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Page 4 of 5
bell hooks: That really impressed me, especially in terms of thinking about the larger meaning of compassion. I feel I’m always trying to address the question of not dividing people into oppressors and oppressed, but trying to see the potential in all of us to occupy those two poles, and knowing that we have to believe in the capacity of someone else to change towards that which is enhancing of our collective well-being. Or we just condemn people to stay in place.
Maya Angelou: Exactly. And how dare we? How dare we? Now mind you, I wrote that piece before the revelation of the Anita Hill affair. But I’d like to think that I would still have written the piece.
bell hooks: I think this is a difficult question, how we deal with the question of forgiveness. For me forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?
I remember when the Mike Tyson/ Desiree Washington case was happening and people kept wanting me to choose, and I kept saying, well, I feel for both of these people. I feel this man should be held accountable for any actions he may have done; at the same time, I also feel for the culture he’s been raised in that has made him an instrument of violence. Increasingly in my life, I’m appalled at how people so desperately want to choose either/or, rather than to have compassion in a larger, more complex way.
Maya Angelou: Absolutely. The decision to choose the either/or way of being is the simplest...well, it’s not really the simplest but it’s the easiest way of dealing with life. And it rules out one half of life, of course. One half is ripped right down the middle, and that half is all fuzzy and out of focus and away somewhere, so the side I’ve chosen is the only side that has any value.
Some years ago Oprah asked me to talk to Mike Tyson when he was still with his wife, Robin, and I said if he will call me, I will talk to him. But he must ask. But he didn’t, and then years passed and he was in jail, and Bob Johnson from BEP and Bruce Lewis called me and said that Mike Tyson asked would I come to jail to visit him. So I went, and I had no idea what on earth I was going to say to this young man. I’d never been but once to a fight; it’s not one of my ways of spending my time.
I went in really nervous and this young man came out who was smaller than I expected. And he said, Dr. Angelou, I just want to thank you for coming to visit me and I just have a few questions. bell hooks, I hope you’re sitting down: he said, my first question is this, what do you think of Voltaire? (laughter) I said, not very much. I hadn’t thought of Voltaire in a million years. He said, but I mean really, what do you think? I said, well, Voltaire was a people’s writer, he was a people’s poet, and a people’s dreamer. He was brave and courageous. He said, well, how do you work out the Eurocentrism of, say, Tolstoi, and Voltaire, and maybe Balzac, with the Afrocentrism of James Baldwin and Richard Wright? (laughs) I started laughing. I started laughing, I got the biggest, greatest laugh. I said, this place has done you well. You’ve been reading. So we had a three hour talk.
bell hooks: I think that goes back to the place of solitude. I always tell my students that Malcolm X came both to his spirituality and to his consciousness as a thinker when he had solitude to read. Unfortunately, tragically, like so many young black males, that solitude only came in prison.
I often think, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had camps, like summer camps, that grown people could go to where they could fellowship together with books. I was talking recently about whether Oprah’s book club was beneficial and someone pointed out that those of us who are writers and academics are accustomed to a world where we have someone else to talk to about what we read. But for most people, what is so painful about reading is that you read something and you don’t have anybody to share it with. In part what the book club opens up is that people can read a book and then have someone else to talk about it with. Then they see that a book can lead to the pleasure of conversation, that the solitary act of reading can actually be a part of the path to communion and community.
Maya Angelou: Absolutely. I remember years ago, I remember a writer, Jacqueline Susann, who wrote Valley of the Dolls and things like that. I found people really putting down those who read those books. On the other hand...
bell hooks: These books provided conversation.
Maya Angelou:That’s right, and also led to other books. Yes, indeed. It’s very important. And then, not only have you sunk a seed which will grow, but the very act of reading is in itself addictive.
bell hooks: At this stage of life, where do you find your joy? I struggle with that, Maya, with my joy and my pleasure. I often find it easier to be teaching or giving to others, and often struggle with the place of my own pleasure and joy.
Maya Angelou: Well, I find the teaching and the giving are joy. I walk out of a class sometimes on top of the world. And I have friends who love me and whom I love. They lift me up with their laughter, their jokes, and their pain sometimes. All of those things lift me up.
I’m trying to be a Christian, and that’s hard work. I’m always amazed when somebody says, I’m a Christian. I think, already? You’ve got it already? Trying to be a Christian is like trying to be a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Shintoist: it’s not something that you achieve and then you sit back and say, now I’ve got it. I’m trying to be a Christian in every moment. That also brings me great joy, and of course the concomitant misery, because according to my teaching I have to admit that everybody else is a child of God—the brute, the bigot, the batterer. I have to admit it, whether he or she knows it or not. So that challenges me, and when I can get over on that, it brings me joy. I love to laugh.
bell hooks: Yeah, I wanted to ask you about laughter, because when I think about the evenings that I’ve spent with you, one of the things is how much laughter there is, how much humor. While on one hand you are, as Melvin has been evoking, somebody who tries to share ethical values for how to live more fully and deeply in the world, I also know that you’re somebody who is totally capable of telling a great joke. Melvin keeps using the word moral, but I think ethical is a much more expansive word than moral, because ethical allows for the mistakes people make, and it also allows for the kind of moments I have shared with you of great ribald and bawdy humor.
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