The Eternal Voice of bell hooks

By Teagan Moehlis, Second Year History and English

Writing of her childhood home in Kentucky where she experienced girlhood in the transitioning period of desegregation, bell hook’s poem “Appalachian Elegy” opens:

“hear them cry

the long dead

the long gone

speak to us

from beyond the grave

guide us

that we may learn

all the ways”

With her recent death on 15 December 2021, bell hooks joins the past voices which now inform us. Hers is a voice which she self identified as a “dissident” one, deriving power from her willingness to articulate “things that we have to say that will be wounding.” A scholar, author, and social critic, hook's most enduring project was her career-long advocacy for intersectionality, an issue gaining increasing visibility as the connections between gender, race, and class become impossible to ignore in ongoing struggles for equality. Therefore, in addition to dissident, her voice represents a collection of experiences and a striking intertextuality. Her own pen name, the all lowercase ‘bell hooks,’(which she swapped from her given name Gloria Jean Watkins) being the name of her great-grandmother and therefore itself representing the ways in which her voice is enriched by those of the past.

In this piece I would like to respectfully engage with the empowering legacy of this dissident voice, compiling some of her arguments delivered orally in interviews, speeches, and talks throughout her career in order to better understand the politics of voice according to bell hooks. 

Achieving balance was one of hooks’ most triumphant accomplishments in the establishment of her voice, especially as a woman of colour engaging in political debates. She discusses the fragility of achieving credibility in this position in her talk at the Women of Color Eleventh Annual Conference in which she critiques black, female historical figures as well as her own history of voice. In a humorous, but informed way she criticizes some of the heroic women of the civil rights movement, naming Coretta Scott King and Rosa Parks saying “So often the black women who are held up to us … are the idealized sense of what black womanhood should be: obedient and silent” and states that Rosa Park’s success as a symbol for civil disobedience was due to her palatability in which she “said nothing that those bourgeois, patriarchal black men didn't want her to say.” 

Far from falling into this patriarchal trap, hooks’ own voice and scholarship undeniably reflects her agency and commands the highest respect. However, in her own activism, hooks describes the difficulty she faced around the time of her first publication of the book Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism in 1981 and the reception that she got in her earlier career. Instead of being inoffensive and muted, her outspokenness was seen as dangerously angry, a stereotype which she identifies as one specifically used to target the passionate activism of black feminists. 

She explains that “more often than not” women of colour’s voices are seen as “too angry to be worthy of being listened to or heard.” hooks herself fell victim to this harmful judgement during this phase when “[her] voice was at times shrill and piercing, full of the pain, feelings of powerlessness in gender, coupled with the awareness of the chokehold dominator culture had on [her] consciousness.” Though rightfully angry, hooks describes the evolution she underwent in order to transform her voice into one which was more broadly respected. With time her voice matured into one which allowed engagement in intellectual debate instead of alienating audiences.

In a conversation with Terry Real, hooks elaborates this specifically intersectional struggle of women of colour’s voices being harmfully stereotyped as angry and consequently underappreciated. She explains that while these women may be generalized as very talkative and expressive, “Being very vocal hasn’t corresponded to a real liberatory vision of voice.” She argues that these voices must be cultivated in order to represent critical thinking and “liberatory power” instead of remaining subordinate and tragically drowned out. She argues that to achieve this is to succeed in “Valuing oneself rightly and speaking from that position” 

Additionally, hooks’ theories of voice expand not only to encompass the struggles of women of colour, but a broader, radical invitation for dialogue. Wary of the censorship which she witnessed in post-9/11 society, hooks’ advocacy for free speech and “radical openness” became a clear characteristic of her transmission of knowledge. In an interview broadcast on the program aptly titled Speaking Freely, hooks explains that “hunger for truth” begs for the continuation of open dialogues and that it is the visibility of differing opinions which allows for the facilitation of debate which can ultimately bring society towards better understandings.

Additionally, the transgression of categories such as her identity as a feminist, for example with her apparent contradictory respect for the gangster rap genre, are what she believed was a way of dismantling the binary language of out current society. Ultimately, our times call for openness and intellectual discussion instead of the “censorship of the imagination” which she spoke against.

Now, through her works and her voice, hooks’ critical thinking offers to us what nature in Appalachian Elegy offered her. Speaking about nature, hooks describes its power of spiritual journey and about the kind of self reflection that she claimed nature offered herself as a renewal, similarly fuelling  the prophets of each age, who were able to “articulate divinely inspired revelations.” In the age of the internet, her own revelations live on, begging us to keep listening. Indeed, through only the few talks of hers which I have been able to access since first truly becoming aware of her since her death, I am confident that her voice will continue to live on, “pushing the fragrance of hope/ the promise of resurrection.”

bell hooks, Getty Images

Bibliography

bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins),  2012. "Appalachian Elegy (Sections 1-6)" from Appalachian Elegy. The University Press of Kentucky.

Badabelent, John. 6 March 2011. bell hooks on Voice.mp4 [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5ThEoA0ESA

Freedom Forum. 29 March 2016. Speaking Freely: Bell Hooks [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2bmnwehlpA

University of Oregon. 6 March 2008. Mind, Body and Soul - Women of Color Conference Keynote [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAuHQIMQUIs