Black Feminist Book Club #3: Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery By bell hooks

How we save ourselves from a world seeking to annihilate us.

In this month’s entry into the Black Feminist Book Club, I am offering a meditation on the work of the incomparable bell hooks. In this book discussion, I have not only included lecture notes, I have also provided chapter-by-chapter summaries and thought questions for readers interested in digging deeper.

hooks’ 1993 book, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, is a necessary text for those of us working to navigate a world seeking to stamp out Black women’s light. In this critical text, hooks focuses on the ways that Black women can create healthy intellectual, mental, physical, and spiritual boundaries in our lives so that we can curate a world of peace and healing around us.

In the 2005 edition of the text from South End Press, there is an interview included as the preface of the book. In the interview, hooks calls the names of those foremothers and elders who passed prematurely, many before the age of 60. She connects the loss of Black wealth and economic standing to the growth of psychological distress among Black communities. She sees this work as the politicization of self-recovery and self-actualization. Sadly, hooks herself died in 2021 at only 69 years old. In many ways, her own life also represents the ways that Black women must actively work to recover ourselves from this anti-Black and misogynoiristic society to ensure that we have some life worth living left.

hooks explains that healing the trauma of our pasts is the hardest work. Not only that, it is work that is rarely celebrated or supported in mass society. She writes, “White supremacy has always relied upon a structure of deceit to perpetuate degrading stereotypes, myths that Black people were inferior, more ‘animalistic’” (12). These myths and stereotypes have contributed to what hooks calls “the culture of dissimulation” wherein Black Americans often learn to cloak and conceal our true selves from others to survive. She writes, “Dissimulation makes us dysfunctional” (15). While this dysfunction is an expectation of participation in mass society, hooks implores us to move from a place of authenticity and truth to disrupt these logics.

In many ways, this book is about returning to one’s self. hooks writes, “It’s important for black women committed to self-recovery to survey our lives and honestly identify what causes us stress” (48). This statement seems trite but is likely one of the toughest steps in self-recovery and personal healing. It entails being honest about the ways that family, friends, lovers, employers, and other active players in our lives actively create harm and perpetuate trauma. Black self-healing and self-recovery require that we first tell the truth about the harms committed against us and the harms that we endure via our own performance of strength. Especially for Black women (and focusing on those at the intersections of transness, disability, fatness, and poverty), it is imperative that the work of healing ourselves and our communities stem from a deep accountability to listening to our own bodies and needs.

Importantly, hooks establishes in this work that emotional health and well-being are necessary aspects of liberatory work. She writes, “As contemporary black people commit ourselves to collective recovery, we must recognize that attending to our emotional well-being is just as important as taking care of our material needs” (102). In many ways, this emphasis on emotional health is a departure from the ways that society often focuses on physical and material needs over all else. By resituating this focus, hooks reminds us that we cannot move in healthy and productive ways without first assessing our own mental and emotional needs.

Finally, as bell hooks is known for her work to theorize love and its power, she offers a framework for love that pushes back against the passive definitions that dominate popular narratives. She explains that love is meant to extend ourselves so that we are mutually responsible for the spiritual growth and development of others. It is “akin to work” (110). Emphasizing the active nature of love instructs readers that platonic, romantic, and self-love all originate from the same center. They must come from a place of spiritual commitment and investment. Love that is rooted in abuse or self-hatred cannot heal. Love and abuse cannot co-exist. This is perhaps the most critical lesson hooks offers us, one that we need in moments like these.

I highly recommend this reading for folks seeking wisdom about how to engage in their healing journeys. Especially for Black women, queer folks, and gender expansive people, this book is a balm in a dark place.

The next book will be Fearless and Free: A Memoir by Josephine Baker.