"Context cannot hold Cervantes and Shakespeare" 💜

Miguel de Cervantes

The Spanish Shakespeare | Creator of the first European novel

#onhisbirthdaytoday

#disqualifiedknowledges #M-Effect

29th September

[Infamous for his involvement in piracy in the Mediterranean, espionage and the Spanish Armada | Imprisoned in Spain for issues related to his work as a tax collector, including being accused of selling seized wheat]

In continuance of our Prison Writing Series, today, albeit by fortuitous coincidence, we shall discuss yet another renowned prison writer who has his birthday today.

Miguel de Cervantes!

Well, Cervantes’s writing was significantly influenced by his time in prison. In fact, the timeless classic, Don Quixote, which also happens to be his most famous novel, is believed to have been conceived while he was in prison. In the prologue to the first part of the book, he suggests the story was “engendered in a prison where every annoyance has its home.”

Trying to catch hold of some authentic references, I was able to gather some very interesting material on Cervantes, from the point of view of three literarians! 

Firstly, one of his recent biographies, titled, No Ordinary Man: The Life and Times of Miguel de Cervantes by Donald McCrory.

Donald here has a very insightful note on the importance of 29th September to Cervantes –

The generally accepted date of Miguel’s birth is St Michael’s day, 29 September 1547, the year in which both Henry VIII and Francis I of France died. It was also the year in which Ivan the Terrible of Muscovy assumed the title of Tsar, an event that went unnoticed by most Spaniards at the time. On the wider canvas, it was the year that saw Charles V defeat the Lutherans at Mühlberg (Luther had died the previous year) and, on a more local note, it was the year when Philip II spent Christmas in Alcalá de Henares,

says Donald.

Secondly, Edith Grossman, one of the recent translators of Don Quixote, has some very profound material to share with her readers –

Cervantes’s fictional difficulty was certainly my factual one as I contemplated the prospect of writing even a few lines about the wonderfully utopian task of translating the first - and probably the greatest - modern novel.

Substitute keyboard and monitor for pen and paper, and my dilemma and posture were the same; the dear friend who helped me solve the problem was really Cervantes himself, an embodied spirit who emerged out of the shadows and off the pages when I realized I could begin this note by quoting a few sentences from his prologue.

I believe that my primary obligation as a literary translator is to recreate for the reader in English the experience of the reader in Spanish.

When Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, it was not yet a seminal masterpiece of European literature, the book that crystallized forever the making of literature out of life and literature, that explored in typically ironic fashion, and for the first time, the blurred and shifting frontiers between fact and fiction, imagination and history, perception and physical reality, or that set the stage for all Hispanic studies and all serious discussions of the history and nature of the novel.

When Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, his language was not archaic or quaint. He wrote in a crackling, up-to-date Spanish that was an intrinsic part of his time (this is instantly apparent when he has Don Quixote, in transports of knightly madness, speak in the old-fashioned idiom of the novels of chivalry), a modern language that both reflected and helped to shape the way people experienced the world.

This meant that I did not need to find a special, anachronistic, somehow-seventeenth-century voice but could translate his astonishingly fine writing into contemporary English.

And his writing is a marvel: it gives off sparks and flows like honey.

Cervantes’s style is so artful it seems absolutely natural and inevitable; his irony is sweet-natured, his sensibility sophisticated, compassionate, and humorous.

If my translation works at all, the reader should keep turning the pages, smiling a good deal, periodically bursting into laughter, and impatiently waiting for the next synonym (Cervantes delighted in accumulating synonyms, especially descriptive ones, within the same phrase), the next mind-bending coincidence, the next variation on the structure of Don Quixote’s adventures, the next incomparable conversation between the knight and his squire.

To quote again from Cervantes’s prologue: “I do not want to charge you too much for the service I have performed in introducing you to so noble and honorable a knight; but I do want you to thank me for allowing you to make the acquaintance of the famous Sancho Panza, his squire….”

Finally, for the take by Harold Bloom on Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote –

Cervantes and Shakespeare, who died almost simultaneously, are the central Western authors, at least since Dante, and no writer since has matched them, not Tolstoy or Goethe, Dickens, Proust, Joyce.

Context cannot hold Cervantes and Shakespeare: the Spanish Golden Age and the Elizabethan-Jacobean era are secondary when we attempt a full appreciation of what we are given.

W. H. Auden found in Don Quixote a portrait of the Christian saint, as opposed to Hamlet, who “lacks faith in God and in himself.” Though Auden sounds perversely ironic, he was quite serious and, I think, wrong-headed.

Against Auden I set Miguel de Unamuno, my favorite critic of Don Quixote. For Unamuno, Alonso Quixano is the Christian saint, while Don Quixote is the originator of the actual Spanish religion, Quixotism.

Herman Melville blended Don Quixote and Hamlet in Captain Ahab (with a touch of Milton’s Satan added for seasoning). Ahab desires to avenge himself upon the white whale, while Satan would destroy God, if only he could. Hamlet is death’s ambassador to us, according to G. Wilson Knight. Don Quixote says that his quest is to destroy injustice. The final injustice is death, the ultimate bondage. To set captives free is the knight’s pragmatic way of battling against death.

Though there have been many valuable English translations of Don Quixote, I would commend Edith Grossman’s version for the extraordinarily high quality of her prose.

The Knight and Sancho are so eloquently rendered by Grossman that the vitality of their characterization is more clearly conveyed than ever before. There is also an astonishing contextualization of Don Quixote and Sancho in Grossman’s translation that I believe has not been achieved before.

The spiritual atmosphere of a Spain already in steep decline can be felt throughout, thanks to the heightened quality of her diction. Grossman might be called the Glenn Gould of translators, because she, too, articulates every note. Reading her amazing mode of finding equivalents in English for Cervantes’s darkening vision is an entrance into a further understanding of why this great book contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake.

Like Shakespeare, Cervantes is inescapable for all writers who have come after him. Dickens and Flaubert, Joyce and Proust reflect the narrative procedures of Cervantes, and their glories of characterization mingle strains of Shakespeare and Cervantes. You cannot locate Shakespeare in his own works, not even in the sonnets. It is this near invisibility that encourages the zealots who believe that almost anyone wrote Shakespeare, except Shakespeare himself.

Cervantes inhabits his great book so pervasively that we need to see that it has three unique personalities: the Knight, Sancho, and Cervantes himself.

Yet… how sly and subtle is the presence of Cervantes!

says Bloom, Harold Bloom!

"Bridges between the “inside” and the “outside” are important for any conception of prison and its effects. Prison writing is one such bridge" 💜

Piper Kerman

#onherbirthdaytoday 

Prison Writing & the Literary World

#disqualifiedknowledges #prosimetrum #M-Effect

28th September

Piper Kerman is an American author, memoirist and advocate, known for her best-selling memoir titled, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, published in the year 2010.

The book chronicles Piper’s experiences while serving a 13-month sentence at a federal prison, for a drug-related crime she had committed well over a decade ago.

Piper’s writing focuses on the personal stories of the women she meets inside the prison, throwing light on the hardships within the prison system.

Well, Prison Writing as a distinct literary genre, has had a very long and ancient history.

One of the earliest known prison writings dates back to the ancient Roman era, by the Roman statesman and philosopher Boethius in 524 AD. Boethius wrote this famous philosophical dialogue titled, The Consolation of Philosophy while imprisoned and facing execution by King Theodoric the Great, who suspected him of treason.

This Boethius’ book is a unique philosophical dialogue - a prosimetrum – wherein a literary work is composed of alternating segments of prose and verse, or poetry and prose! In this treatise, Boethius has a conversation with Lady Philosophy, where he argues that, true happiness comes from the internal life and virtue, not external circumstances like wealth or power.

One very interesting quirk that I came upon, while going through the history of prison writing is the number of prison writers whose names begin with ‘M’! 😊

A quaint literary quirk at that! 😊

Sample this –

Malory – Sir Thomas Malory - is believed to have written his classic collection of Arthurian tales, Le Morte d'Arthur, while in prison during the 15th century.

Marco Polo, the famous explorer, dictated his travels to a fellow inmate while imprisoned in Genoa in the late 13th century, resulting in The Travels of Marco Polo.

More – Sir Thomas More wrote on issues of faith and conscience while in prison. This was in the backdrop of the English Reformation of the 16th century that gave rise to a significant output in prison literature, as political and religious dissenters were mercilessly imprisoned.

Marquis de Sade wrote prolifically during his long imprisonments in the 18th and early 19th centuries, using his time to explore themes of depravity and philosophy in works like Justine

Miguel de Cervantes famously claimed that he begot his novel Don Quixote (1605) while in a debtor’s prison, highlighting the role of confinement in sparking creativity.

Mahatma Gandhi wrote extensively from prison, most notably his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth and Songs from Prison (a collection of ancient Indian religious lyrics) during his time in Yeravada Central Jail in Pune. His prison writings documented his philosophical evolution, addressed spiritual and political matters, and served to connect with and inspire his followers despite his incarceration.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963) is a powerful defense of nonviolent resistance and a landmark document of the Civil Rights Movement.

Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, parts of which were secretly written in prison, became a global symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle.

Malcolm X’s Autobiography, co-written with Alex Haley, details his personal transformation in prison, where he educated himself and became a leader of the Nation of Islam.

Well, the M-Factor to Prison Writing apart - there have also been statesmen, celebrity politicians and literary giants right from John Bunyan, Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, Thoreau, Gramsci, Jawaharlal Nehru et al who have come up with some of their best writings while having been incarcerated in prison.

In this regard, I would like to recommend a lovely read on the subject, titled, Prison Writing and the Literary World: Imprisonment, Institutionality and Questions of Literary Practice, edited by Michelle Kelly and Claire Westall.

This collection of scholarly essays explores the multifaceted relationship between imprisonment and literature. The essays analyse how being imprisoned affects the writer’s craft. They consider how the unique constraints of confinement - such as censorship, limited access to materials, and the psychological impact of isolation - influence literary style, form, and subject matter. And most interestingly, a significant part of the book addresses the challenges of getting prison writing accessible to a wider audience.

And I quote from Prison Writing and the Literary World –

Prisons are particularly intriguing in this sense because their “public” status, ubiquity and physical enormity sit alongside a common view of them as hidden and sealed spaces beyond the comprehension of those “outside”.

Consequently, bridges between the “inside” and the “outside” are important for any conception of prison and its effects. Prison writing is one such bridge.

As well as presenting prison life to external readers, prison writing, in its varying modes, can also provide opportunities for the incarcerated to express themselves, critique the system of detention, and document their struggle for survival and sanity.

Prison Writing and the Literary World examines underexplored examples of prison writing and writing about imprisonment from across the globe.

Turning to “prison writing” first, then, we recognise that this domain, often labelled “prison literature”, has gained some academic traction since the 1960s and 1970s, most obviously in the USA with the efforts of Bruce Franklin and others.

More recently, since the early 2000s approximately, there has been a rise in interest – though it remains a relatively niche area – in the relationship between prison and the arts, and how prison writing and education programmes might be more closely bound to external activities and institutions, including universities.

The growing academic profile of prison writing and other artistic endeavours within prisons brings a need to move beyond (yet still with) efforts at raising awareness of existing texts, authors, genres and artistic techniques arising from carceral spaces, and into new modes of critical examination.

Colvin also indicates, in her chapter, that the term prison writing helps reinforce how such writing is “readable not only as literature but [also] as history and documentary”.

What is prison writing? For Paul St John, writing in Eastern New York Correctional Facility in 1994, it is “dead wood”: insider knowledge that nobody outside wants.

Writers in prison know they are largely invisible and inaudible in the world outside.

Michel Foucault’s analysis of how isolation behind walls replaced the public spectacle of punishment has fed a reading of prisoner experience as “hidden or lost knowledge” and secrecy as “the essence of the prison”.

Once revealed, writing from the prison should therefore be welcomed by a reading public that has always loved the revelation of secrets. Yet most prison writing appears in small print runs with specialist presses on the back of huge efforts by its editors to find a publisher; it almost never appears in a second edition.

So, the knowledge it contains is not just “hidden or lost”, but also culturally elided. It belongs to what Foucault called the “disqualified” knowledges, “low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity”, the barely saleable fruits of the experience of human beings who lack human status.

For as Foucault hints, having one’s experience recognised as real, and mattering, is both the sign and condition for a life that “counts as human”.

"My courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me" 💜

On Katie Fforde and Her ‘Spunky’ Heroines

#onherbirthdaytoday #inspirational

The Archetype of the “Spunky Heroine”

27 September

A ‘spunky heroine’ is a character who is high-spirited and brave, with a ‘can-do’ attitude, eager to tackle problems rather than giving up. They have a cheerful outlook to life, and can uplift the mood of others.

This archetype of the ‘spunky heroine’ – female lead characters who don’t shy away from challenges and are proactive in pursuing their goals, even in the face of societal pressures or personal hardships – is found in various literatures across various time periods. We shall just take two for ensamples!

Firstly, let’s take the case of Elizabeth Bennet from Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Elizabeth is known for her intelligence, wit, and strong will. She is a ‘spunky’ character who boldly stands up to societal expectations and refuses to marry for financial security, instead insisting on a marriage based on love and mutual respect.

And I quote –

Elizabeth saw what he was doing, and at the first convenient pause turned to him with an arch smile, and said, -

You mean to frighten me, Mr. Darcy, by coming in all this state to hear me. But I will not be alarmed though your sister does play so well.

There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me.

Bronte’s Jane Eyre is yet another example to the spunky heroine archetype, who boldly stands up to injustice from a young age and is determined to maintain her independence and integrity, even when it means making difficult choices.

Secondly, sample this from Jane Eyre –

I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will!

Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup?

Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart!

And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh; - it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal,- as we are!”... therefore I am better than you - let me go!

In like manner, Katie Fforde’s heroines lend themselves to the ‘spunky heroine’ archetype. They are are known for being resourceful and proactive, often facing a personal setback and choosing to rebuild their lives in a positive way.

Instead of passively waiting for a man to solve their problems, they embark on new ventures and pursue their own passions.

So finally, let’s consider the ‘spunky’ character Polly from Katie Fforde’s Living Dangerously for an example.

When her friends and mother are trying to set her up with a husband, Polly is content to be single and focusses on her job and her passion for pottery. She is an independent character who resists pressure to conform to others’ expectations.

Here goes the text –

Oh, stuff the family unit. I admit there are times when it would be nice to have a man about the place, but once you’ve got the hang of a Black and Decker, those times are very few and far between. And think what you give up. Just because the ballcock on the loo needs replacing from time to time. I couldn’t make the compromises, not at my age.

‘Thirty-five is not old.’

Bridget was forty-one.

‘I know, but it is mature. I’ve lived on my own since I was twenty-five. I have my little ways – you might even say I’m a touch sluttish . . .’

PS: You may want to read on the Spunky Characters in Literature, with reference to the ‘Concept of Self’ Series, in our past blogposts, from January 2019, HERE.

"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" ❤️🐶

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

II MA English Class | 26th September 2025

#classdebate #onhisbirthdaytoday

Well, just today in the II MA Class, we had an exciting debate on the topic,

‘Street Dogs should be kept in Containment Zones: Agree? Disagree? It was quite a memorable debate with the class equally split in their affinities – 50% on either side.

Topic for today’s Debate suggested by: Mr. Milind

The Official Timer for today’s debate – Ms. Terese

The Group Leader for ‘Agree’ (Black Mic) – Ms. Sivasankari

The Group Leader for ‘Disagree’ (Red Mic) – Mr. Milind

Official Photographer: Ms. Safa

Mic Coordinators: Black Mic – Ms. Ann Mariah | Red Mic: Ms. Lindsay

Official Transcriber of the Debate: Ms. Nivedhaa (awaiting!)

[Black Mic for ‘Agree’ | Red Mic – ‘Disagree’]

Many from either side have expressed their desire to continue on the debate the next week as well. So we hope to! 😊

Coincidentally, and ‘curiously,’ Mark Haddon – whose birthday falls today – has written his award-winning masterpiece titled, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a mystery novel that talks about the death of a dog, and the subsequent ‘awakenings’.

Well, two literary giants were born on this day.

T. S. Eliot and Mark Haddon!

#onhisbirthdaytoday

26 September

For today’s post, let’s do Haddon, Mark Haddon!

Mark Haddon is a British novelist, illustrator, and writer, best known for his novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which was published in the year 2003.

Quite interestingly, the year 2003 has been a very eventful year for literature, as most of the novels published in this year, soon became bestsellers winning major awards and becoming cult classics in the process.

Some of these bestsellers are -

Dan Brown’s alternative religious history, The Da Vinci Code

Rowling’s fantasy novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel, The Kite Runner

Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut novel, The Namesake

Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction, Oryx and Crake

Lauren Weisberger’s chick-lit fiction, The Devil Wears Prada

Mark Haddon’s first novel for adults, The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time

are some of the bestsellers that were published in the year 2003.

Coming back to Mark Haddon’s The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time –

This mystery novel is narrated from the perspective of Christopher Boone, a 15-year-old boy, who discovers that, his neighbour’s dog, Wellington, has been killed with a garden fork.

Interestingly, Christopher is a mathematical genius who prefers logic, facts, and order. Hence the novel’s tone is very clinical and detached, even when describing traumatic events. One reason why, he struggles with understanding human emotions, social cues, and metaphors, which he sees as ‘lies’.

Moreover, the book is structured in a highly unusual way!

The chapters in the novel are numbered using prime numbers (e.g., 2, 3, 5, 7, 11), including diagrams, maps, drawings, and mathematical problems that are crucial to understanding how he processes information and makes sense of his chaotic world. 😊

Giving us all a few interesting snippets gleaned from the novel –

Just to help us engage with the text, which I personally feel, is so gripping right from the beginning –

It was 7 minutes after midnight.

The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears’s house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep.

The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog.

The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over.

I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer, for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.

I went through Mrs. Shears’s gate, closing it behind me. I walked onto her lawn and knelt beside the dog. I put my hand on the muzzle of the dog. It was still warm.

The dog was called Wellington. It belonged to Mrs. Shears, who was our friend. She lived on the opposite side of the road, two houses to the left.

Wellington was a poodle. Not one of the small poodles that have hairstyles but a big poodle. It had curly black fur, but when you got close you could see that the skin underneath the fur was a very pale yellow, like chicken. I stroked Wellington and wondered who had killed him, and why.

My name is Christopher John Francis Boone. I know all the countries of the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7,057.

Then the police arrived. I like the police. They have uniforms and numbers and you know what they are meant to be doing.

There was a policewoman and a policeman. The policewoman had a little hole in her tights on her left ankle and a red scratch in the middle of the hole. The policeman had a big orange leaf stuck to the bottom of his shoe which was poking out from one side.

The policewoman put her arms round Mrs. Shears and led her back toward the house.

I lifted my head off the grass. The policeman squatted down beside me and said,

“Would you like to tell me what’s going on here, young man?”

I sat up and said, “The dog is dead.”

“I’d got that far,” he said.

I said, “I think someone killed the dog.”

“How old are you?” he asked.

I replied, “I am 15 years and 3 months and 2 days.”

“And what, precisely, were you doing in the garden?” he asked.

“I was holding the dog,” I replied.

“And why were you holding the dog?” he asked.

This was a difficult question. It was something I wanted to do. I like dogs. It made me sad to see that the dog was dead.

I like policemen, too, and I wanted to answer the question properly, but the policeman did not give me enough time to work out the correct answer.

“Why were you holding the dog?” he asked again.

“I like dogs,” I said.

“Did you kill the dog?” he asked.

I said, “I did not kill the dog.”

“Is this your fork?” he asked.

I said, “No.”

“You seem very upset about this,” he said.

He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly. They were stacking up in my head like loaves in the factory where Uncle Terry works.

Chapters in books are usually given the cardinal numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and so on. But I have decided to give my chapters prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and so on because I like prime numbers.

This is how you work out what prime numbers are.

First you write down all the positive whole numbers in the world.

Then you take away all the numbers that are multiples of 2. Then you take away all the numbers that are multiples of 3. Then you take away all the numbers that are multiples of 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 and so on. The numbers that are left are the prime numbers.

The rule for working out prime numbers is really simple, but no one has ever worked out a simple formula for telling you whether a very big number is a prime number or what the next one will be. If a number is really, really big, it can take a computer years to work out whether it is a prime number.

Prime numbers are useful for writing codes and in America they are classed as Military Material and if you find one over 100 digits long you have to tell the CIA and they buy it off you for $10,000. But it would not be a very good way of making a living.

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

I’m sure this is added tempt for the reader to take to the book rightaway!

Here’s wishing you a Happy Haddon Time! 😊 

"To boldly speak about one’s life was in mama's eyes, an act of betrayal" ❤️

On bell hooks and William Faulkner

#onhisbirthdaytoday #onherbirthdaytoday

25 September

hooks (sic) and Faulkner are two legendary literarians celebrating their birthdays today.

Both hooks (sic) and Faulkner are known for their deep and critical engagement with the American South, exploring the region’s complex and often painful legacy, particularly the intertwined issues of race, class, and history.

Both authors used their art to confront the same fundamental subject: the American South and its enduring legacy of racial and social hierarchy.

While hooks (sic) approached the topic through a critical, and theoretical lens, Faulkner engaged with the subject of racism through a complex, fictional narrative.

Faulkner was particularly more focused in engaging with what he called, the South's “original sin” of slavery and its long-lasting, corrupting effects on both Black and white families. He calls it as a ‘sin’ because it represents a deep moral and ethical transgression!

Well, I came across this insightful book on Faulkner titled, Critical Companion to William Faulkner: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work published in the year 2008 by A. Nicholas Fargnoli, et al.

It is a must-read book on all things Faulkner from A to Z!

Giving us all a few brilliant gleanings on Faulkner from the book –

William Faulkner - Novelist, author of The Sound and the Fury, Light In August, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, The Hamlet, and other works, winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, and by critical consensus a leading literary artist of the 20th century.

The novelist’s mythic Yoknapatawpha has become a permanent feature of the world’s literary geography, a suffering, defeated place, a haunt of grotesque and villainous Snopeses and Sutpens, with a troubled heritage of slavery and war. But it is an enduring and timeless place too, peopled with ordinary men and women such as Dilsey Gibson, V. K. Ratliff, and Isaac (Ike) McCaslin who rise to heroic stature and in whom hope has not died.

There were the immemorial pastimes of smalltown boyhood: pickup games of football and baseball, explorations of the nearby woods and fields with Mammy Callie, hit-and-run raids on enemy neighbourhoods.

Black-white relations were easy, often affectionate, so long as blacks made no bid to breach the racial barrier. Whites reacted fiercely to any attempt to cross the line. Race and racial identity would become major themes of Faulkner’s mature

Faulkner’s published writings span a period of more than 40 years and include poems, short stories, novels, essays, speeches, screenplays, and letters. His literary works contain well in excess of a thousand named characters, some of whom appear in several different works.

Coming to bell hooks,

Bell hooks, a Black feminist, scholar, and social critic, used her writing to analyze the social, economic, and political structures that perpetuate oppression.

Born and raised in Kentucky, her work is heavily influenced by her experiences as a Black woman from the South. She focused on the intersectionality of race, gender, and class, arguing that these systems of oppression are deeply interconnected and cannot be understood in isolation.

Her memoir titled, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, delves into the personal and collective trauma of growing up Black in the South, and she often wrote about the importance of “homeplace” as both a site of pain and a source of strength and community for Black women.

There’s this lovely book she’s written, titled, talking back thinking feminist, thinking black. It’s a collection of essays that explores the intersections of race, class, and gender. The book critiques mainstream feminist theory for its exclusion of the experiences of women of colour and challenges the patriarchal structures within Black communities.

The title “Talking Back” itself becomes a powerful metaphor for resisting oppression. hooks discusses how Black women have historically been silenced and how reclaiming their voice is a crucial act of resistance and self-empoweration.

Some gleanings from the book by hooks –

Among her discoveries is that moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side, a gesture of defiance that heals, making new life and new growth possible.

More often than not racist, sexist stereotypes characterized black females as loud, rude, overbearing, and in relationship to black males dominating and castrating. Positive studies of girlhood patterns attempt to link being outspoken as a girl with healthy self-esteem.

Unfortunately because many black girls speak out unenlightened feminist thinkers have seen these speech acts as performances of power when they may more accurately simply be a reflection of different cultural values. 

Even when critical thinkers, like myself, have called attention to the reality that in black communities across class, girls being talkative cannot be interpreted as an accurate indication of strong self-esteem.

Black girls continue to be judged by sociological and political standards that are first and foremost informed by perceptions of white girls (i.e. if silence among white girls indicates obedience and self-effacement it must follow that speaking out among girls of colour, especially black girls, can be read as a sign of positive power).

In contrast to privileged white girls who are marked as socialized into silence and therefore taught to be female subordinates, lower class black girls who speak out are then coded as defi ant.

If one group is seen as quiet and self-eff acing then it follows that girls who are loud and aggressive are seen as more powerful. Yet in many non-white ethnic groups female speaking out is not seen as a gesture of power.

In these cultures, speaking out is deemed as much a fulfillment of a sexist defi ned female role as female silence in other cultures. It should not surprise anyone that girls who are loud and outspoken see themselves as strong and/ or powerful. However this rarely corresponds with the actual reality of their lives. When the issue is speaking out, the content of what is spoken is more important than the speech acts.

Rather than making the act of speaking a sign of assertive power for girls, focusing on content provides a more accurate means of making the connection between speaking and healthy self-esteem. Who is speaking is never as important as what is being said, even though who speaks is crucial to our understanding of any politics of gender.

Confronting the fear of speaking out and, with courage, speaking truth to power continues to be a vital agenda of all females.

My elder female ancestors gave me the important gift of bold speech. They were courageous women of vision and purpose.

Longing to fit in with more conventional sexist defined notions of a woman’s proper role in life, Rosa Bell, my mother, was not a woman of bold speech. She endeavoured to be seen and not heard, when speaking to say the right words. When it became clear that I, her third daughter, wanted to become a woman of bold speech, mama tried hard to silence me. When I “talked back” I was punished.

Like the southern women of her time mama believed in the cult of privacy, especially as it related to family and domestic life. No matter what was happening in families, we were all taught that it was tantamount to treason to break the code of silence and speak openly and honestly.

To boldly speak about one’s life and to dare to make that speaking a critique was in mama’s eyes and in the eyes of the middle-class culture of true womanhood a betrayal. And of course it was indeed one of the first ways young females, like myself, challenged patriarchal thinking.

Whether writing in diaries (my older sister always read my thoughts and reported to our mother my secrets) or speaking out, clearly I understood early that talking back was a form of conscious rebellion against dominating authority.

From the start my engagement with contemporary feminist movement demanded that I have the courage to talk back if I wanted to share my perspective on being black and feminist.

It seemed fitting then that I should call this second book “talking back” as it was the first published work wherein I linked telling my story to the writing of theory.

Talking Back has been and continues to be a work that encourages readers to find and/or celebrate coming to voice, especially folks from exploited and oppressed groups who struggle with breaking silences.

Finding our voice and using it, especially in acts of critical rebellion and resistance, pushing past fear, continues to be one of the most powerful ways feminist thinking and practice changes life.

When readers apply the theory of coming to voice to their lives, especially in relation to understanding domination and creating an aware critical consciousness, meaningful transformation takes place for self and society.

When the discussion of coming to voice first began in feminist circles everyone thought it would just be commonly understood as a necessary aspect of feminist self-actualization, so much so that it would become an automatic process. That did not happen.

Many readers still need to have the foundation laid for them by those of us who have been working for feminist change for decades. We will always need to promote and encourage talking back,

signs off bell hooks, in her prefatory to her book.