Talking Back by bell hooks

Picked up bell hooks' Talking Back - thinking feminism, thinking black, and it's awesome!

I want to share a few quotes with you that I've found inspiring, and, as an appetizer a Ryan Gosling meme:

• In the world of the southern black community I grew up in, "back talk" and "talking back" meant speaking as an equal to an authority figure. ... To speak then when one was not spoken to was a courageous act - an act of risk and daring.
• There are some folks for whom openness is not about the luxury of "will I choose to share this or tell that," but rather "will I survive - will I make it through - will I stay alive?"
• The history of colonialization, imperialism is a record of betrayal, of lies, and deceits.  The demand for that which is real is a demand for reparation, for transformation.  In resistance, the exploited, the oppressed work to expose the false reality - to reclaim and recover ourselves.  We make the revolutionary history, telling the past as we have learned it mouth-to-mouth, telling the present as we see, know and feel it in our hearts and in our words.
• Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible.  It is that act of speech, of "talking back," that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject - the liberated voice.
• [Poetry] was meant to transform consciousness, to carry the mind and heart to a new dimension.
• The insistence on finding one voice, one definitive style of writing, and reading one's poetry, fit all too neatly with the static notion of itself and identity that was pervasive in university settings.  It seemed that many black students found our situations problematic precisely because our sense of self, and by definition our voice, was not unilateral, monologist, or static, but rather multi-dimensional.
• When we dare to speak in a liberatory voice, we threaten even those who may initially claim to want our words. In the act of overcoming our fear of speech, of being seen as threatening, in the process of learning to speak as subjects, we participate in the global struggle to end domination. When we end our silence, when we speak in a liberated voice, our words connect us with anyone, anywhere who lives in silence. Feminist focus on women finding a voice, on the silence of black women, of women of color, has led to increased interest in our words. This is an important historical moment. We are both speaking of our own volition, out of our commitment to justice, to revolutionary struggle to end domination, and simultaneously called to speak, "invited" to share our words. It is important that we speak. What we speak about is more important. It is our responsibility collectively and individually to distinguish between mere speaking that is about self-aggrandizement, exploitation of the exotic "other," and that coming to voice which is a gesture of resistance, an affirmation of struggle.
• While the struggle to eradicate sexism and sexist oppression is and should be the primary thrust of feminist movement, to prepare ourselves politically for this effort we must first learn how to be in solidarity, how to struggle with one another.

Why I love it, a start:

I love how she sees voice as the mechanism to move from subject to object.  From colonized, to powerful. I love to hear her thoughts on how finding voice can be transformative, and how she also is critical of mainstream (white) feminism in that it isn't just about speaking, it's also about the content of what is said.
I love it because she makes me ask the question, again: "what does solidarity mean?"  She makes me want to understand and feel what she means by "an affirmation of struggle" - as it relates to finding a voice.

I love how she presents of the stakes of speaking up/talking back.  It's not a luxury of what to share, and does/has carry/carried serious punishments.  And it doesn't seem like she does so from a perspective of being a victim, which I've seen presented harshly recently.  Rather, she speaks a lot to the courage required and the power gained by speaking against these punishments.

Update, 1 hour later: just saw this on Facebook and I think it highlights a lot of what bell hooks brings up, check it out: