In the Preface to her second memoir, titled Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life, bell hooks tells her audience point blank that she is not interested in linear narrative journeys, especially when it relates to the presentation of her narratively recovered ‘self’. Life according to hooks does not follow a linear pattern; what we experience in our lives is not a finite passage from point A to point B. Therefore, she chooses to shift her life-writing story between two narrating voices, one rendered in the first person, and the other a more detached third person-observant voice. The two narrating voices unearth hooks’ life-story through a fragmented, disjointed narrative, recollecting events and remembrances of people and places without essentializing the need to compartmentize their precise spatial and temporal occurrence.
Ever the skillful storyteller, hooks does not conceal from her audience the reasons for her narrative strategy; quite the contrary, she confronts her fragmented ‘selves’ on the page by revealing to us the mechanism behind their generative power.
The detached third person-observant voice complements and at the same time negates the first person narrator by coercing it to dig deeper into memory, to recover the self through writing about conflicting and painful past recollections. Reflexive, hooks’ third-person narrating voice meanders through difficult patches of saturated past pain (for example, the story of her father’s violence over her mother’s body and spirit, which leaves young Gloria devastated, and yet the experience strengthens her determination never to allow such violation over her ‘self’ in the future), allowing for the pain to emerge, to become palpable through the act of recovery in writing. On the other hand, this same voice of reasoning reflection complicates the act of healing since what surfaces on the written page is not a clear-cut example of the narrating self’s coming to terms with its past, but rather an additional blurring and hurtful re-casting of the same painful past. Consequently, what we encounter while reading through hooks’ memoir is a conscious attempt to unmask the past experience, to recognize how painful it was to live through it by re-living its memory in the present moment of writing, i.e., to go through the act of healing by acknowledging the immanent acts of painful remembrance.
No matter how honest hooks seems to come across in the Preface to the memoir, admitting full-heartedly to her narrative choices and intentions for this life-story, once we read through the book, reading with and against the narrating voices, we might come out feeling ‘conned’, ‘played’, ‘messed with’. Why such a feeling after all hooks has told us about her writing technique? If we do agree that hooks has consciously tricked us into believing her that this and nothing else constitutes her life-story, does this narrative ‘thick and treat’ invalidate her act of self-recovery as an act of healing and pain? Perhaps this feeling of being fooled is fueled by the fact that ‘hooks’ is a pen name, a conceptual identity used in public and for the public, whereas the original ‘Gloria Watkins’ remains silenced behind this cultured mask.
But then again, wouldn’t such reasoning be just another example of misreading hooks’ work, obliterating her narrative attempt to recover the private self in the public’s eye?
When I read Wounds of Passion (and I use ‘read’ in a present continuous tense form, as a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘done’, since I understand hooks’ work, theoretical and autobiographic, as one of constant unfolding), I see the distinction between Gloria Watkins and bell hooks breaking down, as the latter speaks for the former, bringing her innermost thoughts, fears, hopes and struggles to the culture’s forefront. Gloria Watkins is submerged into bell hooks but that does not make her a silent witness/accomplice to hooks’ retelling of her story; she is the key vocal component to the act of self-recovery. By recalling her life as Gloria Watkins, hooks can continue to live and discuss her life as bell hooks, now no longer an empty political concept. In other words, the temporally and spatially detached hooks, nowadays a notable academic and cultural theorist, channels the painful upbringing, schooling, and love seeking of the unknown and dismissed graduate student-poetess Gloria Watkins, thus allowing her former self to heal and to live out the pain.
On that note, is the third-person-observant narrating voice then ‘the voice’ of bell hooks, whereas the first person narrator ‘the voice’ of Gloria Watkins?
I cannot say that I fully agree with such a narrowed reading of hooks’ memoir, mostly due to my understanding that both narrating voices reflect the writing choices of one bell hooks, a far too skillful crafts(wo)man to enunciate such a simplistic division of narrative roles. Let’s take into consideration hooks’ layout for her narrative: the fragmentation of the memoir’s narrating voices reaffirms the fragmentary outlook of the text on the page. It is as if hooks wants us to play the ‘who is who game’ and at the same time she is making us aware that such ‘playfulness’ on our part could sidetrack us from the ‘real deal’, that is, that all life and all recollection of life is fragmentary, multi-layered, multi-vocal, whether or not the source for the ‘speaking selves’ may be one and the same person. Only through the fragmented bits and pieces of memory can we grasp the magnitude of human existence, human interaction, human self-knowing. In that respect, hooks’ memoir Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life transpires an exultant life-writing attempt to get to know oneself, privately and publically, by not being afraid to ‘scratch the skin off old wounds’ and ‘make them anew’.
Personal Statement:
Constructing a cultural identity is as easy as mastering the nuances of a foreign language while traveling to the country of its origin on an eight-hour flight. There are gifted individuals among us who may be able to carry out this task in less than eight hours. Fortunately or not, they are few in number. For most of us, nowadays, the process of constructing our cultural ‘selves’ is the journey of a lifetime, struggling to position/inscribe ourselves within a culture that is no longer (re)presented as monolithically uniform.
I constantly do battles with my own cultural heritage (who was I before I became ‘I’) and my cultural repose (who am ‘I’ now that I contribute to the ‘living out’ of the cultural legacy), since for the most part these two notions seem to be at odds with each other. In other words, I was born into an ethnic group which, in turn, due to various social, political, religious circumstances managed to distinctly reshape and restructure its beliefs and customs, so that nowadays it strikes the outsider’s glare as non-existent in the first place. Therefore, when an individual such as myself decides to reaffirm his or her cultural identity against the background of strong ties to the indigenous culture which he or she was born into and the greater social milieu which he or she has assimilated to (as a result of education, religious conversion, power accessibility, etc.) the outcome may prove disheartening both to the individual and to his or her audience.
Often these palimpsestic attempts at coming to terms with ‘the individual’ versus ‘the cultural’ self are carried out in the arena of autobiography, a genre whose flexibility offers the author/protagonist the ability to assert himself or herself in front of a larger audience as he or she sees fit. Whether the audience will fully comprehend the ‘portrayed self’ as the author/protagonist’s ‘true’ self does not necessarily constitute the principal claim behind an autobiographical work. When the personal becomes public through the act of writing it down, publishing it, or in the case of pre-literate autobiographies, when it becomes a part of the community’s oral narratives, an act of healing and/or an act of pain emerges.
Reading through bell hooks’ second memoir, I was constantly reminded of this actualization of the ‘self’ in autobiographical narratives, how it must ‘ache’ before/as it ‘heals’.
I have always been interested in the relationship language and memory partake on in the making/unmaking of the narrative ‘selves’, especially if the ‘historical self’ had been denied existence, had been ‘shoved under the rug’ so to speak, and in that respect, it seems to me that hooks’ narrative technique asks of us as readers to persistently question the presence of a selfhood and its positionality inside an individual, within a community, amidst a social practice, or in a text. Hooks’ life-writing beckons us to examine whether language and memory, already dissolved by pain, can indeed ‘bear witness’ to the construction of a self.
One of the reasons why I have decided to journey with the ‘genders in America’ seminar this semester is tied in with my own quest for an understanding of this evocative process; namely, I would like to look closer at the link between language and memory, particularly when an individual’s pain cannot be clearly conveyed. In that regard, can pain be at least examined privately, in order to validate ‘the self’ to itself?
If pain is not publically utterable, can we comprehend the suffering it causes, can we contemplate it?
I think hooks’ memoir allows for us to look at this question either way.
On the one hand, pain cannot make us ‘real’; if reality (empirically speaking) is a place reserved for memory, pain can, like the acknowledgement of a self’s existence, be revoked at any time. On the other hand, pain does make us fully human, at a large expense to our ‘humanity’. Does this then mean that being human is like being ghostly, spectral and substantial, fictional and real, occupying an ever shifting identity?
In a sense, hooks’ text (and I would say that she shares this writing quality with Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston) constantly reevaluates our definition of humanity, of a self, of a voice, of a consciousness. It teaches us that a self remade in kindness is no more real than a self unmade in violence, as we seem to forget how easily a self is made and unmade, willingly or not. Hooks’ narrating voices teach us how to re-structure and re-examine the unspeakable human cost of American slavery, white patriarchal supremacy, everyday racism, sexism. Personally, hooks’ life-writing has enabled me to go back to African-American slave narratives written by female slaves, to re-read them now with a better understanding of their allusive silences, narrative ellipses and absences, which are revelatory of the complex and complicating nature of the double consciousness of the narrators’ selves. Hooks’ voices have taught me to begin to understand this without passing on my essentialist 21st century logic on everything I find cruel and repulsive within/without my cultural existence. They have taught me to read and to listen. And for that I thank them.
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