She mentions how her sisters would find her writing and end up “poking fun” at her (7). Hooks writes of how you can be caught out by others who think they have found something out about you by finding your words. There is much beauty in bell hooks’s writing about writing, in her description of what is wearing about the work, about the words.

We are asking the wrong questions when we question a world that gives us such little room. In putting her writing there, her thoughts and feelings tumbling out, what she hears, “bits and pieces of conversations,” she exceeds the space she has been given, the concerns she is supposed to have, allowed to have, the corners, the edges of the room. To write is how she spills out, spills over, the intensity of sorrow, filling it up, stuffing it where she can, where she is, the places she has, under the bed, in the pillow cases, among her underwear, under, in, among hidden with delicates, her other things. The pages wear out because of how they matter. The pages fall apart from “too much handling.” The paper is cheap, the material she has available. She spreads her words, herself, all over the place.Īll that intensity, it goes somewhere.

In writing, by writing, bell hooks refuses to be confined. I hid these writings under my bed, in pillow stuffings, among faded underwear” (1988, 6-7). I could not confine my speech to the necessary corners and concerns of life. And so, I wrote down bits and pieces of conversations, confessing in cheap diaries that soon fell apart from too much handling, expressing the intensity of my sorrow, the anguish of speech, for I was always saying the wrong thing, asking the wrong questions. In Talking Back: Thinking Feminism, Thinking Black, hooks wrote of writing as “a way to capture speech, to hold on to it, keep it close. Words are coming out because of what you gave to the world. Or, you can meet someone through what they gave to the world. For me, it takes time for words to come, to get to a point when I can say something about losing someone. I read what others wrote, grateful that for some of us grief does not take away the capacity for description. When bell hooks died, I couldn’t bring myself to write about her, what her work meant to me, to the students I have taught over many years, to those with whom I share a political project and community. I am deeply indebted to bell hooks for teaching me this – and so much else, besides.

To be a feminist is to make feminism your lifework. A lifework: the entire or principal activity over a person’s lifetime or career.

Feminism is for everyone bell hooks