English discussion post

C all a n d R esponse— T aking a S tand By bell hooks

Reading Silas House's speech "Our Secret Places in the Waiting World," I hear him speak our collective pain and lamentation, those of us who are exploited, oppressed, dominated. I hear the lamentation of the privileged who witness suffering, who long for justice but who feel more often than not overwhelmed by powerlessness. Even though Silas powerfully calls us to act again and again, to revolt and resist on behalf of freedom and justice for all—on behalf of fairness—there are not many who are answering the call. Then there are those who have answered, but whose voices grow weary from burnout, from encroaching fear and despair that there will be no change coming. All too often, when freedom fighters are telling our stories again and again, speaking truth to power with no response that brings about progres­ sive change, we grow weary. We become afraid, and we long to be silent. But, Audre Lorde, poet, activist, lesbian, has already told us in her poem "A Litany for Survival" that "when we are silent / we are still afraid / So it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive."

To re-kindle a spirit of home, Silas evokes the emergence of a "New Ap­ palachia" made up of folk who are outsiders, nomads, immigrants. House declares:

We are gathered as a community to talk about a New Ap­ palachia of the rural and the urban, the white and the black, the Cherokee and the Hispanic, the straight and the gay and the transgendered, the queer, the Other. We are a new Appalachia made up of a people who are perpetual immi­ grants, those whom the rest of the nation see as the Other, no matter how assimilated they may be within this culture.

When I read these words, the speech in its entirety, I affirm the spirit of difference and diversity evoked. Yet, I do not see us as representing a new Appalachia. What is new is our visibility, our speaking out without change, our solidarity. Yet this diverse Appalachia has always been and will always

Professor, activist, and fem inist bell hooks is the author o f numerous award-winning works that seamlessly blend the stu d y o f race, class, gender, culture, and teaching into a unique and thought-provoking call to action, hooks, born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, received a PhD from the University o f California, Santa Cruz in 1983. She has taught English, African studies, and African American studies at Yale University and women's studies and American literature at Oberlin College, and was a distinguished lecturer o f English literature at the City College o f New York.

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R esponses to A S A K eynote A ddress 123

be. A nd w e m ust be careful not to fall into the binary separations that simply re-articulate another version of us and them.

I am alm ost tw enty years older than Silas. A nd w hat I rem em ber m ost about m y grow ing up life in the Kentucky hills w as the w idespread belief that those of us w ho lived in the hills were different because w e chose to separate ourselves from the conventional w orld and its laws and creeds. No doubt there w as plenty of racism and sexism in those hills, b u t there w as alw ays racial integration, the crossing of boundaries, folks living the life that they w anted to live in spite of all m anner of prejudices and obstacles. Truly shared class positionality w as a unifying factor; everyone around u s w as living w ith less, everyone around us was poor and w orking class, squatters, renters, a n d a few ow ners. There w as m uch diversity in that w orld, and even though m any folks were not educated, they were radically open, refusing to judge and condem n others.

I evoke this subculture of Appalachia that has always been because I think it is vital that we honor connections to a past where difference, however relative, survived and w as at times celebrated. With critical awareness, we m ust recognize the spaces of openness and solidarity forged in the concrete experience of living in communities that were always present in radical spaces in Appalachia both then and now. Rather than speak of a "new Appalachia," I believe it is essential for unity in diversity to gather those seeds of progres­ sive change and struggle that have long characterized the lives of some indi­ viduals in rural Kentucky. While Silas says "in Appalachia, w e have always been about rem embering," he declares: "I hate the fact that so m any of us w ithin this region believe that w e m ust cling to the past w ithout ever going forw ard." With insight, he shares that "we m ust find balance betw een . . . rem embering and going forward." A fundam ental aspect of that balance has to be that those of us w ho are progressive, who are more critically conscious and aware, n o t construct hierarchies w herein w e separate ourselves from those w ho are still held in bondage by dom inator thinking. For w e will not convert or change folks w ithout extending the forgiveness and compassion that is essential for the building of communities of solidarity.

There is no evil that exists in the larger society that is not present here in Kentucky, and in our beloved hills—the hatreds that abound in the w orld at large (hatred of queer folk, h atred of colored folks). The only w ay to change from dom inator culture to a culture of fairness is to teach folks to love justice. A nd th at teaching begins w ith those w ho are m ost likely to be the targets of hate-em bodying principles, the revolution of values that are the heart of all true m ovem ents for social justice.

We are n o t calling forth a rom antic nostalgia about the A ppalachian past w hen w e w ork to reveal and rem em ber the roots of radicalism, linking progressive change in the past to the progressive change w e long for in the present.

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