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Valerie Grim

A Review Belonging: A Culture of Place
By bell hooks
Routledge

African Americans’ oral and written traditions are full of stories about return, of reverse migration away from places where they exiled themselves in a search for economic, social and political opportunity. For more than 400 years, these stories have encouraged back-to-Africa and back-to-the-South movements. Now hooks, a widely published author, feminist and native of Kentucky, has become a returnee—she is now a distinguished professor in residence in Appalachian studies at Berea College. It is the experience of growing up in Kentucky, leaving and coming home again that she chronicles in this autobiographical account of change in both the interior and exterior landscape.

Generations of African Americans have gone in search of old farm homes where they were born and raised, diligently seeking the gardens that held their nourishment, the streams where they fished trout for the family’s supper, that spot where grandma’s flower garden grew at the edge of the front porch. This remembering and longing, hooks writes, is an indication of a need to feel connected, though some might argue that it is also a desire to make the present tolerable and hopeful, that by romanticizing the past we feed the spirit and warm the heart and thereby keep the body moving.

hooks uses powerful metaphors to reconstruct the agrarian past that for most black people is a fading identity. Home, she writes, is not only an emotional and physical space, but also the environment where life is conceived and creativity inspired. It is in this rootedness that hooks finds harmony and wholeness, where she herself finds peace, first with herself and then with others and with nature. But while Belonging is a powerful cultural history of place, it also reflects the loss of place. hooks writes of an earth disappeared beneath concrete; of a pastoral idyll eaten away by disharmonious industrialization; of blacks forgetting their agrarian past and historical love of and for the land; of communities built through the creative arts of quilting, gardening and cooking being displaced into urban mazes that stifle creativity and imagination. Reading hooks’ warm descriptions of her growing-up years in a farming community offers a therapeutic sense of relief, but ultimately her book is a reminder of what has died in our society.

This is not a call for return to rural life. For most of us that is not likely or even possible (though there’s much to be gained by participating in a community garden, spending time in the woods observing what nature provides or even tending flower pots on a balcony). Rather, hooks encourages a return to our rural past as an ideal. By re-adopting the agrarian values that foster creativity and community, by re-engaging with the land and nature, the “dearest freshest deep down things,” she writes (quoting poet Gerard Manley Hopkins), we can find autonomy and peace within ourselves.

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VALERIE GRIM is an associate professor of African American and African diaspora studies at Indiana University-Bloomington.