What's love got to do with it?

A conversation with writer/ painter/cultural critic bell hooks about her love books by Gary Dauphin

It's an old says, but bell hooks really is the hardest-working woman in academia. At just under 50, she's already the author of over 20 books, ranking from the groundbreaking Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism-- started when she was only 19-to dozens of works on feminist theory; art and race. She has even found time in between to paint-Changing the Subiect, a limited edition collection of her artwork appeared in 1994--and pen two children's books.

Her latest release, Communion: The Fe-- male Search for Love, completes a trilogy of books about the loving souls of black women and men that she began with All About love: New Visions and Salvation: Black People and Love. For a writer who a long.time was better-known in women's studies departments than on the bustling streets of Manhattan where she lives and writes, the "Love Books" are certified crossover hits. Communion outranks Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by several orders of magnitude on Amazon's list.

Before the "Love Books," hooks occupied an odd place in the black intellectual firmament. And the success of the love trilogy puts her in an even odder, albeit more professionally enviable position. For one thing, the recent tiff between Cornel West and Harvard's president illustrates that too much work and popular acclaim can be bad for a black academic's reputation.

In 1995, lefty academic Adolph Reed lumped hooks in with West and Henry Louis Gates Jr., in a rather nasty- attack wherein he likened their stardom to minstrelsy. Reed curiously reserved his most virulent criticism for hooks, despite the fact that-from a purely material standpoint-she's barely a blip on the academic-industrial radar screen compared to the West/Gates juggernauts.

Then there's the fact that those who cut their teeth on the difficult theoretical prose that made hooks' reputation, seem to find the love books' sentimentality something of a departure. Black Issues Book Review sat down with hooks to ask her what, if anything, love has to do with it.

BIBR: So why write three books about love? bh: I've gotten more curious about it as I've gotten older. I have questions about how love fits into my life, black peoples lives, like: What makes people live? What makes them change? I look at my parents---as f--ed up as they are-they've maintained their commitment to all of their children through all of our dramas, and I'm impressed by that. I don't know what it's like to be committed to someone for 50 years, right down to stupid little things like my mother sending each of us our little Christmas box every year for all that time. It's really amazing to me now. I look at that and wonder, who could I be faithful to for 50 years?

BIBR: Is thinking and writing about love a step away from the themes of race and class that marked your earlier work?

bh: Well, I feel like all my books have talked about love. Love allows people to sustain life, that capacity to connect through love. I think about what Martin Luther King did for people. He got people to feel like they could go and sit at those counters. I don't know if I could get up from this table and go sit somewhere and be spit upon and beat upon. But that was love in action. We can do all this stuff today because some black people and white people had the will to say: "We will love in this way."

I didn't always know that love had those kinds of implications. I remember as an undergraduate, I used to think: F--k Martin Luther King. That's blase. Gimme my Nkrumah and my Malcolm! And now when I go back to King's writings, I see he was writing about love, but also about new technologies and the dangers of militarism. Contrast that to the black men who've come to power in our loveless age-Colin Powell: fascist, Farrakhan: fascist.

BIBR: You think we live in a loveless age?

bh: Completely. Black people would get really mad at me when I would talk about my sister who teaches in the schools in Flint, Michigan. When I visit her, I'll go to her school and I meet these kids, really young kids who think love is a f--ing joke. Little black kids are incredibly cynical about love. They'll tell you there's no such thing as love. Love is like Santa Claus: "There ain't no Santa Claus, and there ain't no love. Don't even try it!" And they're proud of thinking that. They feel that it's a badge of their black identity. They remind me of when I was kid in school and other kids would tell me, "You're not black, you talk white." This is how extreme we've become in associating blackness with pain. There's no space in our culture or our imaginations to associate blackness with love, with desire. We can dramatize pain, but we can't articulate the desire for love., It sounds too soft and Pollyannaish.

BIBR: Did you worry about sounding soft with the love books?

bh: Sometimes people tell me these books are shit, which hurts me. But I feel lucky, too, because the biggest black supporters of my love books have been working-class people who are in touch with their own pain. I'm having to argue with "so-called evolved and smart" friends to get them to even consider that they might be dealing with pain. But black men who've spent their entire lives in the corners of factories came out when I was on tour with Salvation, because they knew what I was talking about. You're not going to get your Harvard-Yale graduates making $50,000 a year to think about the meaning of their lives.

And that's not about white people and racism. It's about us and what we've failed to deliver to each other. Not just personally, but in terms of work and art and thought. I look at my body of work and I feel lucky. At least I delivered-to myself, and the people I love-the best of me. I didn't implode. I didn't hoard it in some weird academic, elitist safe. I wrote the books I needed to write, and I wrote three books that reached black folks who had never heard of bell hooks before. So to me, my love books are like my good Hollywood blockbusters-but with something meaningful to say.

For a complete bibliography of bell hooks work, go to www:bibookreview.com.