Najma Sharif

Hi, I’m Najma. I’m a culture writer. And when I say culture, I mean, I write about everything from film and music to politics. I try to analyse and theorise about the world in the ways I can. Aside from that, I guess I would be a critical thinker and Somali woman living in the US.

Shadee Malaklou

It’s nice to meet you, Najma. I’m Dr Shadee Malaklou. I am the founder and inaugural director of the bell hooks centre of Berea College. I’m also the chair of the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Department. I am a scholar of Black feminism and Black liberation thought in the vein of Franz Fanon, and I actually read Fanon as a Gender Studies text, much through the lens of bell hooks and other Black feminist writers. It’s a real joy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Najma

Oh, nice! Fanon, I could talk about him all day. So where am I going to begin? In an interview, bell hooks once said that the line between culture and political writing was that the intent of political writing is to change how people think about their political reality, whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there. hooks is known for engaging in both.

Shadee

I think bell was really invested in the feminist politic of making the personal political. I once asked her – I had the supreme pleasure and privilege of befriending her – if she would describe herself as a Black feminist, and bell said, “No, I’m a feminist”. Without the additive. And she took that seriously, insofar as she wanted to use feminism as an anti-racist analytic to think about the way the world worked, and her place in it, and our place in it.

She named those intersecting worldings “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”, and later, in the conversation with Laverne Cox, added “cis” and “hetero” to patriarchy. This is what is especially powerful about bell’s work: she locates, with precision, the intersections that others abstract. When we abstract intersectionality, we misunderstand it as an analytic of intersecting experiences of oppression. And that’s not what it means to analyse and really disarticulate the intersecting structures of oppression that bell named and agitated against, both in her writing and in her person.

bell was a contrarian. That much I can recount from sharing time and space and conversation with her. To those ends, I would actually argue that the cultural and political merged for bell, because to change how people “think about their political reality” requires helping folks see “what’s already there”. And I do think that social media is one way that we can help people see past “imperialist white supremacist capitalist cis-hetero-patriarchy” in order to re/think their political possibilities. However, bell did not personally engage social media platforms, and warned that “social media is clutter and life is already full of clutter”. So, I guess what I’m saying is that social media can be the space of vapid filtered selfies and images of food (as “clutter”), but it can also be the place where we rattle and rage.

bell wrote about popular culture as the political, and, before she fell ill, invited well-known folks to her Institute at Berea College to do this kind of thinking with her – like Emma Watson, Laverne Cox, Cornel West and Darnell Moore – all of whom (perhaps, excluding Emma Watson) straddle cultural and political critique in a public-facing way.

One thing that bell talked about a lot was her critique of Beyoncé. Until the day she died, she was upset about the amount of vitriol she received because of writing that. bell was a spitfire and a dissident, even (especially) when it got her in trouble. She was a critic of our time. I become quite frustrated when the public opines and obsesses about her love ethic and forgets the critic that she was. They really de-politicise what she means by love. But for bell, love is the way and justice is the destination. There can be no justice without love, and no love without justice. And so even as she drags Beyoncé, there’s a love there. And I have to be honest, I was one of her closest friends, and she dragged me too, sometimes. But it was always with care.

Najma

I remember the response to the Beyoncé essay, talking about criticism and love, right? Was that part of her radical approach to this fearless, bold critique too? Was love what empowered her to put herself out there, and face the vitriol, or was it just the love of the criticism? The theory, the thought, like, how did she think about that?

Shadee

On the voicemail recording that bell took with her from home to home in Berea, she says, “All awakening to love is spiritual awakening”, which is a quote from her book All About Love, but it’s also inspired by the writings of the Sufi poet Rumi. For her, love is a verb, an action, a community, a care, an accountability, a possibility. And all of these things are what creates an anti-racist feminist praxis for addressing the intersections that bell critiques.

I do think that she came to love out of her Buddhist practice. And that’s something that she found a little later in life, not in opposition to theory, but as its complement. In an interview about the first time that she met Thich Nhat Hanh, bell recounts that she came to him with anger and rage, and that he told her to use that anger as “compost for her garden”. Which is to say, theory (bell’s garden of possibility) was made possible when she turned her anger and rage into love. The two co-existed for her.

Najma

I’m very curious as to the boldness in her critique that we don’t see today, because if it is coming from a place of love, knowing that source is important.

Shadee

bell was really skilled at making academic jargon accessible. We see that sometimes with academics who write for the public. Imani Perry and Cornel West do this, and I think that’s why they were invited to the Institute to have conversations with bell, because they similarly had one foot in the public sphere. They weren’t talking in this echo chamber of academia – a masturbatory practice in which one only speaks to other people who know their language, as a means of self-aggrandisement. You know, Dionne Brand says, “Black people are people without a translator”. And I think what is so beautiful about bell is that she tried to put words to something that is outside of language and its structuring logics of grammar – something that didn’t exist before she described it.

Najma

I have this really big book of contemporary writers, and I found an interview with bell hooks and Cornel West, when she started moving away from the more academic work, the early stuff, and he called her a “Black prophet”. What do you think of that?

Shadee

I do think bell was a prophet. Absolutely. To name just one example: ten years ago, at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Puerto Rico, she said that, given the choice, white women will always choose their race over their gender. And then Trump happened.

Najma

So happy I asked that. I was very afraid of dehumanising her or making her out to be some sort of deity.

Shadee

She is an elder, an ancestor now, so I feel she was part of a Black prophetic tradition. I think that’s what Cornel West was getting at, too. That it wasn’t just that she was a prophet in the popular sense; she was engaging this prophetic tradition of call and response, and radical critique and liberation theology, to make her interventions known.

Najma

How did bell hooks approach transgression in the classroom? I saved this quote where she says, “The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility.” So…

Shadee

Yes, thank you for that quote! So Fred Moten, a cultural critic and Performance Studies professor at NYU, describes the classroom as a potential “undercommons”: a space of possibility within but not of the university. Another thinker, who publishes under the pen name ‘la paperson’, describes this mis/education as a project of the “third university”. Jared Sexton talks about how under-the-radar, life-affirming socio-political spaces can exist: these are “not lived in the world that the rest of the world lives in, but [are]… underground, in outer space”, or underwater as the case may be. So for example, returning to Beyoncé, in Lemonade, she curates Black life almost entirely underwater, in an underworld where Black persons can actually breathe. I think that bell created a space in the classroom for those kinds of questions.

Najma

It’s interesting you mention these third spaces, because bell hooks can be attributed to a lot of digital feminists, really. A lot of people learned about her work online. Was that something that she thought about, like how her work came into the Tumblr sphere? Someone was saying there is no golden age of Tumblr or digital feminism without bell hooks, and that’s how I came across her work, on Tumblr at 16 years old.

Shadee

That’s so interesting, she would want nothing to do with that.

Najma

I know she hates social media. [Laughs]

Shadee

Yes, and she hated the computer. It was her sister and I who answered bell’s emails and received her correspondence. She didn’t have a mobile phone either; she only had a house line.

Najma

I guess I’m talking about how the digital space becomes a space to learn. You know, she talked about transgressing academia, and a lot of folks study online and come to terms with her work online.

Shadee

I agree with you, even if bell wouldn’t. I think that virtual and social media spaces can be a location of the Otherwise that bell wanted – an underground outside of the white gaze. Or, the space of an “oppositional gaze”, to use bell’s own language. It is very much a space where you can make your own possibilities. And to make your own possibilities is transgressive.

Having said that, we must beware – and I think that this is what bell feared – of how those spaces are appropriated. Representation will not save us. We see this with Black Twitter, for example. Spaces like Black Twitter are no longer sacred. They are available to woke, virtue-signal plucking and retweeting. bell was very much against that. Once usurped in this way, Black spaces are no longer the underground, undetectable, and yes, transgressive Otherwise of Black mutuality and care – those things that make Black life possible.

Najma

I remember witnessing the beginning of all this, and it was that safe space for Black women. Black non-binary people, plus-size Black women, Black Muslims, where there was nuance in the discussions being had at the time, and now it’s very much what you describe.

I want to follow through a line of where all this leads to, like what’s going to be the future of this? I hate the word “wokeism” but it’s the best way to describe the kind of virtue-signalling, grandstanding, self-righteousness that happens online with young people. Because when I think of bell hooks I think of intersectionality, nuance. I think of not looking for the most oppressed person in the room – there’s also solidarity, right?

Shadee

Well, bell was very concerned towards the end of her life about feminism, and that feminism was dying. She was very into feminist sisterhood beyond racial distinction.

Najma

A lot of what I’m seeing happening today is people trying to re-package misogynistic white supremacist patriarchal dynamics as radical. Like all the girls are saying they want to be housewives right now, and it’s like, are we in the ‘50s? Um, I think we already went through that wave of feminism?

Shadee

But also, which women have the privilege to be a housewife? Feminists of colour have held white feminism accountable for precisely this privilege. Claudia Jones, for example, and Toni Cade Bambara, to list another example, implored that we “get our house in order”– that we think first about our own participation in “imperialist white supremacist capitalist cis-hetero-patriarchy” before we go lead a march or participate in some movement out there. What about the Black and brown women who are cleaning these feminist activists’ homes, who these white feminists are paying under the table – in other words, not a living wage – so that they can go out and climb this patriarchal ladder at the behest of capitalism? “Lean in”, and all that.

Najma

And then there’s the other facet: this isn’t a reality at all because men aren’t even making money – they’re not even the capitalist patriarchs that they used to be.

Shadee

Black men certainly aren’t.

Audre Lorde says Black people were “never meant to survive”, and I think she means not just slavery, but its afterlife. People weren’t paid living wages on purpose, so they would starve and die out. I think it’s very, very intentional that communities of colour, especially Black communities, cannot find work that makes life possible.

Najma

I would think that intersectional feminist lens, that nuanced, caring, holistic viewpoint of the world would come back as people struggle, but instead, people are reverting back to harmful ways of thinking, because they’re realising they didn’t benefit from the virtue signalling. They benefit more from performing, I guess, heteronormativity, hegemonic ways of living, like playing into these housewife dynamics. I feel very alienated as a Black Muslim woman, right now, so I’ve just been thinking a lot about how to make a u-turn on the thinking. What are we gonna have to do?…cause it’s bad out here.

Shadee

There’s several strands to what you just said. I’m going to try to tease them out.

You talk about Black men and youth: bell was very, very invested in the children’s novels that she wrote. The thing that she was most concerned about at the end of her life was that she wanted to not write academic books, but more children’s novels. She wrote novels specifically about Black boys. She wanted Black boys to feel that they could be tender and soft.

The second thing I want to say is I actually see a different move from what you do in terms of romantic dynamics and gender and sexuality. As Hari Ziyad says, “My gender is Black,” because gender in Black culture has always been fluid. Black genders and sexualities are not imagined as modern or postmodern, in other words, at the apex of human civilisation and progress. Instead, we locate them in “the bush”, in a time before human time, marked by sexual excess and gender ambiguity.

I think a lot of sex/gender performance in communities of colour, such as what you’re describing, is an attempt to climb that ladder of civilisation through white mimicry, to appeal to whiteness in order to accrue what Fanon describes as “ontological resistance”: the human recognition that makes secondary markers of identity like gender and sexuality cohere.

So, you go to any non-white country and the first thing that you see at the pharmacy is skin-lightening creams and hair removal products. Communities of colour have an obsession with laser hair removal and electrolysis, and an obsession with nose jobs, specifically, aquiline noses. I don’t think that this is just about being “marriage material” or having romantic sexual appeal. I think that it’s about having white feminine appeal specifically.

In terms of what bell might say about this, I encourage everyone to revisit her first book, taken from Sojourner Truth’s refrain, “Ain’t I a woman”.

Najma

It’s very interesting that you say all that is for white appeal. Because there’s an entire genre on TikTok right now of women who teach each other etiquette and how to dress. And they’re getting nose jobs, and the amount of money they spend on just everything, filler, extensions. They’re teaching you where to grab the champagne flute from, because, you know, we all do that every day (!)

Shadee

Do you think that this is about respectability? Respectability politics is always white. I was never invited to cotillion [a ‘ball’ in which children are taught etiquette] when I was growing up in multiculturalist Southern California. Yes, even (especially) in a liberal haven, one must perform the trappings of whiteness.

Najma

Respectability politics is making a huge comeback, like for sure – there’s a whole culture of it – men and women, all genders, all races, across religions.

Shadee

I’m not on TikTok so I feel like an idiot.

Najma

Don’t come! You don’t have to do that. [Laughs]

It has damaged my brain! But yeah, that was very illuminating because it definitely ties together something I have been witnessing in politics and culture and social media.

So, what do you think are bell hooks’ most underrated books and essays?

Shadee

I like Bone Black, mostly because she talks a lot (and lyrically) about her childhood in that book. I also like Appalachian Elegy, because in it she attributes her dissident feminism not to the cosmopolitanism of (post)modernity, but to the culture of hillbilly folks in the “Kentucky backwoods”, who she describes as her “ancestors and kin”. bell was Appalachian, but we don’t think of her that way, because she’s Black. Appalachia is imagined as this white coal mine region. There are plenty of Black and Indigenous Appalachians. bell was Indigenous as well, which again, we don’t talk about because she’s Black, and Black almost cancels out anything else. So, I think her books about growing up in Kentucky are really meaningful.

Najma

Before you dip on us, I wanted to know more about what bell was like as a friend and as a colleague?

Shadee

Oh, she was a spitfire, and she was a gossip. She was obsessed with Juicy Fruit gum. I’d buy it for her in bulk. And she didn’t like the sugar free kind or the kind in a canister; she liked the old school Juicy Fruit gum packets. Before Juicy Fruit, she was obsessed with peppermints, specifically, soft fluffy peppermints. Not the hard kind.

She was the first person who called me in the morning and the last person who called me at night. And she’d want me to bring her coffee in the morning. And I’d be like, “bell, I have to teach!”, then she’d call me fifteen times during my class because she wanted a McDonald’s cheeseburger.

bell was in a lot of pain towards the end of her life. And she could be – well, she described me in this way, but I think this applies to her too – “strident”. But, you know what, I loved that about her. I loved that she was a truth teller. It was her love language. A tough love, but love. She wasn’t airing dirty laundry; she was curating an honest, intentional, beloved feminist community.

I would sit with her as she devoured mystery novels. I think that the kind of friendship we had gave me a lot of love, because we would sit there, and she would be reading in silence or napping. And I would be working. And it was a kind of friendship where you didn’t have to talk. You know, there was an ease there.

She said it like it is and took no prisoners. You knew when she loved you, even when she knocked you around, even when her loving and doting gaze turned into her trademark side-eye. I loved her, too, and I’ll miss her forever.

Najma

Wow, that’s… wow. Thank you so much.

Shadee

Thank you. I’d love to be in conversation again soon.

Najma

That’d be really dope.

Najma Sharif is a culture and politics writer based in the USA. Dr Shadee Malaklou is the founder and inaugural director of the bell hooks center of Berea College. This interview took place on 25 February 2022. This is a shortened transcript edited by Theodora Danylevich and Zainab Rahim.

Featured photo: bell hooks speaks on campus at UW-Madison / University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives Photo Collection