationship, and was trying to remember when I was not in the matrix like that. But coming from a family where I had been routinely tortured and emotionally persecuted, it was hard for me to even imagine a space where I wasn’t involved with people who seduce and betray—who make you feel loved one minute, and then pull the rug out from under you the next—so you’re always spinning, uncertain how to respond. The point is: performance art, in the ritual of inventing a character who could not only speak through me but also for me, was an important location of recovery for me.
R/SP: As far as the position of women or people of color goes, it seems that the deception levels are getting worse. The illusions are so much tighter, and the grip of control.
bh: There’s an incredible quote by Martin Luther King in his last essay, “A Testament of Hope.” He says that the black revolution is not just a revolution for black people, but in fact is exposing certain systematic flaws in society: racism, militarism, and materialism. And while there are a lot of progressive people on the Left who oppose militarism, many do not oppose materialism.
One thing we can learn from Thich Nhat Hanh, who lived through the Vietnam War, is how much this culture is so profoundly materialistic … people think they need so much. When I teach a course on Third World Literature, I spend the first few weeks trying to get people to unlearn thinking with a First World mind-set, which means when you watch a show like “Dynasty” and see all this material opulence, you measure your own life by that. You might say, Oh God, I don’t have anything—I only have an old car and an old stereo, but just look at this opulence!” Whereas if we think about the rest of the world … I remember myself as a naive teenager going to Germany and finding out that everyone didn’t have a stereo!