Toward the end of Belonging, Kentuckian bell hooks journeys to Henry County, Kentucky for a conversation with another Kentuckian, one who like Ms. hooks returned to his home after finding success on both coasts, Wendell Berry. Their conversation addresses a common belief that material improvement somehow provides an answer to issues of poverty and injustice, or provides a measure of happiness – a belief that turns out to be empty when one realizes it has cut them off from the land, from community. The resultant disconnectedness does little to address what they left behind only now the nurturing realities of land to grow one’s own food, and community whose sense of worth isn’t tied to feelings of superiority, are not available to provide respite.

The conversation provides a great focus for hooks’ collection of essays revolving around the knowledge that connection to the land and connection to each other, independence from working the land and independence from white supremacist thought, all are ideas that are connected. The book addresses the feeling most of us who left farms in our earlier years have come to terms with later – that our attempts to escape the injustices we experienced in our small towns, in our churches, in our work – are present in wherever the new place is only without the connections that once sustained us. Memory, nature, spirituality become more than just comforts; they are places of nonconformity and resistance.

An essential read.

(My only issue with this book is the atrocious editing by Routledge – multiple typos. It doesn’t diminish my love of bell hooks and her writing – which is where my rating is centered. But if the slopping editing is bad enough it deserves mention.)
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I hadn't read anything by hooks previously, and so after her death decided to remedy that. I really liked this book, and plan to try more of her work. To be sure, some parts of the book are too intellectual and too much theory for me. But other parts are more direct and interesting. I loved, for example, her discussion of quilting as a woman's art form.

In this book she describes her relationship to her birthplace, Kentucky, and her experiences returning to Kentucky after going to Stanford and living in California and New York. It was a good companion for the reading from Margaret Renkl, lots of appreciation of nature and of an agrarian world. Her discussion of racism and it's impact on both black and white people was interesting. She had a description of being raised to be afraid of white people, which is something one doesn't read about often.

And she is a really good writer. Here is a quote:

“Living away from my native place I became more consciously Kentuckian than I was when I lived at home. This is what the experience of exile can do, change your mind, utterly transform one's perception of the world of home.”
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