bell hooks: Feminist, sister, ally

Her writings on love and abandonment, rage and justice, feminism and healing, struck a chord with us all

The last couple of years will be remembered for the incredible void it created — individual and collective, personal and political, spectacular and ordinary. But nothing prepared us for the untimely death of bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins), author, teacher, professor, feminist, and a black woman who made it count in white supremacist America. hooks was remarkable — she insisted on writing her name in lower case, something that I found hard to explain to the editors of my book when they insisted on standardisation. Some women refuse to be standardised, even by multi-million dollar publishing houses, and hooks was one of them.

Her writings resonated across the globe, reaching the farthest corners, in a voice that was distinctly black and overwhelmingly woman. She wrote of love, justice, feminism, teaching, living, politics, and mounted a scathing criticism of white liberal feminism, holding those in power accountable to those they claim to represent, or erase. She hammered the last nail in the coffin of universal sisterhood when she wrote: “Privileged-class white women swiftly declared their “ownership” of the movement, placing working-class white women, poor white women, and all women of color in the position of followers.”