This essay is part of our online special issue honoring bell hooks
Returning Home: Reflections on bell hooks’s Practice of Black Sustainability
By Mysia Anderson
In Belonging: A Culture of Place (1990), bell hooks discursively maps her journey to self-recovery. Born and raised in Kentucky, hooks left her home in search of a landscape that transgressed boundaries of oppression. Her first destination was Stanford University, where she often concealed her Black Southern dialect to avoid ridicule. She reveals how her college experience fashioned a fragmented interior life. For decades, she was a Southern writer in figurative exile before she accepted Kentucky as her fate. This revelatory acceptance cohered through a process of remembering her childhood in the Kentucky hills, a place where she witnessed wild horses roam free. She unearthed this territory by resurrecting memories of the elders who shaped her childhood through their backwoods sensibilities and sustainable ways of being. Like David’s psalm, she lifted her eyes unto the hills from whence cometh her help; bell hooks returned home.
Belonging’s collection of essays teaches how to “embrace an ethos of sustainability that is not solely about the appropriate care of the world’s resources, but is also about the creation of meaning—the making of lives that we feel are worth living” (hooks 1990, 1). Hooks’s practice of Black sustainable living is grounded at the intersection of race, gender, class, geography, spirit, and place. Although Kentucky serves as her backdrop, hooks authored a text that stretches across state lines. She reflects on the fact that ninety percent of African Americans lived in the rural South before the mass migrations to Northern cities during the twentieth century. She uplifts this history to illustrate the generational intimacy between Black people, organic farming, and outdoor living. This historicization disrupts ideologies that mark Black communities as passive in the fight against climate change, and it strategically places environmental justice within anti-racist movements.
Belonging’s teachings are often repetitious, structurally reenacting hooks’s iterative process of returning home after periods of searching for a place to belong. This textual architecture feels like the experience of listening to elders share stories around kitchen tables and card games. With the gift of time, these conversational seeds begin to sprout into wisdom. The text sutures the past and the present, and it tells the story again, but with differences—in time and understanding. As a Black feminist who writes about family, community, and Black sustainability in the city of Miami, I have rooted my study in Belonging’s philosophies. My research called me home, after graduating from Stanford University and studying at Brown University. I am inspired by hooks’s method of holistically anchoring marginalized communal narratives in her theories of sustainability. Miami is built on Tequesta, Miccosukee, Seminole, Mascogo, and Taíno lands, and its very name is an Indigenous word. The histories of these tribes reveal a deep relation with Black migration and enslavement stories within colonial ecologies. A seaward place, Miami is also a city that has been continuously shaped by people from the Caribbean. Bridging Black feminist theory and practice, my dissertation documents reparative world-making in a sinking city, a place where I belong.
It would be a disservice to the text to primarily dissect it for its viable politics without lingering in the beauty and spiritual power found within its pages. Gingerly, hooks seemingly prepares for her death throughout the chapters by reassuring readers that she has chosen where she wants to die with the same clarity she has chosen how she wants to live. Hooks states, “it is the knowledge of my own dying process that allows me to choose to return to a place where I first lived fully and well” (hooks 1990, 222). Despite systemic practices of housing discrimination, hooks purchased land in Berea, Kentucky with the intention of protecting and stewarding the beloved greenery from environmental destruction. She writes, “If we do not see earth as a guide to divine spirit, then we cannot see that the human spirit is violated, diminished when humans violate and destroy the natural environment” (hooks 1990, 26).
Springing from the spirit, the beauty she fought to protect went beyond ocular gratification. She believed that aesthetics “is more than a philosophy or theory of art and beauty; it is a way of inhabiting space, a particular location, a way of looking and becoming” (hooks 1990, 122). Dwelling in the beauty of the hills ushered in a season of reconciling ancestral legacies, nurturing her elderly parents, and confronting her own mortality. Thus, Belonging is a “textual album” that quilts together memories of those who have passed. Similar to many African American aesthetic traditions, quilting transmits the history of Black women who often evaded archival records. In concert with honoring her great-grandmother through her chosen pen name, hooks also memorializes her grandmother, Baba, in the writing of this text. Although Baba could not read or write, each of her quilts held a narrative of her own making. Baba’s quilts were made from recycled fabrics and used to keep her family warm in the winter. They became material inheritances, frequently passed down through the generations as a meditative practice shared between mothers and daughters.
In the hills, hooks quilted a life of her own making before taking her final ascent. The pages of Belonging hold a cultural inheritance for generations to cherish, revisit, and reimagine. Just five days after her passing, western Kentucky experienced the deadliest and longest-tracked tornado outbreak in history. Her teachings of a humanistic sustainability gain urgency as numerous communities struggle to (re)build sustainable lives amid unprecedented disasters. An attention to the political and spiritual power of memory is a reorientation to the reparative nature of sustainability. Tethering human and non-human worlds, sustainability encompasses the preservation of life stories, alternate ways of living, and anti-capitalist communities. Despite troubling ecologies, hooks’s work resists the acceptance of capitalist white supremacist patriarchy, and her spirit remains rooted in landscapes of abundance. Although her body has returned to the earth, I imagine her words greeting each visiting reader from a Southern porch, looking out towards the hills on the blissful side of forever.
Reference
hooks, bell. 1990. Belonging: A Culture of Place. New York: Routledge.
Mysia Anderson (she/her) is a Black feminist artist-scholar from Miami Gardens, Florida. In 2017, she received her BA in African and African-American Studies from Stanford University, with a gender and sexuality concentration. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate in Brown University’s Theatre Arts and Performance Studies Department, and her dissertation dwells in the environmental poetics of Black Miami through an exploration of oral history, storytelling, and performance. Anderson is also a 2022 graduate of the Atlantic Acting School’s Global Virtual Conservatory. As an actress, playwright, and scholar, she desires to tell stories grounded in African diasporic world-making.