I Remember the Listening
Exist
I want so much to please her and yet keep some part of me that is myself, my own, not just a thing I have been turned into that she can desire, like, or do with as she will. I want her to love me totally as I am. I love her totally without wanting that she change anything, not even the things about her that I cannot stand.
bell hooks, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, 1996 p. 140
My mother often tells me the story of when she gave me away to god while I was still in her womb, a noble sacrifice no one asked if I wanted to make. That might have been when the story started, this life that is mine and not mine at the same time. The story of Rebekah McFarland, the scholarship student, brokeass and mixed from Chicago, who Rose Above Strife, went to Boarding School and then to a Prestigious University, who became an Archivist and is Going To Get A PhD. My life: a list of character traits and accomplishments; my face: one in the group of exotics in the brochure to get you to come to our program–we’re very forward thinking, very hip. I regularly find myself on the verge of screaming that I am real and valid whether I want to learn violin, attack the bones of the archival field, or spend a whole afternoon writing fanfiction about my favorite video games.
Every big choice I’ve ever made comes from inside me, from somewhere intimate and precious, only to be seized and rewritten by others into some noble, accomplished character who I hate. When I push against that character, I get rebuked: I write to a white family member (who I love unconditionally whether it’s good for me or not), “I don’t mean this as dismissive, but I disagree with what you are saying,” only to hear that the person felt dismissed by that exact sentence, that they believe I am being led astray by them. Them, a faceless yet malignant wokeness that seems to embody most of the things I believe in. My words are up to open interpretation no matter what I say; my family does not like it when I act OoC, oh-oh-see, out of character against their perfect creation of me. Stick to the script if I want to be part of the family, if I want any demonstrative love.
“I regularly find myself on the verge of screaming
that I am real and valid…”
bell hooks’ family is very different from my own, but I saw myself so deeply in her telling of her child self that sometimes I couldn’t read the words. I felt that she was writing the unseen moments of my life. I wanted to scream, at her little child self, that I saw her, I heard her, that she is real—but she’s dead and self-realized besides, so I scream it at myself instead. I honestly don’t remember how much I spoke when we came together to talk about Bone Black, but I remember the listening. It seemed that we all felt dissonance, whether with families or communities or institutions. We’re all fighting to establish ourselves against the images other people create of us. We’re all reminding ourselves and each other that we exist.
Coward
When bell hooks died I was chastened, made small. I had been putting her off. I had a terrible feeling that I’d read her and be changed. That I’d read her and have to grow even more, something I wanted to do; but I was so tired. Pandemic, school, work, and the world outside—it makes me tired of being, tired of explaining myself all the damn time. And here was hooks. hooks who had never been a hero to me—she was too real for that. There had been too many half-seen snippets here and there when I disagreed with her, when I warmed to her, when I felt myself start really thinking after catching some of her words. She was rounded. Her existence made me a little more proud to be alive and I knew she would make me grow, so I put her off like a friend I’ve been meaning to call.
She died and I was surprised by the hurt I felt, surprised to feel like I’d been a coward. So finally I decided to read but I was still afraid. I thought this would be a solo exploration and there was fear in that. I wanted to ask questions, to hear folx talk about how they heard hooks’ voice, to hear how minds outside of me but made in the same earth as me saw things different. I figured I’d end up going to the internet, reading posts by strangers I would never meet, getting as close to community as I could through fragmented pieces. I’d build myself an isolated space out of online comments.
“So finally I decided to read
but I was still afraid.”
I must have dropped something when I got the email about the bell hooks community study; I remember the sound of something hitting the ground. I remember emailing folx, being a bother, clamoring to get joined up. I was desperate for a moment of community, the sort of community that grows among folx who can look at each other with trust in their eyes. I’d done hard (for me) learning in the Community Study about abolition, talking with folx and growing with folx as I warmed to something that I had started off afraid of. I knew the space and trusted it. I signed up and our cluster formed and our sessions began.
Reading with our cluster grew in me a bravery I needed; I no longer feared that I was too tired to grow, too weary, because through this cluster I wasn’t growing alone. I didn’t need to carry it all. I faced the trauma in hooks’ life with others at my side; we looked at her view of love straight on, upside down, and sideways and listened to the words everyone had to say.
We looked at her thoughts on teaching and brought in our own experiences on both sides, teachers and students, and wondered together whether/when/if ever the institutions that have charged themselves with the right to teach will be ready to listen to what hooks has to say. We’d turn to praise for hooks in one moment and to criticism in another; we’d realize we were standing on her shoulders, thinking critically about things she herself had said because of the room thinkers like her had made for us to do so. “Look at me disagreeing with bell hooks” was a tentative question of self-validity that became a powerful statement, recognition of ourselves as worthy. It’s a place I would have never arrived at alone.
I’ve already said my thank yous to our cluster when we signed off and I meant each word. In my life I’ll read more of hooks on my own than I did with our cluster, but the time I spent with that group—the room we had to read, to grow, to share, to be—that was the magic. That’s the thing that can’t be taught but can be embraced; I don’t know what to call it other than our community and nod to the folx we know, know.
Object
Before I joined the community study I had read some chapters in Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989), and something in the way hooks said words I’d heard before clicked everything into place: “Oppressed people resist by identifying themselves as subjects, by defining their reality, shaping their new identity, naming their history, telling their story” (p. 43). I’d read thoughts like this before but something about how hooks said it finally hit me. As a person I am tired of the literal objectification of my existence in history—objects serving as receipts that we present in order to be a part of the historical record. As an archivist I am ashamed of my role in this objectification, stumbling around looking for better tools but sometimes settling with that same call for receipts when the only other option I can see is loss, erasure. hooks had me look at it different, helped me put to words that it’s not the object, but the story the object represents. All the areas I see where the standards begin uplifting the object over the story—over the subject—are the areas where I need to push, to question, to test.
And when I wonder if I am the problem—perpetuating a system born of white supremacy through my participation, believing and unbelieving in archives as I know them (born of colonizers at their inception) and their ability to change—I now know I can look at hooks and her work on teaching, at the way that she recognized the need for the system to change while demanding space within it during the process. hooks existing in this contradiction lent me a freedom to figure out how to do the same. The folx I spoke with in our cluster gave me real life examples of how they take to the balance, and have sometimes succeeded, have sometimes failed. All of this leaves me feeling a bit less afraid, a bit less like I am hurting the cause just by existing. It helps me remember that I have agency, that sometimes I can even act on it. I learn that I’m a subject, that I’m not going to be put quietly into a gray box to be pulled out when needed unless I let someone put me there. At the very least I can start screaming until my voice goes, reminding myself (and others) that I exist.
Still
I’m still a bit of a coward and I don’t mind; we live in a terrifying time. I’ll have to live with myself sometimes when I speak up and lose a job, or when I stay quiet to keep one. I’m still a bit of a coward but maybe less so, mostly because whatever epic timing led us all to come together and read bell hooks reminded me that I am not alone. hooks reminded me. The cluster reminded me. I’ll hold this reminder in my heart anytime I am afraid.