"There's No Place to Go But Up"

Moderated by Melvin McLeod 

Maya Angelou in conversation with bell hooks 

Probably the best part of my job as editor of the Shambhala Sun is getting to meet some truly wise people and to listen in on their remarkable conversations. Here is a heart-to-heart, mind-to-mind exchange between two people, both important African-American women writers, who care and think deeply about life.

I must confess I knew little of Maya Angelou until we began to prepare for this interview. I had missed her famed inaugural reading that moved so many; I had not read any of her best-selling writings. I discovered a writer of well-crafted simplicity, and a person who, after a hard, varied and fascinating life, has come to a profound sense of responsibility. She is a true elder of our society, a teacher bringing a helpful, positive message to millions.

bell hooks is a kind friend to the Shambhala Sun, and I only become more and more impressed with her passionate thought and writing. bell is someone who shows that the true life of the mind is not one of disinterested speculation but one of questioning that consumes the whole person, full of emotion, often painful. Listen to two people who know in their bones that life truly matters.
—Melvin McLeod



Maya Angelou: Good morning, bell. How are you?

bell hooks: I’m great. I finished reading lots of your work yesterday and I was just so excited by it. I love the work of women writers who have gone before me, like yourself, who have been bold in their vision and in their speech. In your book of essays, Even the Stars Look Lonesome, you say, "We need art to live fully and to grow healthy." Talk about that.

Maya Angelou: That’s true. I do believe that art is as important to the human psyche and physical body as air is, as oxygen, as water. And alas, because it’s not something we can quantify reliably, we tend to think art is a luxury.

Art is not a luxury. The artist is so necessary in our lives. The artist explains to us, or at least asks the questions which must be asked. And when there’s a question asked, there’s an answer somewhere. I don’t believe a question can be asked which doesn’t have an answer somewhere in the universe. That’s what the artist is supposed to do, to liberate us from our ignorance.

bell hooks: Well, you do that for millions of people. I was writing in my journal last night, just writing down sentences from your work that I liked so much. I feel that often your writing is deceptively simple. One might think, "Oh, this is just easy reading," and then there’ll be a line that makes you sit and ponder for a long time. For me, one of those is where you’re talking about the need for solitude and the need to stay away from company that betrays you, that corrupts you, and you have that wonderful line, "It’s never lonesome in Babylon." I read this line to so many people, and I thought about how we need to make children feel that there are times in their lives when they need to be alone and quiet and to be able to accept their aloneness.

Maya Angelou: Yes, yes. Well, again, the writer is always peeking at the inner meaning. However, Nathaniel Hawthorne says, "Easy reading is damn hard writing." So sometimes the critic will say, "Maya Angelou has a new book and it’s very good, but then she’s a natural writer." Well, being a natural writer is like being a natural open heart surgeon. I labor over every sentence. I labor to make it seem simple. I would like to have a reader thirty pages into a book of mine before she knows she’s reading. I would love that. I will work on a paragraph for two days, three days, to keep it simple. I’ve been signing books recently, and people will walk up to me with a book and say, "I read it in the line." I’m torn by that, because I’m glad the work is accessible, but on the other hand, it took me a year to get that together and they read it in the line! (Laughs.)

bell hooks: Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible.

Maya Angelou: Yes, indeed. When Romar Bearden or John Viger or Artis Lane do their paintings or sculptures, they mean for the art to be inside the people, whether they think about it consciously or not. Elizabeth Catlin wants her work inside people. So nobody really wants to write dust-catching matter, nobody. Every artist wants to say, here it is, if you can internalize it, if it can be of any use to you, then my work has not been in vain.

bell hooks: You’re constantly encouraging people to read, and not just to read your books but to read a wide variety of writers—to read the great white male writers, to read the great African-American writers of both genders. I think that’s a force that we see in everything you’ve done—praise for the power of reading to transform our lives.

Maya Angelou: I remember myself as a young girl in Arkansas in the lynching days of the thirties. One man was lynched in my town and people took pieces of his skin for souvenirs, because he was burned after he was lynched. My grandmother was kind of the mother of the town, mother of the black part of town, and she heard about this and we prayed and prayed and prayed. Every time she’d think about it—"On your knees."

In the meantime, I was reading Charles Dickens, and Dickens liberated me from hating all whites all the time. I knew that I liked some of these people, because I felt for Oliver, and I felt for Tim. I read the Bronte sisters and I felt for those people. I decided that the people in my town were a different race than the whites on the moors and in the poor people’s homes and in orphanages and prisons. So I was saved from hating all whites, you see.

bell hooks: When I read Wuthering Heights as a working class girl struggling to find herself, an outsider, I felt that Heathcliff was me, you know? He was symbolic to me of a kind of black race: he was outcast, he was not allowed into the center of things. I transposed my own drama of living in the apartheid south onto this world of Wuthering Heights and felt myself in harmony with those characters.

Maya Angelou: Absolutely.

Melvin McLeod: It strikes me you are suggesting that reading is a more powerful way to develop empathy with people of different races or classes or times than even our normal day to day relationships.

bell hooks: Well, this is so because reading requires that you have to use your imagination. When I’m reading Wuthering Heights I have to imagine what Heathcliff looks like, I have to imagine what Katherine is like. I have to imagine and so my mind has to be working.