(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
hooks was an African-American theorist, educator, and social critic.
She grew up working class in a small town with rigid boundaries and a stifling atmosphere. Her father’s reading—and more fundamentally, his literacy—kept him in touch with a world beyond this, offering the possibility of connecting with it (hooks 2010, 133). He gave her this gift by demonstrating that in “laying the foundation for a passion for words and ideas, reading made the impossible possible” (ibid.). hooks also learned from her father that it was more important to read critically than pursue formal, higher education (pp. 127–130). These intertwined themes of how the literacy we take for granted helps connect us to the world at large, and how reading critically can expand our consciousness, colours hook’s lifetime of work on reading for social equality and civic engagement.
Reading and thinking critically, hooks relates, “helped me survive the traumas encountered in our patriarchal dysfunctional family setting” (p. 186). By reading with curiosity she gained the ability to conceive of a world other than that imposed on her by immediate circumstances—she was empowered to imagine rather than merely react (ibid.). Through the ability to place yourself in different time periods, different social structures, and different bodies, you come to see more possibilities for your own life. For her, “understanding the larger frame helped cultivate in me the seeds of mindful awareness and compassion” (ibid.). We can all benefit from literature in this way.
A critical reader and thinker longs to understand how the world works (p. 7). The practice involves “finding the answers to those eternal questions of the inquisitive child—and then utilizing that knowledge in a manner that enables you to determine what matters most” (p. 9). It requires “radical openness”: a creative willingness to discover difficult truths (p. 187). This is an effortful stance, though, because by default we tend to defend and protect our viewpoints, ruling out the perspectives of others (p. 10). Here hooks is placing a demand on the reader; “radical openness” is no pleasant platitude.
We also often resist looking past the superficial truth of what we read (p. 9). It is comfortable to believe that we’re learning passively; the critical reader seeks “what matters most” by aiming to understand the underlying truth. They read with discernment by embracing the “joy and power” of intentional, active thinking (pp. 8–10). We become wiser when we learn to “reflect, to broaden our vision so that we can see the whole picture”, as hooks began to do when reading a child (p. 187).
This mindful reading fosters our ability to experience awe, by engaging our imagination (pp. 187–8). Openness to wonder transforms the ideas we encounter into sources of inspiration, aiding our struggle for radical openness. The point here is that it’s possible to read in such a way that these effects don’t materialise: if hooks as a little girl accepted that ideas were fixed and static, that the boundaries of her world were unshakeable, impregnable walls separating her powerless self from the wider world, she may have never left. When we remember that ideas are always subject to revision we are able to use what we read to transform the world in a positive fashion (p. 188). Reading can “illuminate and heighten our sense of wonder, our recognition of the power of mystery” (ibid.).
Fiction, by demanding the use of our imagination, enables us to transpose ourselves into the world of the text. When hooks read Dickens as a child she felt herself “in harmony” with the characters (McLeod 1998, (quoted in)). She is disturbed by women who behave as if they can “only read women”, black people, black writers, or white students who believe that they “can only identify with a white writer” (ibid.). This is the path to losing sight of “the power of empathy and compassion” (ibid.).
Reading as a child, hooks found “an alternative sense of self and identity in the world of books” without thinking about race and writing (hooks 2010, 103). She explains (p. 104):
The only canons I formed in my mind were filled with the writers with whom I felt a soul inspiring resonance, the writers whose works were great to me because they gave me words, wisdom, and visions powerful enough to transform me and my world
It is important to critically “read works by authors who may be racist, sexist, engaged in class elitism, or homophobic” because openly addressing issues of diversity in this way encourages us to interrogate our biases, and reflect about how forces of discrimination dominate and intersect (p. 106). Refusing to read such authors would have constituted “a tremendous loss” to how hooks constructed her identity, how she conceived of herself (p. 108).
When approaching a work that was created in a context where “prejudicial thinking was more accepted”, she suggests adopting an “awareness of multiple intentions” (p. 106). In this way we can separate the aspects of a work that speak to our soul from the discriminatory assumptions displayed elsewhere in the work (pp. 106–107). When she taught such books to students she “did not ignore or gloss over the prejudices and racial hatreds expressed…but neither did [she] make that the central focus of [their] critical reading” (p. 108). Her willingness to read such books depends on the larger context that they express; contemporary literature would be unlikely to warrant this treatment (p. 110).
Returning to what she learned from her father, hooks suggested creating community literacy programs in order to include marginalised women in feminism: literacy is “an important feminist agenda” (Olson 1994 (quoted in)). Lacking literacy, “newly born citizens of color, raised in homes where English may or may not be spoken” are “doomed to earning slave wages” (hooks 2010, 131). A person who lacks basic reading skills is unable to learn to their full capacity or fully participate in a democracy (p. 132):
We cannot be proper stewards of our environment, caring for self and the world, without the ability to read
Although a solitary act, “reading can actually be a part of the path to communion and community” (McLeod 1998). Thinkers like Malcolm X, hooks suggests, came to their spirituality and consciousness when they had the “solitude to read”—and, “tragically, like so many young black males, that solitude only came in prison” (ibid.). Academics and writers are accustomed to both having this solitude and being able to discuss what they read, whereas most people lack a community of this type. Even lower quality books are valuable in this regard because it’s the “storytelling that creates community” (ibid.). hooks proposes “camps, like summer camps, that grown people could go to where they could fellowship together with books” (ibid.).
Reading with radical openness allows us to break out of the rigidly delimited communities of our birth to form communities of our own which can lift their members up, and carry them beyond. But reading in this way is not a given. It is difficult as an adult to read with the curiosity of a child and engage critically with potentially uncomfortable and challenging material. In re-discovering, then practising, our ability to experience awe in books, in reading outside our everyday experiences, we find possibilities. In helping others acquire literacy and critical reading ability, we help ignite more inclusive civic engagement.