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Page 3 of 5
bell hooks: Maya, over the years I’ve often been attacked by other black women writers, but you have always been incredibly supportive, incredibly loving. Could you talk some about the need we have to be nurtured by the writers who have come before?
Maya Angelou: It wasn’t difficult to be supportive of you because you’ve always, in every word, been so forthright. I think that may be what has alienated some people from you and your work because you were forthright in a time when...it was sort of like, you were country when country wasn’t cool (both laugh).
But I thought it was just the most wonderful thing in the world that you had such pizzazz. Even when you weren’t certain, you were confident. I know that sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it was very necessary to have your voice.
bell hooks: Sometimes I have felt so discouraged, particularly at the attacks that have come from black women peers.
Maya Angelou: Well, you have to realize that those attacks are fueled by, impelled by, jealousy.
Melvin McLeod: I’d like to raise the other side of this equation, which is not the criticism but the great respect and influence accorded you. When I was reading your essay, "They Came To Stay," about the virtues of African-American women, I was struck by how prominent black women are among the moral examples and guides of our culture. There is yourself; there is Oprah Winfrey, who I think may be the most important spiritual teacher in America today; there is Alice Walker; bell’s work has a deeply moral character. What is it about the condition of the African-American woman that makes her so well suited for the difficult role of moral instructor, and willing to take it on?
bell hooks: Before Maya says something, can I just say that when you named off all those women, I realized what we have in common is not just that we’re black, but that we all came from harsh and difficult circumstances. We were on the bottom of this society’s class totem pole at some point in time. I think that is as much a factor as race, where we were positioned class-wise—and geographically, because those women, we were all southerners.
Maya Angelou: That’s true, very true. Well, there’s a sardonic line in a nineteenth- century blues song: "I was down so low, gettin’ up stayed on my mind." Very true, too. There’s no place to go but up.
Also, there’s somebody who went before us. Those grandmothers and great grandmothers, and grandfathers and uncles and fathers, told us, "You’re the best we have." This didn’t happen so much in bell’s generation, but in my generation one was told, "You represent the race." And my goodness, that was a piece of a burden, and a wonderful chore, a wonderful charge. You have to go out there and represent the race.
So, one, we had very little choice about it, and two, there was a willingness, a volunteerism, to do the best you could.
bell hooks: Many spiritual teachers—in Buddhism, in Islam—have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom, to enlightenment. I think many black women writers have tried to create our philosophy, our theory, our artistic vision, from that place of experience, and I think anybody who does that is uniquely situated to speak to masses of people, to be a teacher in the great spiritual, prophetic sense of that word. When Maya Angelou tells a story, a story often coming from her own experience in the world, you see the ripple effect through the audience, the sense of connectedness. It’s storytelling that creates community.
I think that contemporary black women writers have been willing to risk telling things about their lives that other people haven’t been willing to tell. I sat with a group of women last night and I was telling them about Maya Angelou writing about sexuality for the over-sixty and the over-seventy. Everyone admitted that hardly anyone touches upon that. Maya begins from the place of her mother’s experience, and then from her experience; I think that willingness to share allows one to teach in a very different way.
Maya Angelou: Thank you. The idea that closing one’s eyes and sticking one’s head into the sand, as the ostriches are accused of doing, will make the bugaboo go away has never been one of the escapes for the black woman. We’ve had to see and admit what we see. Or we’d have been killed, we’d have been dead.
bell hooks: Well, how do you feel about the critics who have accused you of being a modern day mammy for the Clintons, for the nation? Can you talk about that some?
Maya Angelou: I can’t think of anything better (laughs).
bell hooks: Well, say more. I know your understanding of that is much more sophisticated than people will assume when you say that.
Maya Angelou: Exactly. What I mean is I take responsibility for the time I take up and the space I occupy. That’s what I do. And if that is considered being a mammy, well, I can’t do anything about their ignorance. I can’t de-ignorize them. So if I’m asked to speak for my church, or my neighborhood, or my people, I’m going to speak. I pay taxes. In all the ways I pay my dues. In all the ways.
I have a lot to say, so I speak. I’m sorry that folks find that negative and derogatory. I’m always extolling the human spirit, and sometimes the human spirit doesn’t want to be extolled. It wants rather to drag down the extoller. You know, when you say to someone, "You’re wonderful," and they say, "I’m not that wonderful, stop saying that," well, they tell me more about themselves than about me. Because what I see is the wonder in the human spirit. What I see is the potential in the human spirit. Some people will really try to live up to the level upon which you address them. Some can’t. Some resent being asked to come up, come up out of the morass, come out of the mire, come up, the air is breathable, up an inch out of self hate.
bell hooks: I was particularly struck by your critical reflection on your support of Clarence Thomas. I found it fascinating because I believe that this nation can only heal from the wounds of racism if we all begin to love blackness. And by that I don’t mean that we love only that which is best within us, but that we’re also able to love that which is faltering, which is wounded, which is contradictory, incomplete. In your "I Dare to Hope" piece you seem to be talking about the necessity of not giving up on people.
Maya Angelou: Absolutely. You see, I think we confess that we’re not very smart if we give up on people. I think that our pundits ought to have planned ways in which to go out to Clarence Thomas, to surround him...
bell hooks: That’s what I found fascinating in your piece, since I didn’t support him...
Maya Angelou: I understand. But to surround him with so much stuff that he’s almost a pupae in chrysalis, instead of shunting him away, closing him in. If we could have done that, surrounded him, eventually he might have emerged a butterfly. Now, he might have emerged a dragon, but I think the effort should have been made.
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