Love: Counting It In, Counting It Out
I have spent a lot of the past few weeks reading and re-reading bell hooks ' Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery . I've been working with a copy from the public library, but I need to purchase a copy for myself. This title is one of hooks' earlier works and her chapters on addiction, loss, work, and beauty are masterful. Her chapter on love, however, speaks most deeply to me and captures the energy that makes everything else about our "recovery" important. Near the opening of the "Living to Love" chapter, hooks writes: "Many black women feel that we live lives in which there is little or no love. This is one of our private truths that is rarely a subject for public discussion. To name this reality evokes such intense pain that black women can rarely talk about it fully with one another." Before you, dear reader, say that lots of people live without love, please remember hooks is writing about the capacity of black women to recove...