Rest in power and light, bell hooks

As a Black activist and feminist, hook’s writing has been pioneering in how it enhances and enables solidarities across feminisms. Pic/Berea College, Twitter

It is gutting to hear of the demise of bell hooks. She was only 69, and even though she leaves behind an immense legacy, there's no doubt she had so much more to say, write and preach. I heard the news from a friend and collaborator and it was difficult to swallow. Because literally every post on my Instagram feed currently hosts a tribute to her, I feel less alone in my grief.

It was through hooks's theoretical work that I really understood what it means to be intersectional in one's feminism, to be aware and to continually call out the myriad forces that collude to advance the oppression of the historically marginalised - white supremacy, capitalism, casteism and patriarchy. As a Black activist and feminist, hook's writing has been pioneering in how it enhances and enables solidarities across feminisms. If you've ever heard her speak (I have only through video recordings available on YouTube) you see her eyes eternally beaming with kindness, even when she is asserting a boundary or being affirmative about a particular belief.

As a feminist, the most significant lesson I learned from hooks was how to appropriate the ‘love' ethic that was a part of my Catholic upbringing, but not in the way it had been taught to me, which was to make me complicit in my own subjugation, rather, to think of love as radical and politically infused as well as empowering. Reading her, alongside Simone Weil's notes, helped me frame a larger ideology of goodness for the sake of goodness, not because of the lure of the eternal life of heaven or the punitive realm of hell. I credit hooks with helping me understand that within love there must be no space for abuse, either physical or emotional; that there is no merit in enduring cruelty, and that one must, first and foremost, be accountable to oneself and remove ourselves from situations of harm that come in the guise of love.

It was her book All About Love: New Visions that made me totally revisit what I had been conditioned to believe compromised loving behaviour. I was amazed at the intellectual and spiritual rigour that enunciates every line in the book. Hooks talks about the dangers of not theorising sufficiently about love, and offers us a broad definition, citing Scott Peck - The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth. It's a moving dictum suggesting that to truly love someone, including yourself, you must be wholly invested in the spirituality of one's self or the loved one. This is an empowering definition, one that goes beyond the cliches that we have internalised, that trap us in toxic relationships because we conflate love with lust and with forms of surrender and involuntariness, when in fact being in a loving relationship involves acknowledging one's choice, and understanding the motivations that govern that choice. "Affection is only one ingredient of love. To truly love we must mix various ingredients - care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment and trust as well as honest and open communication." This sentence is not easy to swallow. If you really sit with it and begin to unpack it and you start to look at your own relationships and you start to see how much self-work there is still to be done.

Another transformative remark by her was about how we must not expect from anyone else the love we are unable to give ourselves. This placing of the self at the centre of loving relations is not something we are taught to do. If anything, thanks to patriarchal conditioning, those of us who are taught to perform as women internalise that sacrifice is everything, we idealise various forms of martyrdom and never learn to assert our boundaries, never learn to refuse, to stand up for ourselves and to assert the cause of our self-interests. For hooks, all awakening to love is a spiritual awakening, because committing to a love ethic involves living one's life with the self at the centre and in relation to the world.

For me, it felt revolutionary to read her writing on forgiveness as an act of agency. I had always been told, especially as a Catholic, that it was imperative to forgive and forget, that there was something noble and altruistic about it. But hooks writes about forgiveness as an act of awareness, as a way of holding the other and the self accountable, and as a process of mourning, grieving and learning. Reading her insights helped me to truly forgive from a space of empathy not only towards the other, but primarily towards myself, because it compelled me to acknowledge that I had been hurt, and to speak honestly about this hurt.

For me, reading feminist theory has never been an academic enterprise. It has been vitally connected to forms of spiritual growth and ways of feeling less alone. But it hooks's writing that really helped me metabolise my Catholic upbringing with my feminist ideology, placing love at the heart of living, loving, and every other form of discourse. Her writings have had such profound ramifications on the lives of Black and indigenous folx as well as people of colour because she shows us, through her own lived experiences, how to embrace our identities and move towards a space of potential wholeness. She reminds us that we do not have to be defined by our oppression. We do not have to succumb to the narratives about our victimhood. We have the right to joy, to living effusively in the light.

Hooks has now joined the pantheon of our feminist ancestors. May she rest in power and light.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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