In Remembrance of Bell Hooks

In Remembrance of Bell Hooks:On Being Human Darnell L. Moore (bio) I met bell hooks in October 2014. At the time, I still held an image of her as an iconic writer rather than an enfleshed Black woman full of desire and deep feeling. She was, after all, one of the most consequential feminist writers and intellectuals of our time. And like most well-known, widely-read, and celebrated figures, I connected to the life-changing words that she penned in her books [End Page 21] without realizing that her words were connected to a beating heart. bell was more than an avatar deserving of veneration. Seven years ago, one of the organizers charged with curating her residency at the New School extended an invitation to join bell in a public conversation on manhood, alongside educators Oman Frame, Ron Scapp and Kurt Voss. To say that I was ecstatic to be in the same room with her would be an understatement. Before we walked out of the green room and into the packed lecture hall, bell jokingly asked, "You sure that you aren't gay?" I laughed and affirmed that I was, in fact, a homo. But I remember that moment as revelatory. As I grew to learn, bell flirted and made jokes and gossipped and offered sharp cultural criticism and wrote conversation-starting books and loved and lusted and was erotic and spiritual and transparent and complicated because that was the stuff of her humanness. As much as she wrote and talked publicly about love with a poignant and graceful brilliance, she was a writer/thinker who was only able to write with such stunning power about a variety of themes because she first wrestled with the ways such themes emerged in her own life. On another occasion, a few years after the New School talk, I visited the institute that bears her name at Berea College in Kentucky. After we finished our talk, we went back to her house, where we chatted about everything from the business of publishing to relationships. I was stunned when she revealed that none of her books had ever made a bestsellers list or that she hadn't received big advances for her works because she understood that the payback would come in the form of royalties. She schooled me that day. She told me about her writing regimen–how she reads one or two books a day and how she wakes up early to write. I silently wished that I possessed half of her will. She reminded me to write only that which moved me because [End Page 22] that is what she did. And she shared stories about some of the relationships that she most cherished and even lamented her then current lack of intimate partnership. I was single at the time and connected with her desire. I let her know that I didn't want to write about a love that I didn't experience in real ways, in real time, in my own life. She understood. No amount of books or celebritydom can fill the inner wells of desire that even the sharpest of writers do their best to explicate on the page. The writing is, at best, a proximate step towards that which is imagined. And that is one of the reasons I respected her–because she imagined for herself and for those of us who read her. I want to remember bell's imagination and her wide grasp of cultural theory among much else. But I also want to remember her laughter and her honesty. I won't forget when I was honored to share an author's table with her at the Tucson Festival of Books in 2018. As we chatted over dinner, opposite a table post with a picture of our books on it, a white woman table-mate interrupted our dinner and conversation to get in a few words with bell. Before too long, bell looked past me and into the eyes of the woman and said, "Do you mind? I am trying to eat my dinner and don't want to talk right now!" I gasped. bell was unafraid, and I thought

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