The dialectis of belonging in bell hooks' Bone Black: Memories Of Girlhood

Abstract

Bone Black represents bell hooks' lifestory of survival amidst a harsh racist and sexist environment in the South of the United States in the 1950s. Her childhood is clearly dominated by a feeling of estrangement and loneliness together with the pain of being the different one, the problematic child, the rebel. Out of the vignettes that compose her autobiography, those related to her maternal grandparents enclose the author's most cherished memories, steeped in the magic of storytelling, quilting and the life-giving communion with the earth and the natural elements. It is in the nurturing wisdom of the old and in the embracing welcome of books that hooks will eventually find what she was most yearning for, a way to belong