How a teenage Nadra Nittle met bell hooks: an excerpt from bell hooks’ Spiritual Vision (Fortress Press)
Photo courtesy of Fortress Press
By Nadra Nittle, Fortress Press, Available November 7, 2023
I met bell hooks for the first and only time as a teenager in the 1990s. Too unfamiliar with her work to have a substantive conversation about her efforts to make feminism more race and class conscious, I sat next to her mostly in silence and awe. She’d given a speech in my school auditorium, and I was part of a group of students chosen to dine with her afterward.
A feminist theorist, cultural critic, scholar, and writer, hooks defined feminism in simple terms—as a “movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.”
She also pushed for feminism to recognize the lasting impact of enslavement on Black American women. In her groundbreaking 1981 book Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, hooks writes, “A devaluation of black womanhood occurred as a result of the sexual exploitation of black women during slavery that has not altered in the course of hundreds of years.”
When I met hooks, I had yet to read that work or any others she’d written. But I did have enough sense to bring a copy of her latest book at the time, 1995’s Killing Rage: Ending Racism, to the meet-and-greet. She signed her name on the title page in the all-lowercase style that became her trademark. Her decision not to capitalize it derived from hooks’ desire to direct attention to her work rather than herself. For the same reason, hooks did not author books under her birth name, Gloria Jean Watkins. Instead, she used a nom de plume that honored her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, “known for her snappy and bold tongue.” In my copy of Killing Rage, she wrote her pseudonym with flair, the stems of the letters elongated in elegant but exaggerated lines.
Since I met hooks, I have lived in more than fifteen residences, three states, and briefly in another country. There, I pulled one hooks book after another off the shelves of my university library to abate the culture shock and loneliness I experienced during my first weeks as an exchange student. It felt comforting to read the words of a Black American feminist when I was the rare Black American woman in my orbit. Today, I still have my signed hardcover copy of Killing Rage.