Transgress bell hooks, Exercises of Voice

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T e a c h i n g to

T r a n s g r e s s

Education as the

Practice of Freedom

bell hooks

Routledge

New York London

4

Paulo Freire

This is a playful dialogue with myself, Gloria Watkins, talking with bell hooks, my writing voice. I wanted to speak about Paulo and his work in this way for it afforded me an intimacy— a familiarity— I do not find it possible to achieve in the essay. And here I have found a way to share the sweetness, the soli darity I talk about.

Watkins: Reading your books A in ’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism , Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, and Talk ing Back , it is clear that your developm ent as a critical thinker has been greatly influenced by the work o f Paulo Freire. Can you speak about why his work has touched your life so deeply? hooks: Years before I m et Paulo Freire, I had learned so much from his work, learned new ways o f thinking about social reality that were liberatory. Often when university stu-

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African Americans living within the white supremacist culture of the U nited States. Do you see a link be tween the process of decolonization and Freire’s focus on “conscientization”? Oh, absolutely. Because the colonizing forces are so pow erful in this white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, it seems that black people are always having to renew a com m itm ent to a decolonizing political process that should be fundam ental to our lives and is not. And so Freire’s work, in its global understanding of liberation struggles, always emphasizes that this is the im portant initial stage of trans form ation—that historical m om ent when one begins to think critically about the self and identity in relation to o n e’s political circumstance. Again, this is one of the con cepts in Freire’s work—and in my own work—that is fre quently m isunderstood by readers in the U nited States. Many times people will say to me that I seem to be sug gesting that it is enough for individuals to change how they think. And you see, even their use of the enough tells us som ething about the attitude they bring to this ques tion. It has a patronizing sound, one that does not convey any heartfelt understanding of how a change in attitude (though no t a com pletion of any transformative process) can be significant for colonized/oppressed people. Again and again Freire has had to rem ind readers that he never spoke of conscientization as an end itself, but always as it is joined by m eaningful praxis. In many different ways Freire articulates this. I like when he talks about the neces sity of verifying in praxis what we know in consciousness: That means, and let us emphasize it, that human beings do not get beyond the concrete situation, the condition in which they find themselves, only by their consciousness or their intentions— however good those intentions may be. The pos-

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sibilities that I had for transcending the narrow limits of a five-by-two-foot cell in which I was locked after the April 1964 coup d’etat were not sufficient to change my condition as a prisoner. I was always in the cell, deprived of freedom, even if I could imagine the outside world. But on the other hand, the praxis is not blind action, deprived of intention or of finality. It is action and reflection. Men and women are human beings because they are historically constituted as beings of praxis, and in the process they have become capable of transforming the world—of giving it meaning.

I think that so many progressive political movements fail to have lasting im pact in the U nited States precisely because there is not enough understanding of “praxis.” This is what touches me about A ntonio Faundez asserting in Learning to Question that one of the things we learned in Chile in our early reflection on everyday life was that abstract political, religious or moral statements did not take concrete shape in acts by individuals. We were revolutionaries in the abstract, not in our daily lives. It seems to me essential that in our individual lives, we should day to day live out what we affirm.

It always astounds me when progressive people act as though it is somehow a naive m oral position to believe that our lives m ust be a living exam ple of our politics. GW: T here are many readers of Freire who feel that the sexist language in his work, which went unchanged even after the challenge o f contem porary fem inist m ovem ent and feminist critique, is a negative example. W hen you first read Freire what was your response to the sexism of his language?

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talking with academic feminists (usually white women) who feel they must either dismiss or devalue the work of Freire because of sexism, I see clearly how our different responses are shaped by the standpoint that we bring to the work. I came to Freire thirsty, dying of thirst (in that way that the colonized, marginalized subject who is still unsure of how to break the hold of the status quo, who longs for change, is needy, is thirsty), and I found in his work (and the work of Malcolm X, Fanon, etc.) a way to quench that thirst. To have work that prom otes o n e ’s lib eration is such a powerful gift that it does not m atter so m uch if the gift is flawed. Think of the work as water that contains some dirt. Because you are thirsty you are not too proud to extract the dirt and be nourished by the water. For me this is an experience that corresponds very m uch to the way individuals of privilege respond to the use of water in the First World context. W hen you are privileged, living in one of the richest countries in the world, you can waste resources. And you can especially justify your dispos al of som ething that you consider im pure. Look at what most people do with water in this country. Many people purchase special water because they consider tap water unclean—and of course this purchasing is a luxury. Even our ability to see the water that come through the tap as unclean is itself inform ed by an imperialist consum er per spective. It is an expression of luxury and not ju st simply a response to the condition of water. If we approach the drinking of water that comes from the tap from a global perspective we would have to talk about it differently. We would have to consider what the vast majority of the peo ple in the world who are thirsty must do to obtain water. Paulo’s work has been living water for me. GW: To what extent do you think your experience as an Afri can American has m ade it possible for you to relate to Freire’s work?

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As I already suggested, growing up in a rural area in the agrarian south, am ong black people who worked the land, I felt intimately linked to the discussion of peasant life in Freire’s work and its relation to literacy. You know there are no history books that really tell the story of how difficult the politics of everyday life was for black people in the racially segregated south when so many folks did n o t read and were so often d ep en d en t on racist people to explain, to read, to write. And I was am ong a generation learning those skills, with an accessibility to education that was still new. The emphasis on education as neces sary for liberation that black people m ade in slavery and then on into reconstruction inform ed our lives. And so Freire’s em phasis on education as the practice of free dom m ade such im m ediate sense to me. Conscious of the need for literacy from girlhood, I took with me to the university m em ories of reading to folks, of writing for folks. I took with me m em ories of black teachers in the segregated school system who had been critical peda gogues providing us liberatory paradigms. It was this early experience of a liberatory education in Booker T. W ashington and Crispus Attucks, the black schools of my formative years, that m ade me forever dissatisfied with the education I received in predom inantly white settings. And it was educators like Freire who affirm ed that the difficulties I had with the banking system o f education, with an education that in no way addressed my social real ity, were an im portant critique. R eturning to the discus sion of feminism and sexism, I want to say that I felt myself included in Pedagogy of the Oppressed , one of the first Freire books I read, in a way that I never felt myself— in my experience as a rural black person—included in the first feminist books I read, works like The Feminine Mystique and Born Female. In the U nited States we do not talk enough about the way in which class shapes our

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from object to subject—the very question Paulo had posed. And it is so easy, now that many, if no t most, femi nist scholars are willing to recognize the im pact of race and class as factors that shape female identity, for every one to forget that early on fem inist m ovem ent was not a location that welcomed the radical struggle of black women to theorize our subjectivity. Freire’s work (and that of many other teachers) affirm ed my right as a sub je c t in resistance to define my reality. His writing gave me a way to place the politics of racism in the U nited States in a global context w herein I could see my fate linked with that of colonized black people everywhere strug gling to decolonize, to transform society. More than in the work of many white bourgeois fem inist thinkers, there was always in Paulo’s work recognition of the sub je ct position of those most disenfranchised, those who suffer the gravest weight of oppressive forces (with the exception of his not acknowledging always the specific gendered realities of oppression and exploitation). This was a standpoint which affirm ed my own desire to work from a lived understanding of the lives of poor black women. T here has been only in recent years a body of scholarship in the U nited States that does not look at the lives of black people through a bourgeois lens, a funda mentally radical scholarship that suggests that indeed the experience of black people, black females, m ight tell us m ore about the experience of women in general than simply an analysis that looks first, foremost, and always at those women who reside in privileged locations. O ne of the reasons that Paulo’s book, Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau, has been im portant for my work is that it is a crucial exam ple of how a privileged critical thinker approaches sharing knowledge and resources with those who are in need. H ere is Paulo at one of those insightful mom ents. He writes:

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Authentic help means that all who are involved help each other mutually, growing together in the common effort to understand the reality which they seek to transform. Only through such praxis—in which those who help and those who are being helped help each other simultaneously —can the act of helping become free from the distortion in which the helper dominates the helped.

In American society where the intellectual—and specifi cally the black intellectual—has often assimilated and betrayed revolutionary concerns in the interest of main taining class power, it is crucial and necessary for insur gent black intellectuals to have an ethics of struggle that informs our relationship to those black people who have not had access to ways of knowing shared in locations of privilege. GW: Com m ent, if you will, on Freire’s willingness to be cri tiqued, especially by fem inist thinkers. bh: In so m uch of P aulo’s work there is a generous spirit, a quality of open-m indedness that I feel is often missing from intellectual and academic arenas in U.S. society, and feminist circles have no t been an exception. O f course, Paulo seems to grow m ore open as he ages. I, too, feel myself m ore strongly com m itted to a practice of open- m indedness, a willingness to engage critique as I age, and I think the way we experience m ore profoundly the grow ing fascism in the world, even in so-called “liberal” circles, rem inds us that our lives, our work, m ust be an example. In Freire’s work in the last few years there are many responses to the critiques m ade of his writing. And there is that lovely critical exchange between him and A ntonio Faundez in Learning to Question on the question of lan guage, on Paulo’s work in Guinea-Bissau. I learn from this

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that this aspect of earlier work be changed, be responded to in writing by him. And he spoke then about m aking m ore of a public effort to speak and write on these issues — this has been evident in his later work. GW: Were you m ore affected by his presence than his work? bh: A nother great teacher of m ine (even though we have not met) is the Vietnamese Buddhist m onk Thich N hat H anh. And he says in The Raft Is Not the Shore that “great hum ans bring with them som ething like a hallowed atm osphere, and when we seek them out, then we feel peace, we feel love, we feel courage.” His words appropri ately define what it was like for me to be in the presence of Paulo. I spend hours alone with him, talking, listening to music, eating ice cream at my favorite cafe. Seriously, Thich N hat H anh teaches that a certain milieu is b orn at the same time as a great teacher. And he says:

When you [the teacher] come and stay one hour with us, you bring that milieu.... It is as though you bring a candle into the room. The candle is there; there is a kind of light-zone you bring in. When a sage is there and you sit near him, you feel light, you feel peace.

The lesson I learned from witnessing Paulo em body the practice he describes in theory was profound. It entered me in a way that writing can never touch one and it gave me courage. It has n o t been easy for me to do the work I do and reside in the academy (lately I think it has becom e almost impossible) but one is inspired to persevere by the witness of others. Freire’s presence inspired me. And it was not that I did not see sexist behavior on his part, only that these contradictions are em braced as part of the learning process, part of what one struggles to change— and that struggle is often protracted.

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GW: Have you anything m ore to say about Freire’s response to feminist critique? bh: I think it im portant and significant that despite feminist critiques of his work, which are often harsh, Paulo recog nizes that he m ust play a role in fem inist movements. This he declares in Learning to Question:

If the women are critical, they have to accept our contribution as men, as well as the workers have to accept our contribution as intellectuals, because it is a duty and right that I have to par ticipate in the transformation of society. Then, if the women must have the main responsibility in their struggle they have to know that their strug gle also belongs to us, that is, to those men who don’t accept the machista position in the world. The same is true of racism. As an apparent white man, because I always say that I am not quite sure of my whiteness, the question is to know if I am really against racism in a radical way. If I am, then I have a duty and a right to fight with black people against racism.

GW: Does Freire continue to influence your work? T here is not the constant m ention of him in your latest work as was the case with the first books. bh: T hough I may not quote Freire as m uch, he still teaches me. W hen I read Learning to Question, ju st at a time when I had begun to engage in critical reflections on black peo ple and exile, there was so m uch there about the experi ence of exile that helped me. And I was thrilled with the book. It had a quality of that dialogue that is a true ges ture of love that Paulo speaks about in other work. So it was from reading this book that I decided that it would be useful to do a dialogical work with the philosopher Cornel West. We have what Paulo calls “a talking book,”