Bleak, I’ve been thinking about death. The last two years have been chocked full of it; it has been hiding in corners with sadness and surprise; it has been coupled with life and choices that move us towards one or the other. It feels odd to mourn someone I’ve never met, but I’ve been mourning bell hooks since her death in December.
I carried bell hooks’ All About Love and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy with me to London and then throughout Portugal in November when I was rota but pretending I wasn’t. I thought about the lies and truths that I tell and hide in ways big and small. I thought about the secrets that I keep, thinking it will make free. I thought about the love and grace that we all so desperately need but convince ourselves that we don’t, or more dangerously, that we don’t deserve.
Their work makes me wonder how intellectually cruel it is to ask my students to read complicated, big, dark, and shining material and then ask them to analyze it. How can you do a good job at analyzing something that challenges your understanding and perceptions of the world? I hope that one day they treat it as a process of revision. Reading can revise thoughts. Writing makes those thoughts tangible on a page, and as soon as they are written, they are asking to be returned to, revised. Or maybe, hopefully, they return to them having been further revised from the version of them that wrote it. What is love besides something or someone that you can attend to, (w)hol(l)y?
I’m not going to pivot and start writing a review of either of those books. It’s too hard. I’m always in awe that words on a page placed in a particular order can peel you back: exposed. Here is Kiese Laymon writing about the importance of revision (in writing, remembering, thinking, and being): “I want to say that remembering starts not with predictable punditry, or bullshit blogs, or slick art that really asks nothing of us; I want to say that it starts with all of us willing ourselves to remember, tell, and accept those complicated, muffled truths of our lives and deaths, and the lives and deaths of folks all around us, over and over again…I’m a walking regret, a truth-teller, a liar, a survivor, a frowning ellipsis, a witness, a dreamer, a teacher, a student, a failure, a joker, a writer whose eyes stay red, and I’m a child of this nation.”
I hope you read something, anything by bell hooks and Kiese Laymon, and I hope their sentences make you feel unable to hide from or lie to yourself and anyone else. In learning that (god, is it hard to learn), I hope that you let every revised version of you love and be loved.
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