‘She contained multitudes’: memories and tributes to bell hooks
Iwas asked to write about bell hooks’ life and legacy but I realized it would not be true to the spirit of how she lived for any one person to sum her up. Instead I have gathered a communal offering of memory, friendship, loss and love for the visionary we’ve lost.
bell spent her life standing up against “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” – a phrase she said she didn’t much like but which connected all the forms of domination that are enslaving us in the world today. I watched her create, along with other women, a vision of Black feminism that invigorated an entire generation. She taught me personally about so many things: decolonization, the tyranny and trap of masculinity, how love must be our guiding principle in all that we do, the roles white women can and can’t play in this movement. bell once wrote that “one of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone”. So I reached out to gather some memories from, as Stephanie Troutman says, “the beloved community bell helped to create”.
– V (formerly Eve Ensler)
Tamura Lomax, PhD
I would not be a Black feminist if it were not for bell hooks. The Feminist Wire would not exist without hooks’ urging to “talk back”. I came to Black radical resistance through her.
While social media didn’t always value hooks (we will talk about this more honestly one day – in fact, after her critique of Beyoncé and capitalism folks were quite vicious), I would venture to say there would be no hashtag or internet feminism without hooks’ insistence on plainly and brilliantly articulating Black feminist theory. She gave us tools for reading popular culture, relationships, history, politics and so much more.
She made us face our complexities, contradictions, consumptions and appropriations. May we better and always honor her work and life by daring to sit with what audiences found
so compelling about her contributions, including the parts we don’t like. Stephanie Troutman (Robbins)
It is hard to know the right story to tell about my legendary friend, the singular Dr bell hooks.
When I think of bell, the words and concepts that come to mind are: radical self-acceptance, feminist agency, community and love. These were the values that bell hooks was deeply believed in and hoped to inspire above all else. These life lessons are her legacy. They are the lessons I embrace and aspire to across the spaces and identities I occupy: mother, teacher, friend, mentor, wife, junior-elder.
bell’s reminder, in Teaching to Transgress, that “no education is politically neutral” have been my anchor and guiding light as a teacher, mentor and scholar. So much of my professional identity, which bleeds into my whole self, I owe to the work, ideas and writings of bell hooks. I envision her now, IN GLORY, on the ancestral plane wondering over the beloved community she helped to create and inspire.
Gloria Steinem
The words of bell hooks are intimate and universal at the same time. She should have been here for many years to come, and the only comfort now is that her words will be here always.
Imani Perry
I met Gloria (and I always called her that) when I was 19 and an intern at South End Press 30 years ago. She always spoke to me in the ways of the Black south, familiar loving cadences, even when she was talking about Marxian theory or critical pedagogy. She argued and she was outspoken. She was not pious. She was a Marxist with a red Mercedes. She studied Zen Buddhism and would fuss with you. She contained multitudes, as it were.
If you ever talked high theory with her, you knew she absolutely could have gone that route and been a traditional academic rockstar. Yet she rejected a conventional academic style, and chose instead to merge those heady ideas with folk ways and deep spiritual questions and teaching as an ethical practice. She wanted to bring us – her readers, especially her young adult readers – into the fold of ideas that were in the service of building a more just and humane world.
She was devoted to the process of us collectively working together against domination.
Quentin Walcott
I once met bell hooks, at her dark, barely lit apartment at an undisclosed and mysterious downtown Manhattan location. She was hungry and wanted to go to eat. As we did, she sized up and tested me to determine how authentic and genuine I was about my work against gender violence.
She challenged my notions of accountability, pointing out that it is not the job of women, particularly black women, to educate and supervise men while also dealing with racism and sexism. Despite the flak she received over the years for her feminist critiques of masculinity, I could tell that she loved Black men and believed that we – me – were indeed redeemable. She loved, challenged and held us accountable.
Billy Korinko
When I first began exploring what it means to be a white man, and an aspiring feminist ally, I believed that feminism was just about the liberation of women. But bell hooks’ work challenged me to think about pain I had experienced in my life and how this pain was the byproduct of patriarchal thinking and living. Her work was not about centering men’s experiences, but rather illustrating the damage that patriarchy also enacts on men. hooks made clear that men’s pain, insecurities, fears, and inability to connect with others emotionally are all connected to men’s allegiance to patriarchy. She is sort of saying, “The call is coming from inside the house!”
Her work has provided men who feel frustrated, insecure, lonely and emotionally stunted a blueprint for change. The question is, are we wise enough to pick it up?
Crystal Wilkinson
When I met bell in 1993, I was a single mother, a burgeoning writer trying to find herself. I had read her books. I knew she was from Kentucky. bell hooks and Gayl Jones were the only Black published women writers I knew from my home state. I was in awe of the power hooks wielded on the page, how she made me believe in my own agency. I squeezed myself and my twin girls into a crowded community center to sit on the floor and listen to her speak in those early days, amazed that she had fire and intelligence and an accent like mine.
Fast forward to the early 2000s when she had returned to Kentucky, and we worked in Berea where she lived. By then we were friends. She invited me to her house. We broke bread. We talked about love, Black liberation, family, girlhood and the beauty of the Kentucky landscape. Her ability to talk of the mundane from the comfort of her living room with the same power that she wielded at the podium was astounding.
Honestly, she wasn’t always easy to love. Equal parts bite, tender hand and intellect, she may have been the most complicated person I have ever met or will, but I loved her fiercely and know she loved me. She taught all of us so much until the end and now she’s left us to continue our lessons on our own.
Zillah Eisenstein
Our first meeting was at Haverford College, where Hortense Spillers had arranged a session on racism in the white women’s movement. We were very young then, me in my late 20s, bell in her early 20s. We stayed in contact for most of the rest of our lives. We shared clothes, especially scarves, and talked about our bodies and how they were a gift and a burden.
I kept reminding her, as she declined in these last years, and often felt alone and forgotten, that she was always present in the lives of women, especially Black women and girls who she taught to talk back; to see their commodification and reject it; to demand space in the center and the love they deserve.
Imara Jones
So often we think that to be radical is to be loud. But through her quiet demeanor, coupled with her ringing indictment of the fundamental toxicity of our society, bell hooks was a constant drip of water which bent rocks to her vision of how everything could be better. She was a radical woman if there ever was one; powerful not only in what she said but how she said it.
Another key lesson I learned from her is the patient power of radical love. It means that in conflict we lean into our humanity as a way to break our own chains, as well as those which imprison oppressors. It means we show up for others even if it’s the last thing we want to do. Radical love is the requirement of our time.
David Zirin
It is no exaggeration to say that the scholarship of bell hooks changed my life. Her great gift was that she could push you to challenge your own ingrained privileges and bigotries while also pulling you in closer. It was a talent that affected all of our activism: challenging ourselves to be better while also being open to people still processing their own muck.
As she said so beautifully: “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” We are either going to heal together or continue to bleed out. Thank you, bell hooks, for always steering us through healing.
Deborah Willis
One beautiful afternoon in June of 1992, I had a long chat with bell hooks and discovered that we both loved the portrait that Moneta Sleet, Jr made of Billie Holiday for Ebony magazine. We felt moved by the image and the sensitivity he presented in her pose. We talked for a long time about why it was so important that we think and write critically about black images and how they affect the African American community. She ended up writing In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life, an essay she contributed to my edited volume Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography.
She taught me a lot over time about mixing history, images and personal memory, embracing difficult moments with laughter while building a narrative about African American joy and the complexities of Black life. I love that she wrote about Love so often and I connect her to Dr King’s imagining a “Beloved Community”. I thank her for her choices as she moved through life. I will always treasure our time together. Byron Hurt
Growing up, and then as a young college student, I saw the world almost entirely through the lens of a heterosexual, Black American male. I was raised to give voice to issues that mostly affected Black boys and men. bell hooks changed that for me.
Once I started reading bell’s essays and books, I couldn’t stop. Her book Ain’t I A Woman? Black Women and Feminism helped sensitize me to the plight of Black women, and her book The Will to Change forced me to grapple with the ways in which patriarchy is self-defeating and destructive to boys and men as well as girls and women.
When I set out to make my documentary I AM A MAN: Black Masculinity in America (1994), bell hooks was at the top of my list of interviewees. She graciously agreed to my request for an on-camera interview. I drove from Boston to interview her in her Lower East Side apartment. She was kind, down-to-earth, and loving. She dropped so many jewels during her interview that it was hard to select which to include in the film. Hers is the very first image and voice that you hear in I AM A MAN, and intentionally so. From the opening frame, I wanted other Black men to hear her, to see her, and to feel her urgent call for us to interrogate patriarchy and the culture of masculinity. Charles Knight
I keep bell hooks’ The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love close to my desk and return to its dogeared pages again and again. Years ago I gave a copy to my son Eric and it was he who told me this morning that bell had died. bell could hold passionate anger at the social and cultural structures of oppression and domination – and still fiercely love those compromised by them. Despite her personal suffering in the patriarchy, bell somehow had the capacity to see that “patriarchal culture does not care if men are unhappy” and that men are also aggrieved by the “failure of love”. Her empathy astounds. She was a teacher and I imagine she recognized early that it is through empathetic connection that students really learn, especially when the subject matter is dealing with the really tough stuff within ourselves and our society. May more like her carry on.
Evangeline Lawson bell hooks had the tawny skin tone of my grandmother, the bright and passionate eyes of my niece and the diminutive stature of my mother. And a love so deep for Black people that it poured from the pages of her work and into our very souls. In all of those things both beautiful and complex, bell embodied the fire in her spirit that ignited all of us brown-skinned girls to take up space in this world. And to not apologize for it.
Her reminder – to walk boldly in our femininity, to acknowledge past hurts, but to be ever-persistent in our willingness to give love, all while allowing it to propel us toward victory – is what I hope we can carry on as her gift to legions of women to come.
DaMaris Hill bell hooks is radical. This was evident in her radical self-agency, radical living and radical loving. Her words were affirmations and grace. Her books were palaces to dwell in. To know bell is to exist in a space where existential freedoms and safe harbor coexist, a place that is a type of nirvana for a Black girl, for any human being. She is joy and in this moment we are dancing with her, all of us, the generations and futures, the legacies and new lives. Kevin Powell
I am profoundly saddened by the death of bell hooks, my mentor, friend, sister, one of our greatest writers and thinkers. I am just glad I was able to travel to her house in Berea to pay my last respects days before her passing. I cried sitting there with her as she slept, thinking of our 27-year history, of the man I am now because of her. I told bell over and over again how much I loved her; I told her over and over again, THANK YOU.
Forty-plus books in 40-plus years and so many lives and minds and souls touched by her words, even those who may have disagreed. I will miss her voice, smile, the way she always kept me on my toes, the way she always said both my names. But bell did what she came to do, and as Nikki Giovanni recently said about life, we go on. Sleep well, bell, you have earned it.
Mahogany Browne bell hooks suffered no ignorance. In this refrain may we witness Black feminist thought as a place of a sovereignty. The revolutionary idea of a Black femme body governing her ownness is a radical intellectual movement we assemble through text, discussions, and debate. hooks provided the tools for true freedom dreaming. Her lessons served as a direct call to action. She left no ignorance to morph and feed in the shadows. Through her love for arts, letters and Blackness bell hooks was undeniable in the act of legacy keeping.