by bell hooks
This tension between writing as an expression of my longing to emerge as autonomous creative thinker and the fear that such expression and any other manifestation of independence would mean madness, an end to life, created barriers between me and those written words. I was afraid of their power and yet I needed them. Writing was the only space where I could express myself freely. It was crucial to my fragile sense of well-being. I was often the family scapegoat—persecuted, ridiculed. I was often punished. It was as though I lived in a constant state of siege, subject to unprovoked and unexpected terrorist attacks. I lived in dread. Nothing I did was ever right. That constant experience of estrangement was deeply saddening. I was brokenhearted.
Writing was the healing place where I could collect the bits and pieces, where I could put them together again. It was the sanctuary, the safe place. Yet I could not make that writing part of an overall process of self-recovery. I was able to use it constructively only as an outlet for suppressed feeling. Knowledge that the writing could have enabled transformation was blocked by feelings of shame. I was ashamed that I needed this sanctuary in words. Confronting parts of my self there was humiliating. To me that confession was a process of unmasking, stripping the soul. It made me naked and vulnerable. Even though the experience was cleansing and redemptive, it was a process I could not fully affirm or celebrate. Feelings of shame compelled me to destroy what I had written. Diary writing, as a record of confession, brought me face to face with the shadow self, the one we spend lifetimes avoiding. I was ashamed that this “me” existed. I read my words. They were mirrors. I looked at the self represented there. Destroying the diaries, I destroyed that shadow. There was no trace of her, nothing that could bear witness. I could not embrace that inner darkness, find the light in it. I could not hold that being or love her.
Undoubtedly this process of destroying the diaries, and the self represented there, kept me from attempting suicide. There were times when I felt that death was the only way I could escape that inner darkness. I remember even now how much I longed to be rid of the wounded me, that secret shadow self. In Lyn Cowan’s Jungian discussion of masochism she describes that moment when we learn to “embrace the shadow” as a necessary stage in the psychic journey leading to recovery and the restoration of well-being. She comments: “Jung said the shadow connects an individual to the collective unconscious, and beyond that to animal life at its most primitive level. The shadow is the tunnel, channel, or connector through which one reaches the deepest, most elemental layers of psyche.” Confronting that shadow-self can both humiliate and humble. Humiliation in the face of aspects of the self we think are unsound, inappropriate, ugly, or downright nasty blocks one’s ability to see the possibility for transformation that such a facing of one’s reality promises.
That sense of profound shame evoked whenever I looked at the shadow-self portrayed in the writing was a barrier. It kept me stuck in the woundedness. Even though acknowledging that self in writing was a necessary anchor enabling me to keep a hold on life, it was not enough. That shame had to be let go before I could fully emerge as a writer because it was there whenever I tried to create, whether the work was confessional or not. When I left home to attend college I carried with me the longing to write. I knew then that I would need to work through these feelings of shame. One early journal entry from that time reads:
Writing, and the hope of writing pulls me back from the edges of despair. I believe insanity and despair are at times one and the same. And I hear the voices of my past telling me that I will go crazy, that I will end up in a mental institution—alone. I remember my oldest sister laughing, telling me that no one would visit me there, that “girl, you ought to stop.” Stop thinking. Stop dreaming. Stop trying to experience and understand life. Stop living in the world of the mind. That day I had sat a hot iron on my arm. I was ironing our father’s pajamas. They were collectively mocking me. I asked them to leave me alone. I pleaded with them, “Why can’t I just be left alone to be me?” I did not want to be molded. I was something. And when the hot iron came down on my arm I did not feel it. I was momentarily carried away, pleading with them. I stood there in the hallway ironing and even when the stinging pain was there I continued to iron. I stood there struggling to hide the pain and sorrow, not wanting to cry, not wanting them to know how much it hurt. I was trying to be brave. I know now that an anguished heart is never a brave heart. It’s like some wounded body part that keeps bleeding, that can’t stop itself. Writing eases the anguish. It is my connection. Through it and with it I transcend despair.
Writing, whether confessional prose or poetry, was irrevocably linked in my mind with the effort to maintain well-being. I began writing poetry about the same time that I began keeping diaries. Poetry writing was radically different. Unlike confessional prose, one could use language in writing poetry to mask feelings, to hide the experiential reality leading one to create. Poems on the subject of death and dying did not necessarily make explicit to the reader that I was at times struggling with the issue of whether to stay alive. Poetry writing as creative process was intimately linked with the experience of transcendence. Unlike the diary writing, which became a space where I confronted pain, poetry was the way to move beyond it. I never destroyed poems because I felt there was nothing revealed there about the “me of me.”
Then and now I remain a great admirer of Emily Dickinson, often marveling that she as living presence seemed always absent from her poems. To me they do not stand as a record of her experience but more as expressions of what I believe she felt was a fitting and worthy subject for poetry. Her poems are masks, together creating a collective drama where the self remains in the shadows, dark and undiscovered. It is difficult to look behind the poems, to see, to enter those shadows. Poetry writing may have been just that for Dickinson, the making of an enclosure—the poem as wall, a screen shielding her from the shadow-self. Perhaps there was for her no safe place, nowhere that the unnamed could be voiced, remembered, held. Even if it is there in the poems, we as readers cannot necessarily know or find it. What is clear is that writing was for Dickinson a way to keep a hold on life.
Writing that keeps us away from death, from despair, does not necessarily help us to be well. Anne Sexton could confess, “I am trying a flat mask to hold my sanity up … my life is falling through a sieve” and then “the thing that seems to be saving me is the poetry.” I remember her, Sylvia Plath, and not so well-known black women poets Georgia Douglas Johnson and Clarissa Scott Delany because they all struggled with dangerous melancholy and killing despair. We know that poetry does not save us, that writing does not always keep us away from death, that the sorrow of wounds that have never healed, excruciating self-doubt, or overwhelming melancholy often crushes the spirit, making it impossible to stay alive. Julia Kristeva speaks about women’s struggle to find and sustain creative voice in the chapter “I Who Want Not to Be,” which is part of the introduction to About Chinese Women. There she addresses the tension between our longing to “speak as women,” to have being that is strong enough to bear the identity writer, and the coercive imposition of a feminine identity within patriarchy that opposes such being. Within patriarchy woman has no legitimate voice. Her voice is either constructed in complicity or resistance. If the choice is not radical then we speak only what the patriarchal culture would have us say. If we do not speak as liberators we collapse under the weight of this effort to speak within patriarchal confines or lose ourselves without dying. Kristeva recalls the Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva, who hanged herself, writing: “I don’t want to die. I want not to be.” Her words echo my longing to be rid of the shadow-self, the “me of me.”
Writing enables us to be more fully alive only if it is not a terrain wherein we leave the self—the shadows behind, escaping. Anne Sexton reiterated again and again in her letters that it was crucial that the writer keep a hold on life by learning to face reality: “I think that writers must try not to avoid knowing what is happening. Everyone has so
mewhere the ability to mask the events of pain and sorrow.… But the creative person must not use this mechanism any more than they have to in order to keep breathing.” A distinction must be made between that writing which enables us to hold on to life even as we are clinging to old hurts and wounds and that writing which offers to us a space where we are able to confront reality in such a way that we live more fully. Such writing is not an anchor that we mistakenly cling to so as not to drown. It is writing that truly rescues, that enables us to reach the shore, to recover.
To become a writer I needed to confront that shadow-self, to learn ways to accept and care for that aspect of me as part of a process of healing and recovery. I longed to create a groundwork of being that could affirm my struggle to be a whole self and my effort to write. To fulfill this longing I had to search for that shadow-self and reclaim it. That search was part of a process of long inward journeying. Much of it took place in writing. I spent more than ten years writing journals, unearthing and restoring memories of that shadow-self, connecting the past with present being. This writing enabled me to look myself over in a new way, without the shame I had experienced earlier. It was no longer an act of displacement. I was not trying to be rid of the shadows, I wanted instead to enter them. That encounter enabled me to learn the self anew in ways that allowed transformation in consciousness and being. Resurrecting the shadow-self, I could finally embrace it, and by so doing come back to myself.
That woundedness that I was once so ashamed to recognize became for me a place of recovery, the dark deeps into which I could enter to find both the source of that pain and the means to heal. Only in fully knowing the wound could I discover ways to attend to it. Writing was a way of knowing. After what seemed like endless years of journal writing about the past, I wrote a memoir of my girlhood. It was indeed the culmination of this effort to accept the past and yet surrender its hold on me. This writing was redemptive. I no longer need to make this journey again and again.
women who write too much
There are writers who write for fame. And there are writers who write because we need to make sense of the world we live in; writing is a way to clarify, to interpret, to reinvent. We may want our work to be recognized, but that is not the reason we write. We do not write because we must; we always have choice. We write because language is the way we keep a hold on life. With words we experience our deepest understandings of what it means to be intimate. We communicate to connect, to know community. Even though writing is a solitary act, when I sit with words that I trust will be read by someone, I know that I can never be truly alone. There is always someone who waits for words, eager to embrace them and hold them close.
For the vast majority of my life I have longed to write. In my girlhood writing was the place where I could express ideas, opinions, beliefs that could not be spoken. Writing has then always been where I have turned to work through difficulties. In some ways writing has always functioned in a therapeutic manner for me. In The Dancing Mind, Toni Morrison suggests that the therapeutic ways writing can function are at odds with, or at least inferior to, a commitment to writing that is purely about the desire to engage language imaginatively. She contends: “I have always doubted and disliked the therapeutic claims made on behalf of writing and writers.… I know now, more than I ever did (and I always on some level knew it), that I need that intimate, sustained surrender to the company of my own mind while it touches another.…” Morrison’s description of the urge that leads to writing resonates with me. Still, I believe that one can have a complete imaginative engagement with writing as craft and still experience it in a manner that is therapeutic; one urge does not diminish the other. However, writing is not therapy. Unlike therapy, where anything may be spoken in any manner, the very notion of craft suggests that the writer must necessarily edit, shape, and play with words in a manner that is always subordinated to desired intent and effect. I call attention to the way writing has functioned therapeutically for me as a location where I may articulate that which may be difficult, if not impossible to speak in other locations because this need leads me to turn and turn again to the written words and partially explains the sheer volume of my written work.
As long as I had only written and published one or two books no one ever inquired or commented on my writing process, on how long it took me to complete the writing of a book. Once I began to write books regularly, sometimes publishing two at the same time, more and more comments were made to me about how much I was writing. Many of these comments conveyed the sense that I was either doing something wrong by writing so much, or at least engaged in writing acts that needed to be viewed with suspicion. When I first took creative-writing classes from women professors who taught from a feminist perspective, we were encouraged to examine the way that sexism had always interfered with women’s creativity, staging disruptions that not only limited the breadth and range of women’s writing but the quantity as well. In a feminist studies course taught by writer Tillie Olsen I learned reading her essays on writing that prior to the 1960s it was rare if a white female writer, or a black female or male writer, published more than one book. We talked in class both about the material conditions that “silence” writers as well as the psychological barriers (i.e., believing that work will not be received or that what one has to say is either not important or has already been said). Knowing that black writers had faced difficulties that inhibited their capacity to write or complete works that had been started did serve as a catalyst challenging me to write against barriers—to complete work, to not be afraid of the writing process.
To overcome fears about writing, I began to write every day. My process was not to write a lot but to work in small increments, writing and rewriting. Of course I found early on that if I did this diligently these small increments would ultimately become a book. In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard reminds readers: “It takes years to write a book—between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant. One American writer has written a dozen major books over six decades.… Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year.” Dillard’s numbers may no longer be accurate as writers today not only have more time to write but have more writing aids (like the computer). Certainly as a writer who has handwritten, then typed or keyed into computer, all my books, I know how the computer and printer speed up the process. Typing and retyping a book takes much more time than keying in rewrites on a computer. I never approach writing thinking about quantity. I think about what it is I want to say. These days when I see the small yet ample stack of books I have written (usually seen at book signings), I know that this body of work emerged because I am again and again overwhelmed by ideas I want to put in writing. Since my interests are broad and wide-ranging, I am not surprised that there is an endless flow of ideas in my mind.
I write as one committed simultaneously to intellectual life, which means that ideas are the tools I search out and work with to create different and alternative epistemologies (ways of knowing). That I am continuously moved to share these ideas, to share thought processes in writing is sometimes as much a mystery to me as it is to readers. For I have writing comrades who work with ideas in the mind as much as I do but who are not as driven as I am to articulate those ideas in writing. A driving force behind my writing passion is political activism. Contrary to popular assumption writing can function as a form of political resistance without in any way being propagandistic or lacking literary merit. Concurrently, writing may galvanize readers to be more politically aware without that being the writer’s sole intent.
A covert form of censorship is always at work when writing that is overtly espousing political beliefs and assumptions is deemed less serious or artistically lacking compared to work that does not overtly address political concerns. In our culture practically every aspiring writer realizes that work that is not addressing the status quo, the mainstream, that addresses unpopular political standpoints wi
ll rarely be given attention. It certainly will not make the best-seller list. Since I began my writing career utterly uninterested in writing anything other than poetry and fiction, work that I did not see as political, I was more acutely aware than most writers might be that by writing critical essays on unpopular political issues, I might never be seen by the mainstream world of critics and readers as an artistically “serious” writer. It has been challenging to maintain a commitment to dissident writing while also writing work that is not overtly political, that aspires to be more purely imaginative.
Successful writing in one genre often means that any work done in another genre is already marked as less valuable. While I have been castigated for writing critical essays that are too radical or simplistic, just “wrong-minded,” the poetry I write along with other work that does not overtly address political concerns is often either ignored or castigated for not being political enough. Until we no longer invest in the conventional assumption that a dichotomy exists between imaginative writing and nonfiction work, writers will always feel torn. Writers will always censor their work to push it in the direction that will ensure it will receive acclaim. Everyone knows that dissident writing is less likely to bring literary recognition and reward.
Dissident voices are rarely published by mainstream presses. Many writers from marginal groups and/or with unpopular perspectives have relied on small presses to publish their work. Indeed, my writing would not have achieved public acclaim were it not for the alternative small presses publishing my work at a time when large publishing houses simply held to the conviction that writing about race and gender would not sell. Mainstream publishers showed interest in my writing only after sales of work published with small presses documented that an established book-buying audience existed. Significantly, the publication of my work by a mainstream press was also possible because many young college-educated workers in the industry were familiar with the work because they had studied it in school or knew that other students were excited about it and they could affirm the existence of an established readership.
