Talking Back
THINKING FEMINIST,
THINKING BLACK
bell hooks
First published 2015
by Routledge
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© 2015 Gloria Watkins
The right of Gloria Watkins to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First edition published
by South End Press 1989
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, in which portions of this book
were previously published: Aurora, Catalyst, Discourse, Sage, and Zeta.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
hooks, bell, 1952–
Talking back : thinking feminist, thinking Black / bell hooks. — New edition.
pages cm
Originally published: 1989.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. African American women. 2. Feminism—United States. 3. hooks, bell, 1952– I. Title.
E185.86.H74 2014
305.48896073—dc23
2014023250
ISBN: 978-1-138-82172-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-82173-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-74313-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Garamond MT Std
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
2
Talking Back
In the world of the southern black community I grew up in, “back
talk” and “talking back” meant speaking as an equal to an authority figure.
It meant daring to disagree and sometimes it just meant having an opinion.
In the “old school,” children were meant to be seen and not heard. My
great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents were all from the old school.
To make yourself heard if you were a child was to invite punishment, the
back-hand lick, the slap across the face that would catch you unaware, or
the feel of switches stinging your arms and legs.
To speak then when one was not spoken to was a courageous act—
an act of risk and daring. And yet it was hard not to speak in warm rooms
where heated discussions began at the crack of dawn, women’s voices fill-
ing the air, giving orders, making threats, fussing. Black men may have ex-
celled in the art of poetic preaching in the male-dominated church, but in
the church of the home, where the everyday rules of how to live and how
to act were established, it was black women who preached. There, black
women spoke in a language so rich, so poetic, that it felt to me like being
shut off from life, smothered to death if one were not allowed to participate.
It was in that world of woman talk (the men were often silent, often
absent) that was bom in me the craving to speak, to have a voice, and not
just any voice but one that could be identified as belonging to me. To make
my voice, I had to speak, to hear myself talk— and talk I did— darting in
and out of grown folks’ conversations and dialogues, answering questions
5
6 bell hooks
that were not directed at me, endlessly asking questions, making speeches.
Needless to say, the punishments for these acts of speech seemed endless.
They were intended to silence me— the child—and more particularly the
girl child. Had I been a boy, they might have encouraged me to speak
believing that I might someday be called to preach. There was no “calling”
for talking girls, no legitimized rewarded speech. The punishments I
received for “talking back” were intended to suppress all possibility that I
would create my own speech. That speech was to be suppressed so that
the “right speech of womanhood” would emerge.
Within feminist circles, silence is often seen as the sexist “right speech
of womanhood”— the sign of woman’s submission to patriarchal authority.
This emphasis on woman’s silence may be an accurate remembering of
what has taken place in the households of women from WASP backgrounds
in the United States, but in black communities (and diverse ethnic com-
munities), women have not been silent. Their voices can be heard. Cer-
tainly for black women, our struggle has not been to emerge from silence
into speech but to change the nature and direction of our speech, to make
a speech that compels listeners, one that is heard.
Our speech, “the right speech of womanhood,” was often the solilo-
quy, the talking into thin air, the talking to ears that do not hear you— the
talk that is simply not listened to. Unlike the black male preacher whose
speech was to be heard, who was to be listened to, whose words were to
be remembered, the voices of black women—giving orders, making threats,
fussing— could be tuned out, could become a kind of background music,
audible but not acknowledged as significant speech. Dialogue—the shar-
ing of speech and recognition—took place not between mother and child
or mother and male authority figure but among black women. I can remem-
ber watching fascinated as our mother talked with her mother, sisters, and
women friends. The intimacy and intensity of their speech—the satisfac-
tion they received from talking to one another, the pleasure, the joy. It was
in this world of woman speech, loud talk, angry words, women with ton-
gues quick and sharp, tender sweet tongues, touching our world with their
words, that I made speech my birthright—and the right to voice, to author-
ship, a privilege I would not be denied. It was in that world and because
of it that I came to dream of writing, to write.
Writing was a way to capture speech, to hold onto it, keep it close.
And so I wrote down bits and pieces of conversations, confessing in cheap
diaries that soon fell apart from too much handling, expressing the inten-
sity of my sorrow, the anguish of speech—for I was always saying the
wrong thing, asking the wrong questions. I could not confine my speech
to the necessary comers and concerns of life. I hid these writings under
my bed, in pillow stuffings, among faded underwear. When my sisters
found and read them, they ridiculed and mocked me— poking fun. I felt
violated, ashamed, as if the secret parts of my self had been exposed,
TALKING BACK 7
brought into the open, and hung like newly clean laundry, out in the air
for everyone to see. The fear of exposure, the fear that one’s deepest emo-
tions and innermost thoughts will be dismissed as mere nonsense, felt by
so many young girls keeping diaries, holding and hiding speech, seems to
me now one of the barriers that women have always needed and still need
to destroy so that we are no longer pushed into secrecy or silence.
Despite my feelings of violation, of exposure, I continued to speak
and write, choosing my hiding places well, learning to destroy work when
no safe place could be found. I was never taught absolute silence, I was
taught that it was important to speak but to talk a talk that was in itself a
silence. Taught to speak and yet beware of the betrayal of too much heard
speech, I experienced intense confusion and deep anxiety in my efforts to
speak and write. Reciting poems at Sunday afternoon church service might
be rewarded. Writing a poem (when one’s time could be “better” spent
sweeping, ironing, learning to cook) was luxurious activity, indulged in at
the expense of others. Questioning authority, raising issues that were not
deemed appropriate subjects brought pain, punishments—like telling
mama I wanted to die before her because I could not live without her—
that was crazy talk, crazy speech, the kind that would lead you to end up
in a mental institution. “Little girl,” I would be told, “if you don’t stop all
this crazy talk and crazy acting you are going to end up right out there at
Western State.”
Madness, not just physical abuse, was the punishment for too much
talk if you were female. Yet even as this fear of madness haunted me, hang-
ing over my writing like a monstrous shadow, I could not stop the words,
making thought, writing speech. For this terrible madness which I feared,
which I was sure was the destiny of daring women bom to intense speech
(after all, the authorities emphasized this point daily), was not as threaten-
ing as imposed silence, as suppressed speech.
Safety and sanity were to be sacrificed if I was to experience defiant
speech. Though I risked them both, deep-seated fears and anxieties charac-
terized my childhood days. I would speak but I would not ride a bike, play
hardball, or hold the gray kitten. Writing about the ways we are traumatized
in our growing-up years, psychoanalyst Alice Miller makes the point in For
Your Own Good that it is not clear why childhood wounds become for
some folk an opportunity to grow, to move forward rather than backward
in the process of self-realization. Certainly, when I reflect on the trials of
my growing-up years, the many punishments, I can see now that in resis-
tance I learned to be vigilant in the nourishment of my spirit, to be tough,
to courageously protect that spirit from forces that would break it.
While punishing me, my parents often spoke about the necessity of
breaking my spirit. Now when I ponder the silences, the voices that are
not heard, the voices of those wounded and/or oppressed individuals who
do not speak or write, I contemplate the acts of persecution, torture— the
8 bell hooks
terrorism that breaks spirits, that makes creativity impossible. I write these
words to bear witness to the primacy of resistance struggle in any situation
of domination (even within family life); to the strength and power that
emerges from sustained resistance and the profound conviction that these
forces can be healing, can protect us from dehumanization and despair.
These early trials, wherein I learned to stand my ground, to keep my
spirit intact, came vividly to mind after I published A in ’t IA Woman and
the book was sharply and harshly criticized. While I had expected a climate
of critical dialogue, I was not expecting a critical avalanche that had the
power in its intensity to crush the spirit, to push one into silence. Since that
time, I have heard stories about black women, about women of color, who
write and publish (even when the work is quite successful) having nerv-
ous breakdowns, being made mad because they cannot bear the harsh
responses of family, friends, and unknown critics, or becoming silent, un-
productive. Surely, the absence of a humane critical response has tremen-
dous impact on the writer from any oppressed, colonized group who
endeavors to speak. For us, true speaking is not solely an expression of
creative power; it is an act of resistance, a political gesture that challenges
politics of domination that would render us nameless and voiceless. As
such, it is a courageous act—as such, it represents a threat. To those who
wield oppressive power, that which is threatening must necessarily be
wiped out, annihilated, silenced.
Recently, efforts by black women writers to call attention to our work
serve to highlight both our presence and absence. Whenever I peruse
women’s bookstores, I am struck not by the rapidly growing body of
feminist writing by black women, but by the paucity of available published
material. Those of us who write and are published remain few in number.
The context of silence is varied and multi-dimensional. Most obvious are
the ways racism, sexism, and class exploitation act to suppress and silence.
Less obvious are the inner struggles, the efforts made to gain the necessary
confidence to write, to re-write, to fully develop craft and skill— and the
extent to which such efforts fail.
Although I have wanted writing to be my life-work since childhood,
it has been difficult for me to claim “writer” as part of that which identifies
and shapes my everyday reality. Even after publishing books, I would often
speak of wanting to be a writer as though these works did not exist. And
though I would be told, “you are a writer,” I was not yet ready to fully af-
firm this truth. Part of myself was still held captive by domineering forces
of history, of familial life that had charted a map of silence, of right speech.
I had not completely let go of the fear of saying the wrong thing, of being
punished. Somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind, I believed I could
avoid both responsibility and punishment if I did not declare myself a
writer.
TALKING BACK 9
One of the many reasons I chose to write using the pseudonym bell
hooks, a family name (mother to Sarah Oldham, grandmother to Rosa Bell
Oldham, great-grandmother to me), was to construct a writer-identity that
would challenge and subdue all impulses leading me away from speech
into silence. I was a young girl buying bubble gum at the comer store when
I first really heard the full name bell hooks. I had just “talked back” to a
grown person. Even now I can recall the surprised look, the mocking tones
that informed me I must be kin to bell hooks— a sharp-tongued woman, a
woman who spoke her mind, a woman who was not afraid to talk back. I
claimed this legacy of defiance, of will, of courage, affirming my link to
female ancestors who were bold and daring in their speech. Unlike my
bold and daring mother and grandmother, who were not supportive of
talking back, even though they were assertive and powerful in their speech,
bell hooks as I discovered, claimed, and invented her was my ally, my sup
port.
That initial act of talking back outside the home was empowering. It
was the first of many acts of defiant speech that would make it possible
for me to emerge as an independent thinker and writer. In retrospect, “talk-
ing back” became for me a rite of initiation, testing my courage, strengthen-
ing my commitment, preparing me for the days ahead—the days when
writing, rejection notices, periods of silence, publication, ongoing develop-
ment seem impossible but necessary.
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, that makes new life and new growth possible. It is that
act of speech, of “talking back,” that is no mere gesture of empty words,
that is the expression of our movement from object to subject—the liberated
voice.
