2. bell hooks, Bone Black: memories of girlhood

[pauraque]

I went to the library looking for something by bell hooks, because I read Killing Rage a long time ago and got a lot out of it. My library only had two of her books, of which I picked Bone Black. I sat down to see if it was something I wanted to read, and didn't get up until I realized hours had passed and I had to get home. I finished reading later the same day. I loved this book.

It is a series of memories -- each short, just a few pages -- starting from early childhood and going through high school, in what seems to be rough chronological order. Each memory is allowed to be what it is, to simply tell us what she saw and heard and thought and felt. This imparts an almost dreamlike quality, as in the immediacy and raw selfness of a dream. The firings of your mind without shaping it, analyzing it. The impressions, joys, traumas that are the things we actually remember and the things that, taken together, build up who we are.

The effect is one of deep intimacy. My background is very different from hers, but it is impossible to feel like an outsider when reading this. Or rather, it is impossible not to identify with *her* feelings of being an outsider, both in the world and within her own family.

It's a short book (I was sad when it was over), but there's just so much. I love her portraits of her grandparents and other older people she befriends, a child who relates to them much more than to other children, who are often invisible or backgrounded in her memories. I love the wisdom she finds in her experiences of religion -- the reality she learns from a priest at an interfaith retreat, that all people know loneliness, and that we must love our own hearts first, or we will be too dead to even think of helping others. (That story reminded me strongly of Thich Nhat Hanh's writings, and funnily enough, there's his name on hooks' Wikipedia page under Influences.)

There is also some harrowing stuff here, very ground-up descriptions of how this child saw racism, homophobia, and abuse, not as Social Issues viewed from above, but fragmentary, confusing, inescapable. No different and not separate from the other aspects of the world, of our culture, that we simply absorb and get used to, like what we eat and how we dress. But the child in this book never could accept how they told her she should dress, either, never could wear the pink dresses they picked out and told her she should like.

When I got to the end, I noticed that this book had not been checked out of the library since 2004. I'm sure lots of library books don't circulate much, but the place I live is very white, so I couldn't help wondering if people might have seen the book, seen the picture of the young black girl on the cover, and thought it wasn't for them to read. Maybe they thought a memoir of the segregated South would be depressing.

But it is not a depressing book at all, it's an uplifting one. The permeating subtext is, of course, that this child grows up to be an author, just as she dreams of doing. The story is both specific and universal. It seeks to share a life, a childhood, and it succeeds completely. Highly recommended.

(eta tags: racism, memoir, african-american, integration, a: hooks bell)

Comments

[b-writes.livejournal.com]

I've read some of her essays, but didn't know she's published a memoir. I definitely want to check it out!

[pauraque]

Her essays also tend to be generous with vivid personal experiences, and this memoir really allows that quality of her writing to shine. If you like her work, I think this book will only enhance your appreciation of it.

[b-writes.livejournal.com]

Awesome.