The End of Suffering

"I wanted knowledge only to the degree that it would enable my suffering to end" (hooks, 1991).

I feel solace, finally. 

Hooks makes me remember the reason why I read. I do not read for knowledge, nor even for pleasure, but to enable my mind's suffering to end. Life is full of contradictions and distractions, and if we stop paying attention, pain. The best fictions bring me back to the reasons why I want to live, and how living even is possible. 

"Poetry and novels brought me close to myself... My mind became a site of resistance" (p. 54). 

Through deeply critical poetry and stories, hooks became more aware of herself, as in going "backstage" with Appleman (2015), who aimed to give her students "the power of being able to name what it was they were doing" when they were reading (p. 35). Appleman's argument for critical lenses is to see one's own blind spots and biases as one reads (the word and the world). 

I think hooks would only slightly buy Rosenblatt's idea that, "A reader makes a poem as a [s]he reads. [S]he does not seed an unalterable meaning that lies within the text. [S]he creates meaning from the confrontation" (Appleman, p. 40). Hooks, and Lewis (2000), agree that readers are also "produced as subjects as they read," resulting from dominant cultural discourses and colonization (p. 258). For hooks, reading is salvation, not aesthetic; it comes from a transformational aspect of the work itself. This is where she differentiates between the types of texts that are "critical" and not. 

Critical fictions, she says, are those that show us ways out of oppressive states. Rather than create meaning with language or "context" or through the reader's own pleasure-state, "these fictions confront and challenge" (hooks, 56). They create ways of imagining, which enable the reader to "begin the process of transforming reality." Per Lewis (2000), they "interrogate that which in our imaginations becomes naturalized and taken for granted" (p. 259). They allow the reader who is restrained in some way by colonization, discourse and power structures, to begin to de-structure these oppressive forces. This, hooks asserts, is what the imagination, not separate from oppression itself, is good for. 

"In oppressive settings the ability to construct images imaginatively of a reality not present to the senses or perceived may be the only means to hope" (hooks, 55).

I see characters who suffer in American Born Chinese, and The House on Mango Street, from the oppressions of racism and poverty. I see a character who suffers from her own disillusionment about herself and her own culture in Listen, Slowly. I see powerful forms of self-acceptance arise through conflict, and through the characters' own abilities to rise above. It began from their inner strength, as conjured up through their imaginations. 

Empathy comes in when the reader, too, is called in to participate in the acceptance, in the rising above. The reader sees a character overcome, and the reader begins to understand the practice of solidarity. This, hooks calls a true "paradigm shift." 

As we have read previously in Baldwin, our world is in need of a paradigm shift, and not just by those who are oppressed, but by all of us who can empathize and join them in solidarity in their causes. Critical fictions will help us, and our students, to get there. After all, "this ability to be empathetic is rooted in our capacity to imagine" (hooks, 57).