What bell hooks and Greg Tate taught us about Black art

Against the Grain is a monthly column by Huda Hassan examining popular culture and the arts through a Black feminist lens.

I was sitting in the back of a York University lecture hall when I heard bell hooks, in her dainty but robust voice, ask: "Who are you writing for?" It was 2015, during one of her last lectures in Toronto. Probed by an audience member's question, she was critiquing the writing of journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates. I was not a fan of Coates, per se, but the heart of the inquiry struck me then. It's stuck with me since. I've returned to her question repeatedly since: who am I writing for? 

This was six years before hooks — the Black feminist writer, born Gloria Watkins, who offered us the purposive phrase "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy" — passed away during a month of far too many deaths. Last December, many corners of a divided cultural world grieved. Malidoma Patrice Somé, Eve Babitz, Joan Didion, and Greg Tate were some of the many artists and thinkers who left weeks apart from one another. Imani Perry called it a ​​grieving epoch. 

Within a week and a half that December, we lost hooks and Greg Tate — two pivotal Black cultural critics. Greg Tate, a hip hop journalism pioneer who was once a musician, then critic for The Village Voice, offered the world some of the most meticulous critique of Black music and cultural production. Both writers adamantly made it clear who they were writing for. They didn't call for us to see Blackness; instead, they wrote directly from it as a starting point. 

When I think about hooks' public inquiry to Coates — "Who are you writing for?" — I am reminded of the ongoing thesis in not only her work, but that of Tate. Blackness was always at the centre for both critics — to be dissected, appreciated, learned from, and placed front and centre. They both positioned Black art as cultural forms of admiration, study, and reflection. They made Black popular culture a site of pedagogy. 

As we look back on one year without hooks and Tate, I've reflected on what their work means to me — and to so many others. In remembrance of their legacy, I spoke with activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs and revisited the words of Imani Perry and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah. 

How I found Greg Tate and bell hooks 

Tate's writing not only critiqued Black American cultural production but compelled it to be grander, longer-lasting. He searched for its spiritual genius. In his 2009 essay on Michael Jackson, he wrote that this required that something "even more than human" to speak through "whatever fragile mortal vessel is burdened with repping for the divine, the magical, the supernatural, the ancestral." 

Tate challenged many of our boundaries — in the best of ways. His criticism took us past a nationalistic Black aesthetic; beyond national borders, geographies, and historically complicated places. Most notably, in his 1987 essay Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke, he told the world — especially black aestheticians and thinkers — to develop and dedicate themselves to a coherent criticism that can communicate the "com­plexities of our culture." 

I arrived to bell hooks' work much earlier than I did Tate's. I was an undergrad student, not yet interested in feminist theory as a field of study; I still required far more personal growth for that. Her work was recommended by some of the women around me — peers in school who were devoted to gender studies; artists in Toronto's creative worlds who were theorists themselves; or amongst girlfriends during a late-night hang.

hooks gave us not a new way of thinking, but salvation from it. As a young woman in search of expression, she affirmed my language to critically dissect relationships with family, patriarchy, self-love, art, power structures at large, and the gazes they created: oppositional and dominant. Similar to what hooks wrote in Teaching to Transgress (1994), I arrived to academia "desperate, wanting to comprehend — to grasp what was happening around and within me." Engulfed by grief, I, too, was desperate and looking for language. 

As a Black cultural critic and feminist writer, bell hooks and Greg Tate are integral to my understanding of Black criticism, and the love of Blackness (and self) that it requires. They taught me how to place Black culture at the forefront; as a site of pedagogy, reflection, and analysis. 

Greg Tate: 'A time traveller, a conjurer, a magician'

"To me, Greg Tate was a time traveller, a conjurer, a magician, and a loving, community-building genius," says writer, educator, poet, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs. "Everything I witnessed him do or say made it clear that he believed in the legacy of Black cultural work and its future. It is rare to see someone love our people and act accordingly with such creativity and in a way that includes so many of us!"

"Greg Tate's teachings and writing taught me that you should only be involved in Black cultural criticism if you are coming from a place of deep love and grace and belief in the possibility of what Black culture can do in the universe. (Or else just go home.) Only love could power an intellect like that. The depth and agility he displays comes from that intensity of commitment. You can't fake it."

bell hooks: 'Bringing Black feminist criticism into every arena'

As a Black feminist writer, independent scholar, poet, activist and educator, Gumbs has been greatly influenced by bell hooks. 

"There is no part of being a Black feminist scholar in my generation that has not been made more possible, easier, more recognizable, more powerful due to the existence of bell hooks and her insistence on bringing Black feminist thought to bear on all aspects of life, community and culture," she says. "So her influence on me is existence. Her existence. My existence. There is no part of my day, let alone my work that is not impacted by bell hooks. The fact that people even know what I'm talking about when I say I'm a Black feminist scholar and writer, even people in my own family, is thanks to bell hooks."

"I credit bell hooks with bringing Black feminist criticism into every arena. For so many people, [we can credit her with] the fact that Black feminist critique and practice can be on the news, showing up in response to the latest film, reaching people where they are in a way they can understand on every imaginable topic."

There is no part of being a Black feminist scholar in my generation that has not been made more possible, easier, more recognizable, more powerful due to the existence of bell hooks.- Alexis Pauline Gumbs, writer, educator, and activist

"bell hooks teaches us that the stories we tell about the world impact everything. She teaches us that no narrative — filmic, musical or otherwise — is separate from the world we are creating, and therefore the possibility of creating a world that honors Black women and girls, and a movement that ends violence against women and girls, is everywhere. It's always possible."

Greg Tate 'treated Black musical culture with an unmatched reverence'

Imani Perry, professor of race, law, and Black culture, first met Greg Tate a few years after he published Flyboy in the Buttermilk (1992), his first collection of essays on American music and culture. Last year, she wrote about mourning one of her most important teachers. 

"It is hard to fully capture what it meant in 1992 to have a book that explained the thrill of the moment we were living in, the golden age of hip-hop. I'd read Greg Tate in The Village Voice, but to walk into Harvard Book Store and pull Flyboy in the Buttermilk off the shelf was something special…. He was perhaps the only person I ever knew who could easily move between journalism, writing as art, academic circles, and the music world with absolute panache and grace, and to be beloved in every realm.

We were never close friends, but he was warm and generous in every encounter I had with him. He charmed people who couldn't stand each other and would have them all laughing together. He treated Black musical culture with an unmatched reverence, and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of Black cultures all over the world. He'd tilt his head, tip his finger forward, and say, 'Well you know … ' and take you on a journey. And we'd all listen. That's just who he was.

Until you defy expectation, you don't fully know who you are or all you can be. And Greg Tate did that in a way that created space for so many of us to think and explore."

In the same article, Dr. Perry wrote about the lasting influence of the writing of — and casual encounters with — bell hooks.

"I'd first met her when I was an intern working for Tanya McKinnon at South End Press, where Gloria was publishing her books at the time. I was 19 and I read through the pages of her book of dialogues with Cornel West, Breaking Bread, in order to find all the references they made to other books. I would then go to the library to get the full citations to go in the bibliography. I was surprised the first day she came into the office. She wore a bright-red linen sundress (I have one just like it to this day) and red nail polish, and she drove a red Mercedes. And she was a Marxist. She was a feminist who didn't avoid talking about sex or admiring masculinity. She listened to hip-hop (and judged it) and read European social theory (and judged it) and also could treat people in both arenas tenderly. She was a worldly intellectual and very much a downhome, Kentucky woman. Her voice was higher and squeakier in person than on the page. 

She had so many ideas, so much passion for creating a world that was free of domination and oppression of every sort. And she also was a wounded soul. Her feelings got hurt. She offered her abundant intellectual and literary gifts to two Black feminist generations and then was crushed when she felt forgotten or turned on. I suppose I understood this even when I disagreed with her assessment, because no matter how strident I am, I too can get my feelings hurt quite easily. It is sort of a strange way to be, to think you can step out onto a public stage and speak against the way things are, and opine and rant, but cry when you get intense backlash. So be it, we all have our idiosyncrasies.

Still, here's something I do know: Gloria's sensitivity (and sometimes hypersensitivity) was integral to many of the greatest gifts of her work. She thought constantly about love and healing. And she gave voice to our yearnings, including a desire to escape the loneliness that is epidemic in our lives. So when you opened her books, you could feel your own heart beating."

'Tate was making art for the most high'

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, an American essayist who won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, wrote about saying goodbye to "Ironman Tate" in a eulogy so thoughtful that filmmaker dream hampton recommended I return to it. 

"All Tate's writing has a density that I associate with memory but also with the repping for and of the divine. Tate was making art for the most high. He was also a lavish and unabashed lover of Black people. And he refused to let us forget all that he knew about us, not out of arrogance, but out of care. His writing offers us grace. And meaningful instruction on how to treat one another with intelligence and tenderness.

What is dazzling, if not staggering, is how each sentence of his goes forth from the embassy of his intellect, weighted down with all he has to say and heavy with everyone and everything he cites, and somewhere between where it left his desk, carrying his aims as a craftsman, he also then gave those words the ability to alight, run to the sun, and never touch down until they had kissed the sky."

Greg Tate was our bard, our storyteller, and our generous, ego-free high priest, who held in his hands the blueprints to our most profound shrines, who whispered to us that we always know how to get back home.- Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, writer

The lasting legacy of bell hooks and Greg Tate

The void made with the loss of bell hooks and Greg Tate has been monumental. For the many generations they spoke to and taught, the grief of the last year has been heavy.

hooks and Tate inspired a whole current generation of critics, artists, and thinkers. But even as I wonder how one could ever fill their shoes, I remember the vastness of their influence — and know their legacy will not soon be forgotten.