Any suggestions for reading something by this author?
https://www.sistersletter.com
Saved by the bell: Celebrating a Literary Light During Women’s History Month
Last year, we lost a literary luminary, who has meant so much to me as a professor of literature and as a woman. During Women’s History Month, I celebrate Dr. bell hooks (1952-2021) as an important scholar who pulled back the veil on so many unspoken cultural and gender-based biases, taboos and nuances. She mirrored both our significant strides and our as-yet-unaddressed faults. One of my sheroes, hooks gave me and other women a language to express our lives, our work and our feelings of love, despair and hope.
Among the many lessons that make up her legacy, here are some that have touched my life, love and work the most.
Lessons about language
and there we wept
“they that wasted us/ said sing us one of the songs of zion/ we answered/ how
can we sing a freedom song/ in a strange land” — “and there we wept”
In 1978, Gloria Watkins (who wrote under the name bell hooks) published a little-known collection of poems, and there we wept, a small, but powerful chapbook with only 250 copies in circulation. I’m lucky to own a copy of this slender, prophetic book because it set the precedent for the next 43 years of hooks’ searing, loving and penetrating gaze on race, feminism, sexism, love, compassion, scholarship, rage and everything between. In this book, her words were like copper bangles on the delicate wrists of a graceful dancer learning her craft — a harkening, teaching me that poets can become both fire and educator. We could equally adore and challenge social, cultural and historical paradigms in which we existed, that denied Black women their voice.
Lessons about learning
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
When I assigned the chapter in Teaching to Transgress, “Holding My Sister’s Hand: Solidarity in Feminism” to my senior seminar class, African American students at a historically Black college, they could have spit nails. At first, they didn’t want to hear what hooks had to say, that there was and will always be a semiotic, yet unequal relationship between Black and white women due to the hideous nature of enslavement and our binary roles as women in opposition to the white male slave master. Then, as I had, when they pulled the threads of this and other chapters in the book, gradually my students could see the argument that impacted me personally: The struggle, the tug-of-war between the persona of the “weak” white female and the perpetuated stereotype of the Black woman’s body as “property,” “sexualized,” “mysterious,” will continue to weigh down feminism and the fight against sexism, weakening us, unless we combine our struggles intellectually, spiritually and emotionally. This inequality can be seen still in the way murdered or missing white women earn an immediate bounty for the killers, and the media’s 24-hour attention, while murdered or missing Black women receive far, far less attention and notoriety. I took this to heart long before we started calling for allies, and I felt validated in hooks’ words.
"Mickey Mouse and I grew up together." - Ruthie Tompson, Disney animation checker and scene planner and one of the first women to become a member of the International Photographers Union in 1952.
You can't wait until life isn't hard anymore before you decide to be happy.
I had forgotten, if I ever knew, that an informant had alerted them to a possible KKK plot because of his civil rights positions.
