Sometimes, my parents, teachers, or elders would scold and reprimand me for speaking when I was not asked, or for not recognizing what they said about me, or the world around, as a child. Also, talking back. “Rude” is what they called it.
That didn’t deter me. I believed my voice was important and that it was of equal value to others around me, if only for my youthful enthusiasm. I felt a sense of guilt for speaking back.
That contradiction ran deep. You must understand, I’m Nigerian — Urhobo. Although my family and I lived stints in countries between Africa and the West, I was still raised in an ostensibly Nigerian way: with a spoonful of “speak when spoken to” and a deference to authority.
When I encountered the work of the feminist, scholar and cultural critic bell hooks (née Gloria Jean Watkins), who died at 69 on Dec. 15, I was in graduate school and 22 years old. The first book of hers I read was the 1989 collection of essays, “Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black.” It was only then that my habit of talking back to adults took on a new meaning for me. As a child, it felt like an act of necessary disobedience. It became a politic worthy of adherence as an adult.
A young Ms. Hooks dissected existing conventions that required her to speak only when spoken to. She based her work on her experiences as a Black American woman born in the American South and Kentucky. I found a home in her work like many other Black women from a different country, generation, and with different experiences from Ms. Hooks.
She gave me language to understand the shame and triumphs of Black girlhood through describing her own childhood in which she was punished for talking back, or “speaking as an equal to an authority figure.” Children, and especially girls, were not supposed to have this audacity. Partly, the triumph was just having it.
She believed it was necessary. Ms. hooks noted that when girls became women, they would be allowed more room to speak, but that their words would be “audible but not acknowledged as significant.” Women could say the right, socially acceptable things in everyday conversation, but if their ideas called into question the structure of patriarchy, they would often be dismissed. That’s a reality that won’t change unless we reject it.
Indeed, the mere act of speech isn’t enough; we must also speak truth to power, sometimes even within our own communities. Ms. hooks understood what this looks like for Black girls and women who are often socialized under a “cult of privacy” — the belief that it breaks a certain code to openly discuss the things that take place within our homes and personal relationships. Talking back in your own communities is a radical act, she stated.
As a writer and cultural critic, I’ve found this to be true. For example, I’ve found that when I call out the ways that art, films and stories about Black cultures in Africa are filtered through the mostly white gaze of industry gatekeepers to people who look like me, we often agree. Yet, when I criticize them for maintaining that same white gaze I am accused of being divisive.
But I know both of these realities can be true. In a society not designed to take our pains seriously — where it can be difficult for us to even see ourselves as the inflicters of pain — I’m learning and re-learning how to use my speech. Ms. Hooks understood that language and voice are how marginalized people can humanize themselves For themselves.
“Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side,” Ms. hooks wrote, “a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible. It is that act of speech, of ‘talking back,’ that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject — the liberated voice.”
She was tough but compassionate and an inspiration to others. These discussions are incomplete if they don’t consider history, race, class and gender together. The guilt I felt as a child for speaking out is no longer there.
On the day Ms. hooks died, I returned to the first chapters of “Talking Back” after some years. I felt familiarity, a return to the rawness of her still revolutionary ideas.
Multiple generations of women whose voices were made possible by her work are saddened by her passing. Ms. hooks was for us a lighthouse and talking back was how she helped us find our way.
Kovie Biakolo (@koviebiakolo) is a journalist who writes about culture and identity and is the author of the forthcoming “Foremothers: 500 Years of Heroines From the African Diaspora.”
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