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.
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