Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) (29 page)
Read Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) Online
Authors: Bell Hooks
Colonizing white imperialists documented the reality that the indigenous people they met did not greet them with the will to conquer, dominate, oppress, or destroy. In his journals and letters to Spanish patrons, Columbus described the gentle, peace-loving nature of Native Americans. In a letter to a Spanish patron, Columbus wrote (quoted in Howard Zinn’s essay “Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress”):
They are very simple and honest and exceedingly liberal with all they have, none of them refusing anything he may possess when he is asked. They exhibit great love toward all others in preference to themselves.
Though he seemed in awe of the politics of community and personal relations that he witnessed among the indigenous people, Columbus did not empathize with or respect the new cultural values he was observing and allow himself to be transformed, born again with a new habit of being. Instead he saw these positive cultural values as weaknesses that made the indigenous people vulnerable, nations that could be easily conquered, exploited, and destroyed. This cultural arrogance was expressed in his journal when he boasted, “They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” At the core of the new cultural values Columbus observed was a subordination of materiality to collective welfare, the good of the community. From all accounts, there was no indigenous community formed on the basis of excluding outsiders so it was possible for those who were different—in appearance, nationality, and culture—to be embraced by the communal ethos.
It is the memory of this embrace that we must reinvoke as
we critically interrogate the past and rethink the meaning of the Columbus legacy. Fundamentally, we are called to choose between a memory that justifies and privileges domination, oppression, and exploitation and one that exalts and affirms reciprocity, community, and mutuality. Given the crisis the planet is facing—rampant destruction of nature, famine, threats of nuclear attack, ongoing patriarchal wars—and the way these tragedies are made manifest in our daily life and the lives of folks everywhere in the world, it can only be a cause for rejoicing that we can remember and reshape paradigms of human bonding that emphasize the increased capacity of folks to care for the earth and for one another. That memory can restore our faith and renew our hope.
Whether we are evoking memories of Columbus or the Africans who journeyed before him, the legacy they both represent, though different, is masculine. One semester, I began my course on African American women writers speaking about this journey. For the first time, I talked about the fact that initial contact between Africans and Native Americans was first and foremost a meeting between men. Later, Columbus arrives—also with men. While the African and Native American men who greeted one another did not embody the characteristics of an imperialist misogynistic masculine ideal, they shared with white colonizers a belief in gender systems that privilege maleness. This means that even though there were communities to be found in Africa and the Americas where women did have great privilege, they were always seen as fundamentally different from and in some ways always less than men. Zinn’s essay emphasizes both “widespread rape of native women” by white colonizers as well as the degree to which the imperialist venture in the Americas was seen as a “masculine conquest.” What contemporary speculative discussion do we have about the way indigenous men responded to the assaults on native women? Zinn emphasizes the way gendered metaphors were used to
celebrate the colonizers’ victory. He quotes Samuel Eliot Morison’s patriarchal romanticization of this conquest: “Never again may mortal men hope to recapture the amazement, the wonder, the delight of those October days in 1492, when the new world gracefully yielded her virginity to the conquering Castilians.” Indigenous men had no relationship to the land, to the world of their ancestors, to the earth that would have allowed them to evoke metaphors of rape and violation. To imagine the earth as a woman to be taken over, consumed, dominated was a way of thinking about life peculiar to the colonizer. My point is not that Native Americans and Africans did not hold sexist values, but that they held them differently from white colonizers; that there were among these diverse men of color and communities of color limits to masculine power. It is a tragic consequence of colonization that contemporary men of color seek to affirm nationhood and male power in specific cultural contexts by asserting a masculinity informed by the very worst of the white patriarchal legacy.
In our cultural retelling of history we must connect the Columbus legacy with the institutionalization of patriarchy and the culture of sexist masculinity that upholds male domination of females in daily life. The cultural romanticization of Columbus’s imperialist legacy includes a romanticization of rape. White colonizers who raped and physically brutalized native women yet who recorded these deeds as the perks of victory acted as though women of color were objects, not the subjects of history. If there was conflict, it was between men. Females were perceived as though they and their bodies existed apart from the struggle between males for land and territory. From that historical moment on, women of color have had to grapple with a legacy of stereotypes that suggest we are betrayers, all too willing to consent when the colonizer demands our bodies. Any critical interrogation of the Columbus legacy that does not call attention to the white supremacist patriarchal
mind-set that condoned the rape and brutalization of native females is only a partial analysis. For contemporary critics to condemn the imperialism of the white colonizer without critiquing patriarchy is a tactic that seeks to minimize the particular ways gender determines the specific forms oppression may take within a specific group. It subsumes the rape and exploitation of native women by placing such acts solely within the framework of military conquest, the spoils of war, a gesture which mystifies the way in which patriarchal thinking works both apart from, and in conjunction with, imperialism to support and affirm sexual violence against females—particularly women of color. Why is it many contemporary male thinkers, especially men of color, repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy?
Are contemporary people of color not wedding ourselves to the Columbus legacy when we construct a cultural politics of tribal or national identity that perpetuates the subordination of women? If contemporary notions of ethnic subcultural nationhood and identity condone and celebrate female subordination by males via the perpetuation of sexist thinking and behavior, then progressive demands for a rethinking of history will never be fundamentally linked with a politics of solidarity that fully repudiates domination. No transformative interventions can take place to end oppression and exploitation as long as we critique one form of domination and embrace another.
The Columbus legacy is clearly one that silences and eradicates the voices—the lives—of women of color. In part to repair the damage of this history, the way it has been taught to us, the way it has shaped how we live our lives, we must seize this moment of historical remembering to challenge patriarchy. No amount of progressive rethinking of history makes me want to call to mind the fate of native women during the imperialist conquest of the Americas. Or the extent to which their fate
determined the destiny of enslaved African Americans. There is only sorrow to be found in evoking the intensity of violence and brutalization that was part of the Western colonization of the minds and bodies of native women and men. We can, however, call that legacy to mind in a spirit of collective mourning, making our grief a catalyst for resistance. Naming our grief empowers it and us. Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan [in her essay “Columbus Debate” from the October 1992 issue of Elle] reminds us of the depth of this sorrow.
No people could have imagined anything as terrible as what happened here—such terrors, a genocide that is ongoing, the beginning of a grief we still feel. What has been done to the land has been done to the people; we are the same thing. And all of us are injured by the culture that separates us from the natural world and our inner lives, all of us are wounded by a system that grew out of such genocide, destruction to the land and society.
Our indigenous comrades who struggle for freedom in South Africa remind us that “our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting.” To remember is to empower. Even though these memories hurt, we dare to name our grief and pain and the sorrow of our ancestors, and we defiantly declare that the struggle to end patriarchy must converge with the struggle to end Western imperialism. We remember the particular fate of indigenous women at the hands of white supremacist patriarchal colonizers; we remember to honor them in acts of resistance, to reclaim the sound of their protests and rage, the sound that no history books record.
In the past year, I have rejected all overtures to speak or write anything about Columbus. Again and again, I would hear myself saying, “I don’t really ever think about Columbus.” Critically interrogating this assertion, I unpacked the levels of untruth it
holds. It is not that simple—that I just do not think about Columbus. I want to forget him, to deny his importance, because those earliest childhood memories of learning about Columbus are tied to feelings of shame that “red and black” people (as I thought of us then) were victimized, degraded and exploited by these strange white discoverers. In truth, I can close my eyes and vividly call to mind those images of Columbus and his men sketched in history books. I can see the crazed and savage looks that were on the faces of indigenous men, just as I remember the drawings of sparsely clothed, shackled African slaves. I want to forget them even as they linger against my will in memory. Writing in a letter to a friend, Laguna novelist and poet Leslie Silko speaks about the place of images in the mind’s eye, describing what it is like when we think we recall a specific event, as though we were really present, only to find out that our memory of that moment has been shaped by a photograph. Silko writes, “Strange to think that you heard something—that you heard someone describe a place or a scene when in fact you saw a picture of it, saw it with your own eyes.” And I would add even stranger when those pictures linger in the imagination from generation to generation. When I recall the shame I felt seeing those images, of the Indian and the “great” white men, I recognize that there is also rage there. I was not only angry at these images, which did not feel right in my heart, I felt that being forced to look at them was like being forced to witness the symbolic reenactment of a colonizing ritual, a drama of white supremacy. The shame was feeling powerless to protest or intervene.
We are not powerless today. We do not choose to ignore or deny the significance of remembering Columbus because it continues to shape our destiny. By speaking, opposing the romanticization of our oppression and exploitation, we break the bonds with this colonizing past. We remember our ancestors, people of color—Native American and African, as well as
those individual Europeans who opposed genocide in word and deed. We remember them as those who opened their hearts, who bequeathed us a legacy of solidarity, reciprocity, and communion with spirits that we can reclaim and share with others. We call on their knowledge and wisdom, present through generations, to provide us with the necessary insight so that we can create transformative visions of community and nation that can sustain and affirm the preciousness of all life.
19
MOVING INTO AND BEYOND FEMINISM
Just for the joy of it
Initially excited to be interviewed for a book that would highlight women and performance, I was pissed to learn that it would be called Angry Women. In our culture, women of all races and classes who step out on the edge, courageously resisting conventional norms for female behavior, are almost always portrayed as crazy, out of control, mad. This title was good for selling books. Representations of “mad” women excite even as they comfort. Set apart, captured in a circus of raging representations, women’s serious cultural rebellion is mocked, belittled, trivialized. It is frustrating, maddening even, to live in a culture where female creativity and genius are almost always portrayed as inherently flawed, dangerous, problematic. Luckily, despite stereotyped packaging and the evocation of the image of “angry women,” this portrayal is challenged and subverted by the resisting representations that appear in the book.
In this interview, I do not speak out in rage. The passion in my voice emerges from the playful tension between the multiple, diverse, and sometimes contradictory locations I inhabit. There is no unitary representation to be formed here, no fixed sense of what it is to be black, female, from a working-class Southern background. For years, I was afraid to engage in radical political thought or movement. I feared it would close down creativity, confine me in an unchanging standpoint. Moving past this fear and embracing struggles to end domination, I find myself constantly at odds with workers for freedom who invest in the notion of a unitary self—a fixed identity. I continually resist surrendering complexity to be accepted in groups where subjectivity is flattened out in the interest of harmony or a unitary political vision. Turned off by culture vultures who want me to talk “race only,” “gender only,” who want to confine and limit the scope of my voice, I am turned on by subjectivity that is formed in the embrace of all the quirky conflicting dimensions of our reality. I am turned on by identity that resists repression and closure. This interview was a site where I could transgress boundaries with no fear of policing—a space of radical openness on the margins, where identity that is fluid, multiple, always in process could speak and be heard.
| Re/Search Publications: | How did your childhood lead you to your present position: fighting political, racist and sexist oppression? |
| bell hooks: | “Well, it’s funny. I’ve been trying to assemble a collection of essays that are both autobiographical and critical about death. Because when I think about my childhood— the kind of early experiences (or what I think of as imprints) that have led me to be who I am today, they really revolve around the death of my father’s mother, Sister Ray. In our work we use autobiographical experience from our childhood. I wrote this detective novel entitled Sister Ray (my grandmother’s name is Rachel, and that’s the name of the detective) and a childhood event I really remember was my grandmother dying in the bedroom next to mine. My mother put all of us children to bed (allegedly “to take a nap”) because she did not want us to know. So there was this incredible air of mystery about this, and I for one was not going to go to sleep … I got to witness the men from the funeral home coming in with the stretcher, and—it’s funny, but one of the things I deeply remember is the way they smelled—and to this day I have trouble with men who wear sweet colognes. But the most amazing thing was watching my mother closing my grandmother’s eyes. Because I saw this and thought, “Wow—if this is death and it can be looked at and faced, then I can do anything I wanted to in life! Nothing is going to be more profound than this moment!” And I see this as a moment in time that shaped who I became … that allowed me to be the rebellious child I was—daring and risk-taking in the midst of my parents’ attempts to control me. |
| R/SP: | They thought they could control death by keeping it hidden— |
| bh: | Absolutely. It’s interesting to me that this intercession of death and the death of a foremother (the women who go before us) is tied to my development as an independent, autonomous woman. My father’s mother lived alone: she was a powerful figure. And I talk a lot with other women about our experiences as women working to be artists— and in my own case, working not only as an artist but as a cultural critic/intellectual in a world that still isn’t ready for us … that still hasn’t adapted to who we are. |
| R/SP: | We’re all struggling to make these parts fit together into a whole. Your writing is not only philosophical and theoretical but also informed by your personal life. One of the barriers we’re trying to break down is that artificial separation between the so-called “objective” and the “subjective,” the personal and the political. |
| bh: | People have written to me about my book Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics saying, “It’s such a heartbreaking book … it’s so sad.” I think that a lot of what’s going on in my work is a kind of theorizing through autobiography or through storytelling. My work is almost a psychoanalytical project that also takes place in the realm of what one might call “performance”—a lot of my life has been a performance, in a way. In an essay I wrote about Jennie Livingston’s film Paris is Burning, which is about black drag balls in Harlem, I reminisced about myself cross-dressing years ago. I was thinking about this as a kind of reenactment of a past performance, but it’s also a moment of autobiographical sharing that is a kind of stepping out: There was a time in my life when I liked to dress up as a man and go out into the world. It was form of ritual, of play. It was also about power. To cross-dress as a woman in patriarchy meant, more so than now, to symbolically cross from the world of powerlessness to a world of privilege. It was the ultimate intimate voyeuristic gesture. Searching old journals for passages documenting that time I found this paragraph: “She pleaded with him: Just once—well every now and then—I just want us to be boys together. I want to dress like you and go out and make the world look at us differently and make them wonder about us, make them stare and ask those silly questions like, ‘Is he a woman dressed up like a man? Is he an older black gay man with his effeminate boy/girl/lover flaunting same-sex out in the open?’ Don’t worry. I’ll take it all very seriously, I won’t let them laugh at you. I’ll make it real ‘Keep them guessing’ … do it in such a way that they will never know for sure. Don’t worry: when we come home I’ll be a girl for you again. But for now, I want us to be boys together.” Then I wrote that “cross-dressing, appearing in drag, transsexualism, are all choices that emerge in a context where the notion of subjectivity is challenged … where identity is always perceived as capable of construction, invention, change.” I was thinking about this a lot, because today, even before we can have a contemporary feminist movement or a discourse on postmodernism, we have to consider “positionalities” that are shaking up the idea that any of us are inherently anything—that we become who we are. So a lot of my work views the confessional moment as a transformative moment—a moment of performance where you might step out of the fixed identity in which you were seen, and reveal other aspects of the self … as part of an overall project of more fully becoming who you are. |
| R/SP: | This is very important. You write about how separatism or exclusionism really reinforces the older patriarchal hierarchy—therefore we need to analyze all the processes of separation operating within the black community, the women’s community, etc. You’re talking about reintegration with a whole new set of rules … |
| bh: | … as well as different vision of expansionism (and not that imperialist expansionism that was about “Let’s go out and annex more land and conquer some more people!”) but about allowing the self to grow. I think of Sam Keen’s popular book, The Passionate Life: Stages of Loving, which declares that one wants to grow into a passionate human being, and that to some extent having fixed boundaries does not allow that kind of growth. I really shudder when people tell me, “I only want to associate with (this little crowd),” because I think, “Well, what if what you really need in life is over there in another group? Or in another location?” It’s interesting—the way in which one has to balance life—because you have to know when to let go and when to pull back. The answer is never just to completely “let go” or “transgress,” but neither is it to always “contain yourself” or “repress.” There’s always some liminal (as opposed to subliminal) space in between which is harder to inhabit because it never feels as safe as moving from one extreme to another. |
| R/SP: | There are lots of paradoxes to deal with; where are our lack of differences? In a Z magazine article you wrote about seeing your father beat up your mother—can you talk about that, and your feelings of murderous rage and terror mingled together? |
| bh: | It’s funny—when you reminded me of that I felt really “exposed.” I know that my mother and father don’t read Z and would probably never read it unless someone sent it to them, but they would be very devastated and hurt that I was exposing something about their private life to the public. And I would clarify that I talked about hitting and not beating her up. At the same time I deeply needed to express something. I was also frightened by the kind of “construction of difference” that makes it appear that there is some space of rage and anger that men inhabit, that is alien to us women. Even though we know that men’s rage may take the form of murder (we certainly know that men murder women more than women murder men; that men commit most of the domestic violence in our lives), it’s easy to slip into imagining that those are “male” spaces, rather than ask the question, “What do we do as women with our rage?” I’ve found that most children who have witnessed parental fighting (where a man has hurt or hit a woman) identify with the woman/victim when they retell the event(s). And I was struck that what I didn’t want to retell was the fact that I didn’t just identify with my mother as the person being hurt, but I identified with my father as the hurting person, and wanted to be able to really hurt him! My play daughter (who’s an incest survivor) and I were talking about this recently … |
| R/SP: | What do you mean by “play daughter”? |
| bh: | When I was growing up, that was a term used in Southern black life for informal adoptions. Let’s say you didn’t have any children and your neighbor had eight kids. You might negotiate with her to adopt a child, who would then come live with you, but there would never be any kind of formal adoption—yet everybody would recognize her as your “play daughter.” My community was unusual in that gay black men also were able to informally adopt children. And in this case there was a kinship structure in the community where people would go home and visit their folks if they wanted to, stay with them (or what have you), but they would also be able to stay with the person who was loving and parenting them. In my case I met this young woman, Tanya, years ago when I was giving a talk, and I felt that she really needed a mother. At the time I was really grappling with the question. “Do I want to have a child or not?” And I said, “Come on into my life: I need a child and you seem to need a mother!” And we’ve had a wonderful relationship; I’ve watched her become more fully who she’s meant to be in this world. From her talking about the experience of incest, a theory emerged: if you were in some traumatic moment where you felt a particular emotion, and then you repressed that emotion (let’s say, for ten years), and didn’t allow yourself to feel anything … then, when you open the door to those emotions you’ve closed off, you still have to work through that last emotion you were feeling. In other words, this is not like some other kind of emotional coming out—it’s like: you’ve made that emotion incubate by locking it away, so when you reopen those doors, the emotion that first emerges is monstrous. |
| R/SP: | Like facing “the belly of the beast”; facing incredible rage? |
| bh: | Absolutely. I still think men have not fully named and grappled with the sorrows of boyhood in the way feminism gave us as women ways to name some of the tragedies of our “growhood” in sexist society. I think males are just beginning to develop a language to name some of the tragedies for them—to express what was denied them. If I imagine myself as a boy witnessing the grown father hitting the mother—well what “positionality” does the boy feel himself to be in? Clearly he doesn’t think, “I’m going to grow up to be a woman who will be hit.” So does he then have to fear: “I will grow up to be this person who hits—therefore I’d better live my life in such a way that I never grow up?” Like a lot of women, I feel that I’ve loved men who made that decision to never grow up “because then I’ll become that monstrous Other.” I think that’s why so many men in our culture don’t allow those doors to ever be opened: because there’s something in the experience of boyhood they witnessed … |
| R/SP: | … which is just too traumatic … Beyond merely polarizing the men as “victimizers” and leaving it at that, we have to recognize that men are just as crippled as women. What’s very liberating here is the whole notion of not identifying with victimization—that there could be an empowerment if you would just feel that rage, instead of merely shutting down and being victimized. |
| bh: | In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (one of my favorite novels), there’s a moment when the little girl, a victim of rape/incest, says to another little girl whom she wants to be angry, “Anger is better—there is a presence in anger.” I was always moved by that contrasting of victimization versus being victimized; it’s important to maintain the kind of rage that allows you to resist. |
| R/PS: | Yes. When I was a young girl I was petrified of horror films, particularly the psycho/slasher ones, and I’d even have dreams that they were “coming to get me.” So I’d force myself to watch Halloween-type films where usually a male figure kills hundreds of women (or men, whatever). And I decided to try to identify with that male … and it gave me such a sense of power. Of course, this is in the “safe” area of creative expression (film)—so it isn’t like I’m going to go around killing people! But there was this incredible sense of empowerment when I realized I didn’t have to identify with the victim. |
| bh: | Certain feminist writings by lesbian women on S/M discuss what role-playing is in terms of power. A woman can take on ritualized role-playing in terms of confronting a dragon, and realize that in the confrontation of that dragon (through the role-playing), it no longer has power over you. I think it’s been really hard for some feminists to “hear” that the ritualized role-playing in eroticism and sexuality can be empowering … because there’s such a moralistic tendency to see it only as a disempowering reenactment of the patriarchy’s sexual politics. Whereas in all forms of ritual and role-playing, if it is empowering and if one is truly only engaged in play acting, so to speak, there’s the possibility of re-enacting the drama of something that terrifies you … of working symbolically through it in a way that touches back on your real life, so that ultimately you are more empowered. |
| R/SP: | I think that so many women really need to do this: confront those fears. |
| bh: | In an essay on the construction of “whiteness” in the black imagination, I wrote about black people really being fearful of white people, and how it’s really become a cliché or a “no-no” to talk about having that fear. I gave this paper recently at a university, and a young black man who was my host said that my paper really disturbed him—finally he had realized that he really did feel a certain fear of white people, without ever having thought about (or faced) that fact. In our culture, black men are constructed as such a threat: they can pose on the street corner or on the street as people who are in power, in control. And the culture doesn’t ever give black men a space where they can say: “Yes—actually I feel scared when I see white people coming toward me.” When we think of an incident like Howard Beach, where a mob of whites killed a young black man who had “invaded” their neighborhood, we recognize that here were these black men who were not positioned in people’s minds as being potentially afraid—that it might be scary for three black men to be in the space of dominating whiteness. Instead, all the fear was projected onto them as objects of threat, rather than as people who might inhabit a space of fear … There was a whole controversy around the fact that these men said that they wanted to use a telephone, and that they passed by a number of phones (which is what the opposition cited to prove that they weren’t really being honest), and yet there’s no suggestion that maybe they bypassed a number of phones because they were looking for a location in which they would feel greater safety. We have so little understanding about how black people fear white people in daily life … Recently I was staying in New York. Sometimes I would get in the elevator and then see a white person approaching—so I’d try to hold the elevator … and most times they would brush me away! I would just be amazed at the idea that possibly they were afraid to go up in the elevator with me because I was black. And I thought about how afraid I am to go up in elevators with white people. |
