In the foreword of Toni Morrison's sixth novel, Jazz, she writes, "I had written novels in which structure was designed to enhance meaning; here the structure would equal meaning." bell hook’s (born Gloria Jean Watkins) 1996 memoir, Bone Black, is a recollection of her childhood, each chapter's structure resembling the way a memory might come back to us: briefly and full of impressions. Most memories in Bone Black are recounted in first person, a young bell hooks vividly narrating events, reflections and realisations. Some however are told in third person, as if she were outside of her own mind looking in; the distinction inviting us to wonder which memories we consider inextricably linked to our personhood, and which we keep at a distance.
Bone Black chronicles the joys of hook’s childhood as eloquently as it does the pains. From the school tasting parties where she tried cottage cheese for the first time, to the unlikely friendship she formed with a white girl in her teenage years. From finding solace in books gifted from a retired school teacher, to a clumsy attempt at having sex with an older boy in the backseat of a car. She speaks of constant punishment at the hands of the adults in her life; “They punish her so often she feels they persecute her,” she writes. Cherishing the company of adults like Big Mama who “never punishes us.” She speaks of the hypocrisy of not being able to punish adults, despite their relentlessness. She also speaks of loneliness, of constantly feeling like an outsider in her own family. When an older sister moves out and she moves downstairs to take up the empty room, her younger sisters are happy to see her leave. For hooks, it feels like excommunication. In a particularly tender scene, young hooks realises she is being punished for wanting to retain privacy amidst closeness with her family. “In that room, her secrets are always found. Her diaries are read, her hidden money stolen, her clothes disappearing. Everything that is private someone will find and hang on the line like wet clothes for everyone to see,” she writes.
bell hooks does not assume that her memories hold absolute truth; a future discovery reveals that a toy that inspired a mental battle with her brother was indeed a wheelbarrow, that “the red wagon of her memory never existed.” It’s a clever reminder that the way events make us feel can alter the way we speak of them retrospectively.
Many of the writer's works as a critic examine societal power dynamics that are realised by intersections of race, gender, sexuality and class. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, and Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom have been the most poignant and impactful to me.
In Bone Black, these memories may be used as a looking glass for these analyses the way her insights in the aforementioned books are, but to do so would be to oversimplify them. In chapter 49 and 50, bell hooks recalls watching a fight between her parents. Her father, angry and physical; her mother, afraid and pleading. He tells her mother to leave, and a young hooks is in disbelief as she watches her mother pack her belongings in the dead of the night. This disbelief is further realised when the mother’s brother arrives; “she cannot believe the calm way he lifts suitcase, box, sack, carries them to the car without question.” After witnessing this incident she decides that she finally understands marriage, men and women: “...to be the wife to the husband she must be willing to sacrifice even her daughters for his good. For the mother it is not simple. She is always torn.” This sharp, perceptive, innocent gaze of her childhood voice is what makes the memoir most affecting. It is able to convey the complexity of her past, unperturbed by the adult gaze that might be inclined to rationalise everything into critical theory.
There are parts of the original foreword of this memoir and the recently added introduction (in the recent republishing) that refer to the importance of stories about black girlhood. They present the memoir’s significance in its contributions to the lack of stories that centre the black girl. But this too, risks flattening the “magic and mystery” of her inner life, as bell hooks herself puts it.
bell hooks, punctuated by the lower case spelling of her name, insisted on drawing attention away from her and onto the words instead. But this memoir, unlike many of her other works, is best absorbed with the writer's singularity at the centre. Of course we can glean the material implications of her environment on her childhood. But we ought to think 'What is she trying to tell us about her humanness', rather than 'what is she trying to tell us about the sociological state of black girlhood,' to really enjoy Bone Black. In the very beginning of the memoir, before both introduction and foreword, there is a quote by the author herself that perfectly encapsulates its essence.
“when you say "I would die for you" to those you love, the truth of those words may be not that you give your physical life but that you are willing to die to the past and be born again in the present where you can live fully and freely - where you can give us the love we need.”
Bone Black articulates death and rebirth. Through reminiscing on her complicated childhood, bell hooks lets us into the multiple little deaths that lead her to the brink of a final death inside herself. She is instead saved by the sense of belonging she found from a spiritual teacher, the words Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and the belief in her destiny to be a writer. Here lies the primary significance of the book; the understanding of needing to shed a past self before we can come into our own. Young hooks understood the necessary profundity of dying (without excusing people who played a part in the death) before we can live, and the value of holding tight to the things that breathe life back into us.
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