Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work - Tapa blanda

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bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952, was an American author who used lowercase as both an homage to her maternal great-grandmother and an attempt to keep readers' focus where it belonged: on her work. When she died in 2021, hooks left behind a lifetime of thought that was decades ahead of its time. In the heyday of feminism, when the movement claimed to represent all women equally, hooks revealed in Ain't I a Woman--written when she was only nineteen--how the specific life experiences of Black women were being marginalized.

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Born and raised in the rural South, bell hooks learned early the power of the written word and the importance of speaking her mind. This passion for words is the heartbeat of this contemplative collection of essays. Remembered Rapture celebrates literacy, the joys of reading and writing, and the lasting power of the book. These essays once again reveal bell hooks's wide-ranging intellectual scope; if W. E. B. DuBois elegantly dissected the double consciousness of African-Americans, bell hooks, with similar insight and vision, untangles the complex personae of women writers, especially those whose work goes against the grain.

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writing from the darkness

I remember childhood as time in anguish, as a dark time?not darkness in anysense that is stark, bleak, or empty but as a rich space of knowledge, struggle,and awakening. We seemed bound to the earth then, as though like other livingthings our roots were so deep in the soil of our surroundings there was no wayto trace beginnings. We lived in the county, in a space between city andcountry, a barely occupied space. Houses stood at a distance from one another,few of them beautiful; always a sense of isolation and unbearable lonelinesshovered about them. We lived on hilly land, trees and wild honeysuckle hidingthe flat spaces where gardens grew. I do not remember darkness there. It was theblackness enveloping earth and sky out in the country at Daddy Jerry's and MamaWillie's house that gave feeling and meaning to darkness. There it seemedtextured, as though it were velvet cloth folded in many layers. That darknesshad to be confronted as we made our way before bedtime to the outhouse. "Nolight necessary," granddaddy would say. "There is light in darkness,you just have to find it." That was early childhood. From then on I wasterribly lost in an inner darkness as deep and thick as the blackness of thosenights. I could not find my way or see the light there.

I was a child and his words had given me confidence. I believed with him thatthere was light in darkness waiting to be found. Later unable to find my way, Ibegan to feel uncertain, displaced, estranged even. This was the condition of myspirit when I decided to be a writer, to seek for that light in words. No oneunderstood. Coming from country black folks, seemingly always old, folks withthe spirit of the backwoods, odd habits and odd ways, I had no way to share thislonging?this ache to write words. In our world there was an intense passionateplace for telling stories. It was really some big-time thing to be able to tella good story, to as Cousin Bo would say "call out the hell in words."Writing had no such place. Writing the old people could not do even if they hadbeen lucky enough to learn how. Folks wrote only when they had to; it was anawesome task, a burden. Making lists or writing letters could anguish thespirit. And who would anguish the spirit unnecessarily?

Searching for a space where writing could be understood, I asked for a diary. Iremember early on getting the imitation-leather red or green books at holidaytimes, with DIARY written on them in bright gold letters, and of course therewere those ever-so-tiny gold keys, two of them. Keys that were inevitably lost.Whole diaries gone because I refused to pry them open, not wanting what wasprivate to be accessible. Confessional writing in diaries was acceptable in ourfamily because it was writing that was never meant to be read by anyone. Keepinga daily diary did not mean that I was seriously called to write, that I wouldever write for a reading public. This was "safe" writing. It would (orso my parents thought) naturally be forsaken as one grew into womanhood. Ishared with them this assumption. Such writing was seen as a necessary stage butonly that. It was for me the space for critical reflection, where I struggled tounderstand myself and the world around me, that crazy world of family andcommunity, that painful world. I could say there what was hurting me, how I,felt about things, what I hoped for. I could be angry there with no threat ofpunishment. I could "talk back." Nothing had to be concealed. I couldhold on to myself there.

However much the realm of diary-keeping has been a female experience that hasoften kept us closeted writers, away from the act of writing as authorship, ithas most assuredly been a writing act that intimately connects the art ofexpressing one's feeling on the written page with the construction of self andidentity, with the effort to be fully self-actualized. This precious powerfulsense of writing as a healing place where our souls can speak and unfold hasbeen crucial to women's development of a counter-hegemonic experience ofcreativity within patriarchal culture. Significantly, diary writing has not beentraditionally seen by literary scholars as subversive autobiography, as a formof authorship that challenges conventional notions about the primacy ofconfessional writing as mere documentation (for women most often a record of oursorrows). Yet in the many cases where such writing has enhanced our struggle tobe self-defining it emerges as a narrative of resistance, as writing thatenables us to experience both self-discovery and self-recovery.

Faced with the radical possibility of self-transformation that confessionalwriting can evoke, many females cease to write. Certainly, when I was younger Idid not respond to the realization that diary writing was a place where I couldcritically confront the "self " with affirmation. At times diarywriting was threatening. For me the confessions written there were testimony,documenting realities I was not always able to face. My response to this senseof threat was to destroy the diaries. That destruction was linked to my fearthat growing up was not supposed to be hard and difficult, a time of anguish andtorment. Somehow the diaries were another accusing voice declaring that I wasnot "normal." I destroyed that writing and I wanted to destroy thattormented and struggling self I did not understand, then, the criticaldifference between confession as an act of displacement and confession as thebeginning stage in a process of self-transformation. Before this understanding,the diary as mirror was a place where that part of myself I could not accept orlove could be named, touched, and then destroyed. Such writing was release. Ittook the terror and pain away?that was all. It was not then a place ofreconciliation and reclamation.

None of the many diaries I wrote growing up exist today. They were alldestroyed. Years ago when I began a therapeutic process of retrospectiveself-examination, I really missed this writing and mourned the loss. Since I usejournals now as a way to engage in critical self-reflection, confrontation, andchallenge, I know that I would be able to know myself differently were I able toread back, to remember with that writing. Those years of sustained diary writingwere crucial to my later development as a writer for it was this realm ofconfessional writing that enabled me to find a voice. Still there was afrightening tension between the discovery of that voice and the assumption that,though expressed, it would then need to be concealed, contained, hidden, andultimately destroyed. While I had been given permission to keep diaries, it waswriting that my family began to see as dangerous when I began to express ideasconsidered strange and alien. Diaries provided a space for me to develop anautonomous voice and that meant such writing, once sanctioned, became suspect.It was impressed upon my consciousness that having a voice was dangerous. Thiswas reinforced when my sisters would find and read my diaries, then deliver themto our mother as evidence that I was truly a mad person, an alien, a stranger intheir household.

This tension between writing as an expression of my longing to emerge asautonomous creative thinker and the fear that such expression and any othermanifestation of independence would mean madness, an end to life, createdbarriers between me and those written words. I was afraid of their power and yetI needed them. Writing was the only space where I could express myself freely.It was crucial to my fragile sense of well-being. I was often the familyscapegoat?persecuted, ridiculed. I was often punished. It was as though I livedin a constant state of siege, subject to unprovoked and unexpected terroristattacks. I lived in dread. Nothing I did was ever right. That constantexperience of estrangement was deeply saddening. I was brokenhearted.

Writing was the healing place where I could collect the bits and pieces, where Icould put them together again. It was the sanctuary, the safe place. Yet I couldnot make that writing part of an overall process of self-recovery. I was able touse it constructively only as an outlet for suppressed feeling. Knowledge thatthe writing could have enabled transformation was blocked by feelings of shame.I was ashamed that I needed this sanctuary in words. Confronting parts of myself there was humiliating. To me that confession was a process of unmasking,stripping the soul. It made me naked and vulnerable. Even though the experiencewas cleansing and redemptive, it was a process I could not fully affirm orcelebrate. Feelings of shame compelled me to destroy what I had written. Diarywriting, as a record of confession, brought me face to face with the shadowself, the one we spend lifetimes avoiding. I was ashamed that this"me" existed. I read my words. They were mirrors. I looked at the selfrepresented there. Destroying the diaries, I destroyed that shadow. There was notrace of her, nothing that could bear witness. I could not embrace that innerdarkness, find the light in it. I could not hold that being or love her.

Undoubtedly this process of destroying the diaries, and the self representedthere, kept me from attempting suicide. There were times when I felt that deathwas the only way I could escape that inner darkness. I remember even now howmuch I longed to be rid of the wounded me, that secret shadow self. In LynCowan's Jungian discussion of masochism she describes that moment when we learnto "embrace the shadow" as a necessary stage in the psychic journeyleading to recovery and the restoration of well-being. She comments: "Jungsaid the shadow connects an individual to the collective unconscious, and beyondthat to animal life at its most primitive level. The shadow is the tunnel,channel, or connector through which one reaches the deepest, most elementallayers of psyche." Confronting that shadow-self can both humiliate andhumble. Humiliation in the face of aspects of the self we think are unsound,inappropriate, ugly, or downright nasty blocks one's ability to see thepossibility for transformation that such a facing of one's reality promises.

That sense of profound shame evoked whenever I looked at the shadow-selfportrayed in the writing was a barrier. It kept me stuck in the woundedness.Even though acknowledging that self in writing was a necessary anchor enablingme to keep a hold on life, it was not enough. That shame had to be let go beforeI could fully emerge as a writer because it was there whenever I tried tocreate, whether the work was confessional or not. When I left home to attendcollege I carried with me the longing to write. I knew then that I would need towork through these feelings of shame. One early journal entry from that timereads:

Writing, and the hope of writing pulls me back from the edges of despair. Ibelieve insanity and despair are at times one and the same. And I hear thevoices of my past telling me that I will go crazy, that I will end up in amental institution?alone. I remember my oldest sister laughing, telling me thatno one would visit me there, that "girl, you ought to stop." Stopthinking. Stop dreaming. Stop trying to experience and understand life. Stopliving in the world of the mind. That day I had sat a hot iron on my arm. I wasironing our father's pajamas. They were collectively mocking me. I asked them toleave me alone. I pleaded with them, "Why can't I just be left alone to beme?" I did not want to be molded. I was something. And when the hot ironcame down on my arm I did not feel it. I was momentarily carried away, pleadingwith them. I stood there in the hallway ironing and even when the stinging painwas there I continued to iron. I stood there struggling to hide the pain andsorrow, not wanting to cry, not wanting them to know how much it hurt. I wastrying to be brave. I know now that an anguished heart is never a brave heart.It's like some wounded body part that keeps bleeding, that can't stop itself.Writing eases the anguish. It is my connection. Through it and with it Itranscend despair.

Writing, whether confessional prose or poetry, was irrevocably linked in my mindwith the effort to maintain well-being. I began writing poetry about the sametime that I began keeping diaries. Poetry writing was radically different.Unlike confessional prose, one could use language in writing poetry to maskfeelings, to hide the experiential reality leading one to create. Poems on thesubject of death and dying did not necessarily make explicit to the reader thatI was at times struggling with the issue of whether to stay alive. Poetrywriting as creative process was intimately linked with the experience oftranscendence. Unlike the diary writing, which became a space where I confrontedpain, poetry was the way to move beyond it. I never destroyed poems because Ifelt there was nothing revealed there about the "me of me."

Then and now I remain a great admirer of Emily Dickinson, often marveling thatshe as living presence seemed always absent from her poems. To me they do notstand as a record of her experience but more as expressions of what I believeshe felt was a fitting and worthy subject for poetry. Her poems are masks,together creating a collective drama where the self remains in the shadows, darkand undiscovered. It is difficult to look behind the poems, to see, to enterthose shadows. Poetry writing may have been just that for Dickinson, the makingof an enclosure?the poem as wall, a screen shielding her from the shadow-self.Perhaps there was for her no safe place, nowhere that the unnamed could bevoiced, remembered, held. Even if it is there in the poems, we as readers cannotnecessarily know or find it. What is clear is that writing was for Dickinson away to keep a hold on life.

Writing that keeps us away from death, from despair, does not necessarily helpus to be well. Anne Sexton could confess, "I am trying a flat mask to holdmy sanity up ... my life is falling through a sieve" and then "thething that seems to be saving me is the poetry." I remember her, SylviaPlath, and not so well-known black women poets Georgia Douglas Johnson andClarissa Scott Delany because they all struggled with dangerous melancholy andkilling despair. We know that poetry does not save us, that writing does notalways keep us away from death, that the sorrow of wounds that have neverhealed, excruciating self-doubt, or overwhelming melancholy often crushes thespirit, making it impossible to stay alive. Julia Kristeva speaks about women'sstruggle to find and sustain creative voice in the chapter "I Who Want Notto Be," which is part of the introduction to About Chinese Women. There she addresses the tension between our longing to "speak aswomen," to have being that is strong enough to bear the identitywriter, and the coercive imposition of a feminine identity withinpatriarchy that opposes such being. Within patriarchy woman has no legitimatevoice. Her voice is either constructed in complicity or resistance. If thechoice is not radical then we speak only what the patriarchal culture would haveus say. If we do not speak as liberators we collapse under the weight of thiseffort to speak within patriarchal confines or lose ourselves without dying.Kristeva recalls the Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva, who hanged herself,writing: "I don't want to die. I want not to be." Her words echo mylonging to be rid of the shadow-self, the "me of me."

Writing enables us to be more fully alive only if it is not a terrain wherein weleave the self?the shadows behind, escaping. Anne Sexton reiterated again andagain in her letters that it was crucial that the writer keep a hold on life bylearning to face reality: "I think that writers must try not to avoidknowing what is happening. Everyone has somewhere the ability to mask the eventsof pain and sorrow.... But the creative person must not use this mechanism anymore than they have to in order to keep breathing." A distinction must bemade between that writing which enables us to hold on to life even as we areclinging to old hurts and wounds and that writing which offers to us a spacewhere we are able to confront reality in such a way that we live more fully.Such writing is not an anchor that we mistakenly cling to so as not to drown. Itis writing that truly rescues, that enables us to reach the shore, to recover.

To become a writer I needed to confront that shadow-self, to learn ways toaccept and care for that aspect of me as part of a process of healing andrecovery. I longed to create a groundwork of being that could affirm my struggleto be a whole self and my effort to write. To fulfill this longing I had tosearch for that shadow-self and reclaim it. That search was part of a process oflong inward journeying. Much of it took place in writing. I spent more than tenyears writing journals, unearthing and restoring memories of that shadow-self,connecting the past with present being. This writing enabled me to look myselfover in a new way, without the shame I had experienced earlier. It was no longeran act of displacement. I was not trying to be rid of the shadows, I wantedinstead to enter them. That encounter enabled me to learn the self anew in waysthat allowed transformation in consciousness and being. Resurrecting theshadow-self, I could finally embrace it, and by so doing come back to myself.

That woundedness that I was once so ashamed to recognize became for me a placeof recovery, the dark deeps into which I could enter to find both the source ofthat pain and the means to heal. Only in fully knowing the wound could Idiscover ways to attend to it. Writing was a way of knowing. After what seemedlike endless years of journal writing about the past, I wrote a memoir of mygirlhood. It was indeed the culmination of this effort to accept the past andyet surrender its hold on me. This writing was redemptive. I no longer need tomake this journey again and again.

Continues...

Excerpted from Remembered Raptureby Bell Hooks Copyright © 1999 by Bell Hooks. Excerpted by permission.
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