Imani Tafari-Ama | Honouring bell hooks

In December 2021, bell hooks, 69, became an ancestor. This caused her admirers to revisit their memory caches to contemplate the tremendous contributions that this academic and activist made to transformational thinking and praxis. With over 30 books to her credit, bell hooks earned her stripes as a prolific and politically unapologetic proponent of intersectionality, even before it became a popular platform for gender justice advocacy. She intentionally used lower case letters with her moniker to symbolise her resistance to normative narratives of self-representation. bell hooks adopted the name of her great-grandmother, a sharp-tongued woman who talked back to power, a trait she idealised. hooks was of the view that one’s contribution defines one’s stature, more so than capitalisation conventions.

Lloyd D’Aguilar and I were reminiscing recently about how we became engaged with hooks’ scholarship and politics. I recalled that I was fascinated when I read her declaration “I advocate feminism” in her landmark book, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. This assertion was used to explain her standpoint on the issues of inequality entrenched in women’s everyday lives and her theoretical explanations for these anomalies. I read her to mean that instead of freezing herself into a flat identity framework, such as “I am a feminist” would convey, hooks felt that she was at liberty to advocate for gender equity, particularly in the Black community, while also performing her identity politics in multiple other contexts.

In 1997, when I started my PhD journey at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, I attended a two-week residential workshop at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex in Brighton, England. I opted to take a day out to journey by train to London to attend a lecture being given by bell hooks. It was a life-changing experience. After getting her autograph in a copy of her book Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism and engaging in a fascinating conversation after the presentation, my day was made.

MASTER ANALYST

I embarked on the return journey to rejoin the workshop, energised by my reflections on hooks’ ideological complexity, which she combined with a crystal-clear conversational delivery. This marked bell hooks as a master analyst although her polemical style was derided by her detractors as not being academic enough. She told stories that easily explained the myriad ways that patriarchy, as expressed by men’s control of the structures and narratives of power, serves to undermine the options and choices for development that are available to women and girls. She explained how class contradictions serve to ensure that poor black women are hardest hit by economic systems that depend on the rule of men for their existence.

Lloyd D’Aguilar shared with me that he met bell hooks in 1995 at the Calabash Literary Festival held in Treasure Beach. In an interview, (previously published in Third World Review, 1995), D’Aguilar suggested to hooks that the gender equity that feminists are hoping to achieve will not be realised as long as capitalism is the driving force of global political and economic power.

In response to this charge, hooks indicated that even if capitalism was toppled, the problem of patriarchy, which precedes capitalism, will not be resolved. As she elaborated, “I think that what we see globally is that there have been incredible struggles to combat capitalism that haven’t resulted in an end to patriarchy at all. I also think that when we study ancient societies that were not capitalist, we see hierarchical systems that privileged maleness in the way that modern patriarchy does.”

bell hooks emphasised that achieving gender equity would require multiple strategies. As she explained, “I think we will never destroy patriarchy without questioning, critiquing, and challenging capitalism, [but] I don’t think challenging capitalism alone will mean a better world for women.”

This pessimistic perspective is rooted in a realistic review of the impact of global capital on cultural systems and the invidious reach of sexism, which snakes its way into individual mindsets and institutional operations. The failure of the ideologically progressive pockets of activists to attain sustained political power prevented the routing of capitalism. The Marxist pipe dream of toppling the capitalist system is defiant of the persistence of the neoliberal norm. Truth be told, Marxists colluded with Capitalists to divide the world into two camps for ideological control. Leftover leftists should, therefore, not romanticise the power of consciousness-raising or access to the means of production to move the entrenched structures of power.

DIRECTLY CONFRONTED

hooks directly confronted the inevitable critique that feminists are hell-bent on undermining relations between men and women. She also refused to polarise the feminist struggle as an oppositional endeavour in which white women and black women existed at inevitable cross purposes.

“I can think of revolutionary feminists who are white. We don’t hear much from revolutionary feminists who are white because they’re not serving the bourgeois agenda of the status quo. They’re a small minority, but they are there, and they are useful allies in the struggle.”

In this regard, hooks defined critical awareness as the pre-requisite for being feminist, noting that “a woman can’t be a feminist just because she is a woman. She is a feminist because she begins to divest herself of sexist ways of thinking and revolutionises her consciousness. The same is true for the male comrade in struggle”.

Addressing the need for solidarity between women and men to achieve social justice, hooks emphasised that the weight of patriarchy falls heavily on black men and is an obstacle to their development. In the D’Aguilar interview, she noted that the view that feminism “is a struggle against men … is the least politically developed strand of feminism”.

However, she conceded that this view persists because “that is the strand of feminism that people most hear about, not the kind of revolutionary feminism that says, patriarchy is life threatening to black men”.

According to hooks, violence among black men serves the cause of capitalism and patriarchy. As she explained further, “When we look at the black men who are killing each other – who think that their d**k is a gun, and a gun is a d**k – those men need a critique of that notion of patriarchal masculinity to save their lives. Feminism as a political movement has to specifically address the needs of men in their struggle to revolutionise their consciousness.”

In response to Lloyd’s question about prospects for change, bell hooks underscored the need for a critical consciousness approach to pedagogy. The ace educator also explained that strategies for solution must stitch in the political participation of women as a transformational necessity. This is to countervail “the role that gender oppression plays in encouraging young black females to think that they don’t need to study about capitalism. That they don’t need to read men who were my teachers like Walter Rodney, and [Kwame] Nkrumah, and Amilcar Cabral.” hooks is also evidently indebted to Paulo Freire for her characterisation of cultural reform through liberatory thought and action.

bell hooks concluded that her upbringing, which angled her sharply against unequal gender power relations, catalysed the crystallising of her consciousness about the need for equity between men and women. Her critique of the norm that “politics is the realm of males and that political thinking about anti-racist struggle and colonialism is for men” resulted in the emancipatory style of her thought and action.

Dr Imani Tafari-Ama is a research fellow at The Institute for Gender and Development Studies, Regional Coordinating Office (IGDS-RCO), at The University of the West Indies. Send feedback to imani.tafariama@uwimona.edu.jm.