Bone Black, Memories of Girlhood by Bell Hooks

When I first started reading I worried that this thinnish volume would be not so great. This can be worse even than bad sometimes, if it sits there - blat!- not doing anything interesting whatsoever. It was hooks' foreward that got me

" We look back as if we are standing at a distance. Examining life retrospectively we are there and not there, watching and watched. Evoking the mood and sensibility of moments, this is an autobiography of perceptions and ideas. The events described are always less significant than the impressions they leave on the mind and heart>"

Sounding somehow very dull to me, especially as it follows stuff like this

"An unconventional memoir... I share my secret world... This is autobiography as truth and myth -- as poetic witness... That rebellious writer of the Beat Generation Jack Kerouac always declared 'memories are inseparable from dreams.'"

Is she trying to apologize for something? Too many years in academia, perhaps. She writes "Memories" into the title after all, not autobiography, don't worry about it so much. Gore Vidal solved the problem by calling his memoir Palimpsest, which he'll tell you in his forward means tissue of lies. We all know memory is a funny thing, it shouldn't be a problem.

And luckily it turns out that it isn't a problem after all. Bone Black is a string of sketches of character, moments and observations that bring to us bell hooks' experience as a poor African-American girl growing up the South. She writes of her schools, her neighbours and neighbourhoods, her mother, her grandmother and a miasma of tormenting brothers and sisters. The narrator grows from small to young adult. There is plenty of event -- like when she's doing the ironing and her mother and sisters are picking on her so much that she burns her arm on purpose. She remembers enough specifics to make it real - like the difference between Dove soap and home-made lye soap. And hooks writes from a perspective that you don't hear about every day -- like this bit about her experience of desegregation:

"School is a place where we come face to face with racism. When we walk through the rows of national guardsmen with their uniforms and guns we think that we will be the first to die, to lay our bodies down. We feel despair and long for the days when school was a place where we learned to love and celebrate ourselves, a place whe we were number one."

In the end, hooks is probably right to warn us at the beginning, in case we care. There is a foggy impressionism in the writing style -- the blurring of so many fights between her parents; the punishments she receives; the continuous conflicts she has with everyone in her family but the very old; her constant sense of being singled out. Sometimes her litany of woes irritated me because all these things contribute to her development of an intense and productive inner life, which is a good thing, no? On the other hand, I never felt excluded from my family so what the fuck do I know.

"I take him my book to read him passages. Like Rilke, he tells me not to be afraid to look deep into everything, not to be afraid even of pain. I can tell him, my grandfather who loves me always, that I want to belong -- that it hurts to be always on the outside. He tells me there are lots of ways to belong in this world. And that my work is to find out where I belong."

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