Remembering bell hooks

On January 11th 2015, bell hooks agreed to sit for a 15 minute interview for a documentary I was making about my personal experience growing up in rural Kentucky.

She was brilliant and bewitching as she spoke for more than 30 minutes about her experiences growing up in Hopkinsville, Kentucky; her sense of shared solidarity with the working class and Appalachian culture; and about media representations of poverty and the poor. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life interviewing her that evening alongside my co-director Sally Rubin and executive producer Silas House.

I first read bell’s work as an undergraduate student at the University of Kentucky in the fall of 1999. I was a journalism student and enrolled in a class called “Black Popular Culture,” a survey style course taught by a gifted new professor named Dr. Aimé Ellis who had just joined the English Department. Dr. Ellis assigned Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, a text that introduced me to the brilliant mind of bell hooks through a collection of her essays. Chapter 1: Power to the Pussy: We Don’t Want to be Dicks in Drag blew my mind. I had never read anything like it. bell’s incisive critiques about cultural hegemony and her radically unapologetic and searing rhetoric on topics ranging from Madonna to sexism and misogyny in rap music moved me deeply.

bell’s essays complicated my limited understanding of feminism and gave me a sophisticated understanding of its complexities. As a young journalist, her writing provoked me to be “critically vigilant about both what is being told to us and how we respond to what is being told.” She used the phrase “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” to contextualize the inextricably bound workings of domination, gender, and race. I was so inspired by these revolutionary and urgent ideas that I wanted to talk with everyone about patriarchy as a “political-social system.”

As I began a teaching practice of my own in my late 20s, I looked for ways to empower the students and challenge the traditions of academic learning. Teaching to Transgress offered an abundance of inspiration for letting the classroom serve as a space of endless potential. “When professors bring narratives of their experiences into classroom discussions it eliminates the possibility that we can function as all-knowing, silent interrogators. It is often productive if professors take the first risk, linking confessional narratives to academic discussions to show how experience can illuminate and enhance our understanding of academic material. But most professors must practice being vulnerable in the classroom, being wholly present in mind, body, and spirit … (1994, 21).”

In pre-production for Hillbilly, I read Belonging where I learned that bell was a fellow Kentuckian and also about the shared connection we both had as Kentucky natives who felt like unwanted outsiders and were ridiculed for the way we spoke when we moved away to college. “When we open our mouths, generations can be heard as though we are indeed speaking in tongue,” bell writes. “I learned to change my way of speaking, to keep the sound and cadences of Kentucky secret. Not speaking in the tongue of my ancestors was a way to silence ridicule about Kentucky.”

The last time I saw bell was five years ago; two days after the 2016 General Election when I returned to her home for a follow up interview. Despite feeling imminent doom from the results of the election, she looked forward with optimism and love. “I’m gonna hold to the hope that there’s a divine plan for the United States and that these next few years may be the actual unfolding of that plan and we don’t know,” she said. “That is why those of us who are interested in spirituality, cling to the primacy of mystery because there is so much we don’t know. And won’t it be better when we are actually concretely invigorated in protests and resistance to something the government is doing rather than through a kind of nebulous fear?”

bell teaches me over and over again that love and education are practices of freedom. I will forever be grateful to her for her teachings, which I am so excited to share with my two year old, Hazel, who has bell’s entire collection of children’s books.

Ashley York was born and raised in Pikeville, Kentucky and currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and  two-year-old daughter, Hazel.  Her most recent film, Appalachian Futures,  features bell hooks and is screening in the Smithsonian FUTURES exhibit. Hillbilly is available on Hulu and Amazon.