Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work - Softcover

Hooks, Bell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805059105 ISBN 13: 9780805059106

Verlag: Picador, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

"Even though writing is a solitary act, when I sit with words that I trust will be read by someone, I know that I can never be truly alone." --bell hooks, "women who write too much"
In this timeless essay collection on the writing life, award-winning author and renowned thinker bell hooks shares the secrets gleaned from years of facing the blank page, pen in hand.
At a time when the death of the book has been proclaimed, hooks's Remembered Rapture beats with a pulsing passion for words, reminding us of literacy's potency and the vital joys of reading and writing. In contemplative essays infused with her personal experience, hooks reveals her wide-ranging intellectual scope. With insight and vision, hooks untangles the complex personae of women writers, especially those whose work goes against the grain.
This inspiring collection from a treasured American author is for everyone who believes in the power of the written word.
"For anyone who writes, or seeks to understand the writing process, or wants to know more about the erudite and passionate mind of bell hooks, this is the book to read." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

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bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952, was an American author who used lowercase as both an homage to her maternal great-grandmother and an attempt to keep readers' focus where it belonged: on her work. When she died in 2021, hooks left behind a lifetime of thought that was decades ahead of its time. In the heyday of feminism, when the movement claimed to represent all women equally, hooks revealed in Ain't I a Woman--written when she was only nineteen--how the specific life experiences of Black women were being marginalized.

She never lost this pioneering spirit, bringing it to bear on more than thirty books of literary criticism, children's fiction, poetry, and autobiography, including Killing Rage: Ending Racism, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, Where We Stand: Class Matters, Communion: The Female Search for Love and the New York Times bestseller All About Love: New Visions.

A professor of English, African and Afro-American studies, American literature, and women's studies, hooks taught at USC, Yale, among other institutions, including Berea College in her home state of Kentucky, where the bell hooks center was established to honor her work. Winner of the American Book Award in 1991 for Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, a 2000 nominee for the NAACP's Image Award, a 2018 inductee into Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame, and one of Time's 100 Women of the Year in 2020, hooks left her mark in every field she entered.

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Born and raised in the rural South, bell hooks learned early the power of the written word and the importance of speaking her mind. This passion for words is the heartbeat of this contemplative collection of essays. Remembered Rapture celebrates literacy, the joys of reading and writing, and the lasting power of the book. These essays once again reveal bell hooks's wide-ranging intellectual scope; if W. E. B. DuBois elegantly dissected the double consciousness of African-Americans, bell hooks, with similar insight and vision, untangles the complex personae of women writers, especially those whose work goes against the grain.

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Excerpt

writing from the darkness

I remember childhood as time in anguish, as a dark time?not darkness in anysense that is stark, bleak, or empty but as a rich space of knowledge, struggle,and awakening. We seemed bound to the earth then, as though like other livingthings our roots were so deep in the soil of our surroundings there was no wayto trace beginnings. We lived in the county, in a space between city andcountry, a barely occupied space. Houses stood at a distance from one another,few of them beautiful; always a sense of isolation and unbearable lonelinesshovered about them. We lived on hilly land, trees and wild honeysuckle hidingthe flat spaces where gardens grew. I do not remember darkness there. It was theblackness enveloping earth and sky out in the country at Daddy Jerry's and MamaWillie's house that gave feeling and meaning to darkness. There it seemedtextured, as though it were velvet cloth folded in many layers. That darknesshad to be confronted as we made our way before bedtime to the outhouse. "Nolight necessary," granddaddy would say. "There is light in darkness,you just have to find it." That was early childhood. From then on I wasterribly lost in an inner darkness as deep and thick as the blackness of thosenights. I could not find my way or see the light there.

I was a child and his words had given me confidence. I believed with him thatthere was light in darkness waiting to be found. Later unable to find my way, Ibegan to feel uncertain, displaced, estranged even. This was the condition of myspirit when I decided to be a writer, to seek for that light in words. No oneunderstood. Coming from country black folks, seemingly always old, folks withthe spirit of the backwoods, odd habits and odd ways, I had no way to share thislonging?this ache to write words. In our world there was an intense passionateplace for telling stories. It was really some big-time thing to be able to tella good story, to as Cousin Bo would say "call out the hell in words."Writing had no such place. Writing the old people could not do even if they hadbeen lucky enough to learn how. Folks wrote only when they had to; it was anawesome task, a burden. Making lists or writing letters could anguish thespirit. And who would anguish the spirit unnecessarily?

Searching for a space where writing could be understood, I asked for a diary. Iremember early on getting the imitation-leather red or green books at holidaytimes, with DIARY written on them in bright gold letters, and of course therewere those ever-so-tiny gold keys, two of them. Keys that were inevitably lost.Whole diaries gone because I refused to pry them open, not wanting what wasprivate to be accessible. Confessional writing in diaries was acceptable in ourfamily because it was writing that was never meant to be read by anyone. Keepinga daily diary did not mean that I was seriously called to write, that I wouldever write for a reading public. This was "safe" writing. It would (orso my parents thought) naturally be forsaken as one grew into womanhood. Ishared with them this assumption. Such writing was seen as a necessary stage butonly that. It was for me the space for critical reflection, where I struggled tounderstand myself and the world around me, that crazy world of family andcommunity, that painful world. I could say there what was hurting me, how I,felt about things, what I hoped for. I could be angry there with no threat ofpunishment. I could "talk back." Nothing had to be concealed. I couldhold on to myself there.

However much the realm of diary-keeping has been a female experience that hasoften kept us closeted writers, away from the act of writing as authorship, ithas most assuredly been a writing act that intimately connects the art ofexpressing one's feeling on the written page with the construction of self andidentity, with the effort to be fully self-actualized. This precious powerfulsense of writing as a healing place where our souls can speak and unfold hasbeen crucial to women's development of a counter-hegemonic experience ofcreativity within patriarchal culture. Significantly, diary writing has not beentraditionally seen by literary scholars as subversive autobiography, as a formof authorship that challenges conventional notions about the primacy ofconfessional writing as mere documentation (for women most often a record of oursorrows). Yet in the many cases where such writing has enhanced our struggle tobe self-defining it emerges as a narrative of resistance, as writing thatenables us to experience both self-discovery and self-recovery.

Faced with the radical possibility of self-transformation that confessionalwriting can evoke, many females cease to write. Certainly, when I was younger Idid not respond to the realization that diary writing was a place where I couldcritically confront the "self " with affirmation. At times diarywriting was threatening. For me the confessions written there were testimony,documenting realities I was not always able to face. My response to this senseof threat was to destroy the diaries. That destruction was linked to my fearthat growing up was not supposed to be hard and difficult, a time of anguish andtorment. Somehow the diaries were another accusing voice declaring that I wasnot "normal." I destroyed that writing and I wanted to destroy thattormented and struggling self I did not understand, then, the criticaldifference between confession as an act of displacement and confession as thebeginning stage in a process of self-transformation. Before this understanding,the diary as mirror was a place where that part of myself I could not accept orlove could be named, touched, and then destroyed. Such writing was release. Ittook the terror and pain away?that was all. It was not then a place ofreconciliation and reclamation.

None of the many diaries I wrote growing up exist today. They were alldestroyed. Years ago when I began a therapeutic process of retrospectiveself-examination, I really missed this writing and mourned the loss. Since I usejournals now as a way to engage in critical self-reflection, confrontation, andchallenge, I know that I would be able to know myself differently were I able toread back, to remember with that writing. Those years of sustained diary writingwere crucial to my later development as a writer for it was this realm ofconfessional writing that enabled me to find a voice. Still there was afrightening tension between the discovery of that voice and the assumption that,though expressed, it would then need to be concealed, contained, hidden, andultimately destroyed. While I had been given permission to keep diaries, it waswriting that my family began to see as dangerous when I began to express ideasconsidered strange and alien. Diaries provided a space for me to develop anautonomous voice and that meant such writing, once sanctioned, became suspect.It was impressed upon my consciousness that having a voice was dangerous. Thiswas reinforced when my sisters would find and read my diaries, then deliver themto our mother as evidence that I was truly a mad person, an alien, a stranger intheir household.

This tension between writing as an expression of my longing to emerge asautonomous creative thinker and the fear that such expression and any othermanifestation of independence would mean madness, an end to life, createdbarriers between me and those written words. I was afraid of their power and yetI needed them. Writing was the only space where I could express myself freely.It was crucial to my fragile sense of well-being. I was often the familyscapegoat?persecuted, ridiculed. I was often punished. It was as though I livedin a constant state of siege, subject to unprovoked and unexpected terroristattacks. I lived in dread. Nothing I did was ever right. That constantexperience of estrangement was deeply saddening. I was brokenhearted.

Writing was the healing place where I could collect...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Picador
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0805059105
• ISBN 13: 9780805059106
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland