A bell tolls for bell hooks (1954–2021)

I was surprised to recently receive compliments from family members for having completed my doctorate well over twenty years ago. The three email messages followed a picture I sent home of a recent college graduation ceremony. I was in cap and gown. On the other hand, I have sat at academic meetings trying to focus on discussions as I wondered if the people with me ever had to worry about the price of a gallon of milk. Village life is rooted in interdependency. The obligations of older or financially able family members can be overwhelming and endless. My other world poses its own unique challenges. The focus of academic journals and language can appear far removed from everyday struggles to make ends meet by peoples to whom I owe my good fortune. The growing individualism and consumerism across the globe are unnerving, although extremely seductive. Self-sufficiency is reassuring, promising, as it does, independence and control. Accolades and possessions offer a tangible measure of success. However, this is a partial picture. I hear and watch colleagues' and neighbors' concerns of despair, depressions, divorce, family betrayals, and losses of jobs, houses, or deaths of loved ones that comprise our collective pain and grief. We all share in moments of joy, hope, intimacy, solidarity, often beyond social groups. bell hooks's corpus of work bridges these two "world" experiences that have shaped me and which I continually navigate. hooks speaks to our cultural enclaves and reminds us of the greater call to our common humanity, beyond family, beyond community and country to the entire planet. In these spaces, we engage in critical and loving discourses on how to transform society. This is the face of loving practice. Many credit bell hooks with affirming their lives on the margins and giving voice to their pain, as well as possibilities for healing.

Only bell hooks can get away with saying, "Do as I say," in promoting a lifestyle. The seeker of love admits, it was "a longing so intense it could not only be spoken but was deliberately searched for" (2001, xvii). The physical, psychological, and spiritual journey involved years of disengaging from "learned patterns of behavior that negated my capacity to give and receive love" (10). Self-reflection and acceptance helped hooks commit to life affirming and nurturing choices in her quest, often unsuccessful, for love and its transformative power. The love ethic of "care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge in our everyday lives" provides inner resources to address the pain of lovelessness (94). Like the tradition of religious evangelization, "we want to know how to seduce those among us who remain wedded to lovelessness and open the door to their hearts to let love enter" (xxvii). It is possible. It takes time. There is a price, and yet, "love is the only force that allows us to hold one another close beyond the grave" (202).

hooks's analysis of lovelessness and proposed ethic of love also draws on multiple professors, psychiatrists, authors, motivational speakers, feminists, activists, poets, philosophers, psychotherapists, theologians, attorneys, journalists, Catholic saints, Buddhists, Christian ministers, and educators who link unethical behaviors to a false self that diminishes the spirit and dehumanizes others. A common instinct in times of trial and threat, is to blame, attack, break up, and disperse. In writings and lecture circuits, all call for a commitment to personal and collective well-being.

Emotional instability and anxiety are symptomatic of lovelessness: "In a world anguished by rampart destruction, fear prevails. … Power gives us the illusion of having triumphed over fear, over our need for love" (221). A collective fear of love suppresses this naturally deep-seated emptiness. Futile attempts at love reflect a gnawing longing for love in the face of previous failures. In these emotional replays, partners are objectified as individuals to "pick, use, and then discard and dispose of at will" (115). Admissions of love are in hushed, sometimes rushed confessions. Love like the spiritual is dismissed, commercialized, sentimentalized, and considered naive. False notions of love promise "a state of constant bliss." To sustain the fantasy of a prince charming or...