A Note on bell hooks and Pain

 I must admit that I am writing this post from a place of pain; not physical pain, but a kind of pain similar to that which bell hooks (1994) described as the result of “giving up old ways of thinking and knowing and learning new approaches” (p. 43). I have felt the pain that comes with newfound distance with one’s old worldview years ago during my undergraduate career; the pain I am feeling now is slightly different—it stems from the silencing of my voice by my family members, from their unwillingness to endure any of that pain with me. In the wake of this most recent Thanksgiving holiday, I have found myself thinking a lot about bell hooks’ (1994) Teaching to Transgress. I’m not sure why, because it has most certainly always been present, but more than ever I saw white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy (WSCP) at work in the days I spent at home and felt so overwhelmingly suffocated and isolated by it.

In trying to reconcile the silencing I experienced while at home, I’ve returned to hooks’ (1994) call to theorize our experiences. She wrote, “Personal testimony, personal experience, is such fertile ground for the production of liberatory feminist theory because it usually forms the base of our theory making” (p. 70). This view of what it means to theorize encourages me in the sense that I feel empowered to coax my own voice out of the corner to which my family has banished it. That, within myself, I have the power to uplift my voice through the process of theorizing is liberating indeed. Moreover, both Freire’s (1970) and hooks’ (1994) assurance that the act of theorizing is an integral part of praxis mollifies my pervasive desire to constantly act and urges me to prop my feet up for awhile. I’m thankful for this because I need a break from the battle I’ve been fighting with my family and WSCP.

I liken theorizing to propping my feet up not to diminish the difficulty of theorizing about our experience. hooks said, “It is not easy to name our pain, to theorize from that location” (p. 74). I feel this more than ever right now, and it is because of my intense experience of this pain that I am writing this post as a reminder of two things: 1) we must remember to be sympathetic to the pain our students may feel as a result of the material we expose them to and 2) we hold a very special position through which we can accompany those students who bear the pain of theorizing their experience as a result of the material we expose them to. This accompaniment, this willingness to stand with and by our students, is in itself a feminist act.

References

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New                    York, NY: Routledge.