Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 329

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black," by bell hooks.

Speaking becomes both a way to engage in active self-transformation and a rite of passage where one moves from being object to being subject. Only as subjects can we speak. As objects, we remain voiceless—our beings defined and interpreted by others.

To me naming is about empowerment. It is also a source of tremendous pleasure. I name everything—typewriters, cars, most things I use— that gives something to me. It is a way to acknowledge the life force in every object. Often the names I give to things and people are related to my past. They are a way to preserve and honor aspects of that past. Speaking of ancestor acknowledgement within African traditions has been a way to talk about how we learn from folks we may never have known but who live again in us. In Western traditions, this same process is talked about as the collective unconscious, the means by which we inherit the wisdom and ways of our ancestors. Talking with an elderly black man about names, he reminded me that in our southern black folk tradition we have the belief that a person never dies as long as their name is remembered, called. When the name bell hooks is called, the spirit of my great-grandmother rises.