The contributions of bell hooks to the Black feminist literary world have been cited as a pivotal moment in many Black women’s understanding of feminism and feminist practice. While we avoid discussions on whether we know how to love in all our relationships beyond the romantic, bell hooks has directly challenged the ways that society (and with particular focus on Black people) views love in her Love Trilogy – along with the pitfalls that failure can bring.
Through bell hook’s interrogation of racism, patriarchy, classism and feminist fractures, I gained the courage to interrogate the ways systems of domination acutely affect me as a Black lesbian activist and academic living in South Africa. In re-reading the Love Trilogy by hooks, I have begun to untie and examine the individual fibres that make up the love paradigm. Romantic love has become increasingly important in the digital age where this sort of love is hyper-visible. What we neglect to discuss and examine is whether we know how to love in all our relationships beyond romance. With her writing, bell hooks has directly challenged the ways that society views love, with a particular focus on how Black people love, and how the failure to ground resistance in love propels domination.
Although romantic love and parental love have been pedestalled as pinnacles of sorts, hooks has called on us to question our understanding of love and decentralise the narrative of its hierarchies. The books known as the Love Trilogy provide a textured approach to love in its many manifestations. Communion, Salvation and All about love have become seminal texts on love and Blackness. Throughout the trilogy, hooks refer to a love ethic that is grounded in respect.
Through this understanding, it is evident that you cannot say you love somebody whilst abusing and disrespecting them. This is in reference to the relationships between Black people, Black men and women, and Black parents and their children. As a feminist scholar, I use hooks’ teaching as a conduit to understanding the use of love as a foundation for a radical Black feminist practice.
On Black people and love
Central to the theme of each book is the idea that love is a weakness and cannot be used as a proponent to rectify structural and institutional oppressions, which often manifest as racism, sexism, classism and homophobia. In Black Looks: Race and Representation, hooks states, “Loving Blackness as political resistance transforms our way of looking and being, and thus creates conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim Black life.”
This reflection points out the urgent necessity for Black people to love themselves and their Blackness in order to resist systems of domination. Collective radical self-love leaves no room for bigotry amongst ourselves and disallows misogynoir, abuse and homophobia in the Black community. In an introduction titled “Love is our only hope,” hooks states, “The abandonment of a discourse on love, of strategies to create a foundation of self-esteem and self-worth that would undergird struggles for self-determination, laid the groundwork for the undermining of all our efforts to create a society where Blackness could be loved, by Black folks, by everyone.”
Addressing the digression from the message of love, hooks makes the assertation that nihilism and despair became rampant in the Black community as the quest for liberation mutated into a quest towards power.
On Black Women and Love
In Communion: The Female Search for Love, hooks unpacks the societal condition that requires women to perform and aspire to love in a manner that frames the act as a weakness and intrinsically “woman” trait. In the backdrop of a patriarchal society, love is devalued as are all things deemed to exist auxiliary to women. Love can no longer be framed as a burden to be borne by women but rather a necessary act to ensure healthy interactions between women, ourselves and the entire community. On its release, hooks was lambasted by some for shifting her feminist interventions from racial and patriarchal domination to centring on love and the absolute need for it to tackle those systems.
Not all, though. In appreciation of the way hooks writes about theory beyond the Ivory Tower, journalist Afua Hirsch says “she exploded the false binary between the personal and the academic.” Being personal about her experiences with love as a Black woman was a revolutionary act of truth-telling and vulnerability. Without being bound to academic politics, hooks has encouraged women to think critically about their role and position in the Black community.
On Black Parents and Love
Interviewed on the subject matter of All About Love, hooks posits, “If we are being abused in any way, we are not being loved. Love is antithetical to abuse and domination.” Considering any human relationship, it is quite a reckoning to acknowledge that love and abuse cannot co-exist. In parental relationships, the power dynamics are balanced toward the parent who has a fascist rule over their child and in most instances, a parent does not respect their child but rather requires obedience from a child in an autocratic manner. In All About Love, hooks catechizes the normalcy with which people approach disciplining their children in ways that do not instil love but are intended to physically harm or humiliate children.
Black people worldwide can recount a story in their immediate or peripheral family relations where abuse was disguised as a discipline. In a culture of love and moving away from domination, children should be protected and educated through love. In considering the financial disparity of Black households as a consequence of domination, hooks questions the Black parents’ understanding of love. In Salvation, reflecting on the conversation between Hannah and her mother in Toni Morrison’s Sula, hooks states “The second strange thing was Hannah’s coming into her mother’s room with an empty bowl and a peck of Kentucky Wonders and saying, ‘Mama, did you ever love us?’” A silence follows these words, then the dialogue continues: “I mean, did you? You know. When we were little.”
The mother, Eva, responds initially by saying, “No. I don’t reckon I did. Not the way you thinkin’.” Enraged, Eva goes on: “You settin’ here with your healthy ass self and ax me did I love you?”
With her work, bell hooks calls for parents to show love in ways that transcend materiality. Home for Black children may be a vacuous space devoid of affection and time spent together between parents and children. As a consequence of economic hardship and back-breaking work, parents often refer to financial provision as an act of love. The lack of affection and time spent with children as a love language has plagued Black families for generations, with being a provider trumping other actions that illustrate love.
Love is described as a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust by hooks. Once we begin to understand how to love, we can tend to the internal wounds in our community that are inflicted by antiblackness, patriarchy and homophobia. Feminist Kebotlhale Motseothata writes, “More than that, as a queer, Black feminist scholar, hooks was intentional about unravelling the intensity of our trauma as an oppressed people. Hence, she prescribed radical love as a catalyst of our revolution.” With a love praxis, a legitimate and sustainable resistance will significantly erode systems of domination and encourage the honest discourse and support of collective wounds.