bell hooks: A Return To Love

An ode to love with gratitude for pioneer bell hooks

Dearest Reader,

When I started this newsletter Loving Spoonful, I also started a podcast called Love Party with a similar theme around love. The idea for the podcast came first and informed this newsletter and that podcast idea came to me in college some 20 years ago before podcasting even existed. At the time, I was a student at a small women’s college in New England called Smith College. It’s amazing how many things you discover in the that time of voluminous learning or exploration. Around that same time is when I first learned of the author, cultural critics and educator bell hooks. Although I never linked my idea for what would become the podcast with bell hook’s work, hooks would subsequently become a guiding light in how I approach the work I’m doing today in a very important and round about way.

For a long time, the most interesting thing to me about bell hooks was that her name was a pseudonym meant to be a tribute to her great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks. Like my own mother, in fact, hooks adopted an elder woman relative’s name as an act of self-empowerment and more or less left behind her given name Gloria Jean Watkins—I know a number of women who came of age in the 1960s who changed their name. However, hook’s name was curiously written in lower case which was quite unique and meant to convey the difference between the author and her great-grandmother plus draw attention away from the centrality of a name towards her literary work and voice.

I myself have two different names funny enough. When I was a child I was known as Esther, my middle name, and hardly used Agunda, but when I was sent to kindergarten in the United States by my mother, she registered me as Agunda E. Okeyo. Esther became the name only close family members knew me by and to the rest of the world, it was just an initial. Though I must say I still have affection for Esther and often refer to myself as “The Queen of the Jews,” in reverence of the story of the great queen Esther from the bible where my name comes from, as well as, my father’s kind and quiet late sister who I am named after.

I have a vague memory of this transition. I was 5 or 6 years old and my mother told me, “your name is Agunda and you should be proud of it” before I entered my new school in America. Today I think that she was trying to give me both a piece of armor and sense of pride as an African entering schools that throughout my education were top tier, predominantly white institutions and places that fundamentally had no respect for my potential or intellect. I started school in my native Kenya at about 2 1/2 years old because I was bored at home. I was always bright, but I actually enjoyed talking and observing everyone around me more than learning my lessons. When I came to the States, I wasn’t a strong reader though I was verbally above my peers, quite chatty and charming. Up until about age five almost all my time was spent around Kenyans, around black people, but from the moment we arrived in New York City that formula flipped and I went to schools that were predominantly white. I was advised to repeat kindergarten to strengthen my reading skills. Obviously I had no say in that matter, but I do recall continuing to be bored at school even as my reading improved.

I was underwhelmed by school until I went to college. I always got very good grades in primary and secondary school, but I wasn’t particularly stimulated by the material and the thought of joining advanced classes that could mean more time spent in school among my white peers was not appealing. So I settled into a general feeling of boredom for many years until I went to college. I would create art in my spare time and I knew I had a gift for writing, but thought it would be years before I could write a book, for instance. College was the first time I was around a large number of African and black women again. Though Smith was another elite predominantly white school, it had more black students than all throughout my education in America. I discovered more like-minded and global friends, but if I’m being honest with myself, I still felt alone.

That feeling of aloneness lingers today, but I have come to accept it and recognize that people whose minds move as ferociously and dynamically as mine tend to feel a bit alone. I rarely encounter people who have a similar level of curiosity as myself, but I also know how to keep myself engaged. Books, music, television, art-making, film, the world wide web, exercise and meditation (the absence of thinking) are a great resource for my mind. I read books on neuroscience as a young adult and reached certain conclusions about how my mind works that give me a sense of peace with myself. I certainly have close friends to relate to, but I suspect this feeling of aloneness will never leave me, especially as long as I reside in the United States, but even then I don’t think it’s ever going away because I can’t really remember a context without it.

Until I was 19 and went to Smith, I hardly spoke. Most people didn’t know me to be particularly talkative. When I did speak I was always articulate—a strong writer, great at presentations, advocating for myself or speaking to adults. In retrospect I recognize that, to be blunt, white people and broadly American society was under-stimulating and I suppose I just lost interest in verbal communication. I’ve often contemplated why “whiteness” feels so flat to me, lacking animation or insight, and I’ve concluded that white supremacy which is the foundation of American society is very much committed to the absence of critical thinking (see: “anti-wokeness” for example, which is purely reactionary, unoriginal and boring). Certainly there are white Americans who can think critically, but I don’t believe that whiteness rewards critical thought broadly speaking hence the popularity and success of regressive talk radio and predatory technology like social media. To benefit from whiteness you need not think or analyze yourself or society too deeply.

When I went to college and returned home after my first semester, as my family recalls, I was a chatter box again. I discovered new challenging material and met more intellectually rigorous peers, plus exposure to international students brought my mind and vocal chords back to life. I haven’t really shut up since, but still prefer my own company because that way I don’t get bored and I don’t trouble people who don’t really like to think—which kind of defines my relationship to Americans as a curiously uncurious society (no shade, but shade). So college was when I discovered bell hooks.

I mostly understood hooks as a feminist scholar, cultural critic and educator of what she termed “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy.” I did not know at the time that hooks would go on the write three books about love. In fact her first text in the trilogy was All About Love: New Visions which she published in 2000 as a hardcover and 2001 on paperback—I was a freshman in fall of 2001. It would take another 20 years before I discovered hooks work on love. And this would be 20 years after I started contemplating love as a deeply personal reflection on family, childhood, community, society and human rights. I initially found my longing for discourse on love in music and poetry.

I memorized many love songs and several poems in my day. It’s actually pretty easy for me to memorize lyrics and poetry. Standards, Doo Wop, Rock & Roll, Folk, Country, Blues, Funk, Soul, Disco, R&B and Pop from the 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s were the soundtrack to my life well into my 20s. Marvin Gaye was my first major teacher about love as a tortured and exalted experience—love of fellow man, love lost, discovering new love, being in love, unrequited love, desire, longing, desperation for affection and even dying for love. Then I discovered Irish singer Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, he connected me to Irish poetry and writing with the likes of Patrick Kavanaugh, Brian Friel, and Nuala O'Faolain among others who explored love under colonialism. I also read about love in the works of Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo among other African novelists. Later I would discover mystics like Rumi and Siddhartha and explore a more spiritual relationship to love through agnosticism, stoicism and Buddhism. When I was researching Buddhism in my mid to late 20s I rediscovered bell who was a Buddhist so her essays or quotes would occasionally be in things I read, but it would be years before I seriously read her books on love.

As hooks notes in her writing on love, a lot of the literary work around love are written by men. Even a great deal of the music or poetry I sourced in my life was written by men. And as she points out men often discuss receiving love whereas women often experience the loss of love or imbalances in love relationships. Men are usually seen as brave and objective in their exploration of love whereas women are seen as lovelorn and overly sentimental. Another salient point she makes is that we as a society are moving away from love, intimacy, vulnerability and genuine connection. She wrote about this in the context of the early aughts and I don’t think we’ve gotten any better. You just need to read last week’s newsletter on infidelity in modern times to see the landscape of love today as quite fragile. Rightly, hooks tethers systemic issues within society like patriarchy and the psychological impact of family systems to how they interfere with how we receive writing on love by men vs. women and our understanding of what love actually is.

Hooks settled on a guiding definition of love that I viscerally resonate with from The Road Less Traveled (1978) by M. Scott Peck, which he describes as: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” The first part of this brilliant framing is what we would call self-love today. I must say, I question what some mean when they talk of self-love because some people are confusing that with selfishness or self-indulgence, but for the most part I think our collective celebration of self-love is important. If you don’t truly love yourself, unconditionally, you will be lousy at loving or nurturing others. I know from personal experience that loving myself reaps untold dividends. It’s scarier because you have to also accept vulnerability, which many still look down on, but it’s a good way to live.

When I decided to take my 20-year old passion for love and launch the projects I’m currently working on, it felt necessary to consult the elders and bell hooks in particular so I am reading her work and recognizing her pioneering research on love, especially as a black intellectual. Her work is so influential that it seems to have permeated popular culture and sometimes people quote her without even knowing where these beloved insights come from—I’m not quite sure why that is, but I’m thinking about it (maybe just old fashioned black erasure). I met her once in 2016 at a lecture she did at The New School in Manhattan. I remember trying to reach out to her afterwards through a mutual friend, but she only received communication through the mail as I was told. Therefore, I would need to write a letter that our mutual friend would postmark to her and presumably she would write back. I think I contemplated this, but I didn’t follow through.

When she passed away in 2021 at just 69 years old, I was sad for the loss of such a brilliant spirit and disappointed I didn’t work up the courage or self-discipline to follow through and befriend her. I’ve lost a lot of people in my life, especially young folks and it never ceases to surprise me when folks transition and you feel like you had more to discuss. The death of a close friend in 2019, hooks’ passing and the loss of other important black public figures in recent years has made me more vigilant about seizing the present moment. Apparently we had that in common too, she lost a lot of friends and family prematurely and actually had her own brushes with death it seems. Hook’s life experiences sharpened her spiritual and intellectual focus on love. After all, what is the point of all of this human melodrama if not to “extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”

With Love During End Times,

Agunda