My name is difficult. All my life, it’s been mispronounced, misheard, misspelled. It’s such a common experience that I’m surprised and impressed when it’s represented correctly. When my name is used incorrectly, there’s a way in which I feel incorrect, like my presence is not fully accounted for.

We all have stories about our names and, whether they are difficult or common, our experiences with them help cultivate our identities. For people with names that do not subscribe to English language convention, like writer Durga Chew-Bose, the experience of feeling like an outsider due to the treatment of a name represents a belittling of an “essential sense of self.”

It was perhaps with this acknowledgment of the effect of a name that I found myself defending the correct spelling of bell hooks’ name, which I recently included in a profile I wrote about a comedian. The experience was strange — though I argued with editors about the basic fact of respect and the troubling imposition of capitalization and even sent them links to style guides and other publications that have all honored the correct spelling, they stubbornly believed that their conception of “reader clarity” and “stylistic consistency” superseded the proper presentation of a prominent philosopher’s name.

Eventually, dissent culminated to a point it should have never reached and the editors made the right decision to present hooks’ name accurately — but not without reprimanding and patronizing me for posting publicly about the plain fact of the error and the clear embarrassment I felt as the named author of a piece that meant a lot to me and included this egregious oversight.

We all have stories about our names.
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The misrepresentation of hooks’ name amounts to a misrepresentation of, and disrespect for, the educator as a person. That the decision to respect a person by invoking the correct spelling of their name turned into a heated debate perplexed me, though it really shouldn’t have, given that language has always been a site of domination. The experience was a clear embodiment of the exercise of white privilege at a basic systemic level, and it revolved around a writer and thinker whose work seeks to dismantle that very thing. The irony was transparent. (Not to mention the additional irony that lies in the fact that my profile was about the importance of language.)

No matter the reason for hooks’ decision to lowercase her name (according to her Berea College biography, she claims this spelling is meant to draw more attention to her work than who she is), featuring her name incorrectly amounts to a distortion of her identity.

And to distort an identity in the name of grammar is to distort an identity in the name of an imposed convention that has silenced cultures and communities for centuries.

Fundamentally, the power of names is intricately woven into the fabric of our individual and social identities. In many cultures, including the West, the act of naming exhibits dominion or power over something or someone. Examples abound in stories found in mythology, religion, folklore, film, and fiction.

In Greek mythology, invoking the name of the god of the underworld, Hades,summons the god. In the Bible’s Book of Genesis, God names light into being and Adam is tasked with naming the animals of the world in order to exercise man’s dominion. In the Gospel of John, we find the introductory verse naming the Word as God. In fact, A Russian dogmatic sect called the Name Worshippers (heresy according to the Russian Orthodox Church) claim to know that God exists because God can be named. And according to the Kabbalah, the name of every creation is its life-source.

Many stories in popular culture are also rife with powerful name themes. For example, in the Germanic fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin and the 1988 film Beetlejuice, plot is bound up in the way names break a spell or summon a presence. In the novel The Handmaid’s Tale and film Spirited Away, young women are enslaved, the domination inscribed in the act of naming.

One of the most culturally and historically relevant illustrations of how naming and language is bound up with power and the exercise of dominance is the practice of European colonizers attacking, defiling, and altering African names in order to suppress and erase African identity. For slaves, names encompassed their identities as individuals but also aided in the survival of a collective history. Despite this erasure, one of the ways in which enslaved and free Africans sought to preserve culture and identity was through naming. In “Naming and Linguistic Africanisms in African American Culture,” Lupenga Mphande writes that, “The movement for re-naming and self-identification among African Americans started at the very dawn of American history.”

The violence with which name, identity, and colonialism is embedded with slavery is exemplified in the novel and film, Roots, wherein the protagonist Kunta Kinte seeks to retain his birth name at the expense of extreme physical and psychological abuse. First shown on television in 1977, it had a significant impact upon naming in the African American community. As Richard Moore writes in The Name ‘Negro’ — Its Origin and Evil Use, “when all is said and done, slaves and dogs are named by their masters, free [people] name themselves.”

In fact, the history of the English language has always been tied to power and patriarchy. This is most keenly illustrated in the following etymologies, tracing female-centered words back to roots which define women by their relationship to men and how they are useful:

Female: Latin, femina, meaning fetus

Lady: Old English, hlaf dige, meaning loaf kneader

Girl: Old English, gyrlgyden, meaning virgin goddess

Woman: Old English, wifman, meaning female man

Male: Latin, mascul, meaning male

Boy: German, bube, meaning boy

Man; Old English, mannian, meaning man

Words are not merely names or parts of a sentence structure; they represent a dynamic of power relations. They do not exist in a vacuum; they are connected to our relationships. How we communicate language is a social process.

In Language and Power, linguist Norman Fairclough builds upon ideas of linguistic and ideological predecessors like Mikhail Bakhtin, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault to assert that language is the primary medium through which social control and power is produced, maintained, and changed, and advocates for “critical language awareness.”

Fairclough writes:

“‘Critical language awareness’ is a facilitator for ‘emancipatory discourse’ . . . which challenges, breaks through, and may ultimately transform the dominant orders of discourse, as a part of the struggle of oppressed social groupings against the dominant bloc.”

Ultimately, for Fairclough, awareness of language and how it contributes to the domination or subjugation of others is the first step toward emancipation. Though language is not the only site of social control and power, it is the most immediate medium at our disposal.

The English language’s implementation as a homogenizing force and its “correct” use is intricately bound up with notions of colonialism. As bell hooks herself writes:

“Standard English is not the speech of exile. It is the language of conquest and domination; in the United States, it is the mask which hides the loss of so many tongues, all those sounds of diverse, native communities we will never hear . . . in the incorrect usage of words, in the incorrect placement of words, was a spirit of rebellion that claimed language as a site of resistance . . . We seek to make a place for intimacy. Unable to find such a place in standard English, we create the ruptured, broken, unruly speech of the vernacular . . . There, in that location, we make English do what we want it to do. We take the oppressor’s language and turn it against itself. We make our words a counter-hegemonic speech, liberating ourselves in language.”

While the history of capitalization in English is obscure, the convention itself seems to be one with no clear function. During the late 17th and 18th centuries, it was customary to emphasize most English nouns with a capital letter. Personal names and proper names were indistinct from ordinary nouns, with the ultimate decision left up to the writer. It seems that typesetters and printers found the abundance of capitalization aesthetically and economically unnecessary, so, slowly over time, common nouns began to be written in lowercase while “important” nouns were italicized and certain proper nouns were capitalized.

Indeed, the arbitrariness of the convention only underscores the absurdity of imposing it onto a person’s name. Deborah Cameron, a feminist linguist and professor of Language and Communication at Oxford University, tells me, “Whoever says, ‘But the rule is, names get upper case initials’ hasn’t really thought it through: Names are a class of words whose ‘correct’ form is whatever the name’s owner says it is.”

Therefore, imposing capitalization onto bell hooks’ name, in a cruel irony, alters her identity as an African American woman and a scholar who seeks freedom through language and its resistance. Lisa Moore, professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UT Austin, bluntly explains, “To misname [bell hooks] by changing the capitalization of her name is to put racist and patriarchal values above the thoughtful decision and strategy of one of our foremost philosophers.”

Imposing capitalization onto bell hooks’ name, in a cruel irony, alters her identity.
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Imposing a convention or prescriptive onto language disregards the fact of its inevitable evolution and represents an attempt to colonize it in some way. Of linguistic prescriptivism, Nicholas Subtirelu, assistant teaching professor in Applied Linguistics at Georgetown University, writes, “Within the field of linguistics (particularly sociolinguistics), prescriptivists are generally seen as looking for a rationalization for their own attitudes toward others, which might include racist or classist attitudes.” Subtirelu believes that “prescriptivism” is worth practicing, but that it should be motivated by political or moral concerns. “We should not be policing others’ language for deviance from arbitrary rules. We should be policing others’ language for the way it represents the world and others in it.” For this linguist, there is only one prescriptivist commandment: “Thou shalt not use language to harm.”

Which bring us to our current moment, one in which people are policing language for the ways in which it represents the world and the people in it, the ways in which it perpetuates or dismantles power which subjugates and dehumanizes. Some are asking for more responsible use of language while others are decrying “political correctness” gone rogue; some are irresponsibly over-policing, while others are irresponsibly sputtering; some even believe that First Amendment rights are being violated because real consequences are the result of careless and disrespectful language.

There is no “correct” language, only thoughtful and careful language. Language informed by its history. Compassionate language. Language which invites rather than excludes. Language which, most importantly, evolves. “Correct” implies there is only one way for language to be, that language is prescriptive. But language is malleable; it evolves because we are malleable and we evolve. Even the existence of the term “politically correct” and its pejorative use embody exactly the opposite of what thoughtful and generous language is about and what it seeks to accomplish.

At a time when a serious presidential candidate wields cowardly language so flippantly and disrespectfully without any regard for the people he is demeaning or emboldening, fighting my editors for spelling hooks’ name correctly felt all the more imperative. What kind of hope remains if we can’t even get the language right?

Sensitivity to language is responsibility to language, and respect for its power to call forth whatever is summoned by its use. The effects of language matter. We can start by speaking to each other by the names that we choose.

The vagina! If it’s dank and dark; if it’s a gap, a space, a vent, a chink in my armor, a damp rupture, a drip drip dripping leak, a pink rupture, a perforation; if it’s a joyful gash, a ruffled crevice, an angry bellowing fissure . . .

Then what is a penis?

A long bump? A preposterous outcrop, a slender jutting ledge? A cylindrical shelf perhaps. A beige ridge, a swelling protuberance, a warm-blooded obtrusion.

Is it always a weapon?

When talking about sex, it is nearly impossible not to talk about power. And when you are talking about heterosexual penetrative sex, it’s impossible not to talk about the penis. And when you talk about the penis, it’s impossible not to wonder if it’s our enemy, the very nexus of The Patriarchy at which we all rage.

And while this algebra — the phallus serving as a symbol of women’s oppression, predicated on the axiom that women are “the lesser sex” — feels like a logical way to add things up, I want no part of these calculations.

Such equations are reductive at best, dangerous at worse. Making a particular genital synonymous with a particular gender—which in turn places said human at the center at The Problem—doesn’t add up, as it were. The simple fact that some people in possession of a penis don’t benefit from the patriarchy at all—or suffer even more horribly than your average cishet white gal like me—undermines the central premise of this math.

Moreover, I don’t want my power predicated on someone else’s subjugation or humiliation. I don’t want the re-appropriation of power — don’t misunderstand me, I am coming for my rightful share — to come at the cost of degrading others. Or their genitals.

I get the impetus. I have violent urges to exact revenge — sexual and otherwise — a lot. I want to patronize, demean, infantilize, hyper-sexualize, and underpay the cis men I meet all the goddamn time. I want to make them feel small. Scared. I want them to shirk and try to cover themselves.

But amid that reptilian muck, I am wrestling with a belief that rings truer and better (in line with who I am and strive to be) and that’s the notion that violence — metaphysical or otherwise — begets more violence.

If I am deriving — in part — my feminine power from my (utter) delight in sex and said delight comes from the penis, I am forced to acknowledge that I adore the penis, as I adore the person to whom it’s attached.

I cannot hold all penises accountable for the wretched men that have used them to intimidate and violate, those who’ve gleaned delusional — and literal — power from a world that worships the phallus.

Can one worship the icon and loathe its creators?

The penis’ softness, its pliability — like warm clay or dough — when flaccid, is so, so lovely.

I love its roundness, its plumpness. I love stroking it until it’s throbbing against my palm. I love its purple-pink-brown veins, I love the blood coursing through them; I can almost hear my heartbeat in time with the rush of their crimson thrummings.

I love the coupling of power and subjugation when I take him in my mouth. I’m kneeling and his hand presses my head forward — not hard, but not without force — and I can’t quite breath enough, but just for a moment.

We’re eliciting small, joyish sounds from one another — mine are muffled with his flesh; his are breathy, growling. He’s poised between my teeth and I am keenly aware of the tiny beast inside of me who won’t bite — but could — and the tiny brute inside him who won’t use my vulnerability against me — but could.

We’re suspended, mutually sacrificing and taking power.

bell hooks has a really wonderful essay called “Penis Passion” in which she briefly traces the evolution of feminism in relation to the penis and how her own power is no longer predicated on denigrating the phallus — or fearing it.

She says that throughout the ’60s and ‘70s:

“in feminist consciousness-raising groups, we…talked about how women had to become more comfortable with words like pussy and cunt. So that men could not terrify or shame us by wielding these words as weapons, we also had to be able to talk about cock and dick with the same ease. Sexual liberation had already told us that if we wanted to please a man we had to become comfortable with blow jobs, with going down, with the dick in our throat so far down it hurt. Surrendering our sexual agency, we had to swallow the pain and pretend it was really pleasure.”

There is a use of violence against the violator in an attempt to negate the original violence. But again, this algebra feels wrong to me, if natural. hooks too explains her own movement away from this urge to sacrifice oneself on the altar of patriarchal sex to prove we’re just as powerful — that the altar is now ours too — when perhaps, we should be dismantling that altar entirely.

“Naming how we sexually engage male bodies, and most particularly the penis, in ways that affirm gender equality and further feminist liberation of males and females is the essential act of sexual freedom. When women and men can celebrate the beauty and power of the phallus in ways that do not uphold male domination, our erotic lives are enhanced.”

I want to name it. I want to sing a slippery ode to the sliding sensation of the penis, gliding between my legs slick as an otter; its damp fur makes a scratching sound against mine. I like it when his penis is the first thing inside me. I can feel my body give way around him — I wince with pleasure. It feels like stretching after a long run.

I like the way it moves and rises to meet me. I like the way it flexes and reacts to my breath, my glance, my tongue running its length. I like its proudness, its boat-like prow-ness; it’s leading its tired captain to the sandy shores of my sheets.

I like its strength; I like the way it can slap my mound like a slender branch against a rain-streaked window.

In short? I refuse to let my pleasure be synonymous with subjugation; in my adoration of the penis I do not make myself smaller or forgo my agency.

“To identify the penis always and only with force, with being a tool of power, a weapon first and foremost, is to participate in the worship and perpetuation of patriarchy,” hook says. “It is a celebration of male domination.”

And so I will worship at an altar of my own making, devoted to neither pussy nor penis, but mutual pleasure. We’ve fashioned it from plywood and together we’re tracing the splinters in our fingers and spine as we writhe on the shrine we’ve built for one another.

“A large number of black women writers, both past and present, have gone to early graves. To know their life stories is to be made aware of how death hovers . . . [their deaths] stand as constant reminders that life is not promised — that it is crucial for a writer to respect time.”

By Stephanie Fields

There is a bittersweet feeling I have when experiencing Solange’s masterful album, A Seat at the Table. It’s a mixture of pride and sorrow that swells when I listen to the melancholic melodies and absorb the colorful abstract visuals. Solange has delivered a thoroughly crafted, uncomfortably truthful, and hauntingly vulnerable account of what it is to be black in the world. It’s an internal journey through grief, anger, doubt, and hopelessness — notable not just for causing listeners to wonder how pain can sound so beautiful, but for the amount of time she took to complete it.

Solange reported after her album’s release that it took four years to finish her work. Such a lengthy timeline is in stark contrast to those historically afforded to black women creators. Master playwright Lorraine Hansberry’s entire career, for example, was over in just five short years.

Time has always been something of great fascination, famously described as a social construct, a portal through which one can travel, a luxury often afforded to the rich and privileged. But for black women creatives, time has proven to be a parasitic poison that has long stolen many of our beloved writers far too early. In her collection of essays on the writer at work, Remembered Rapture, bell hooks speaks of time’s insidious treatment of black women writers:

Put bluntly: Black women creatives have not been able to afford to trifle with time. For them, it is a literal tumor that eats away at their lives. Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Pat Parker, Claudia Tate, Minnie Riperton, Lorraine Hansberry, Kathleen Collins have all died pretty much the same way: fairly young, of cancer, and on the cusp of burgeoning creativity.

It’s a scary pattern, especially when you are, as I am, a black woman creative fighting tooth and nail to get work out. I’ve always been plagued by the question, why. Why did all of these brilliant women go out the same way, at the hands of such a brutal killer?

Womanist writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins provided a theory on the matter. Before her own death, she stated that it was fear that caused talented creative women to fall into a self-destructive illnesses she termed as “psychic disconnection[s].” This fear was rooted in women feeling their creative power but not being able to acknowledge and manifest it.

But what stops these women from being able to acknowledge and manifest their creative power? Is it solely feelings of imposter syndrome? The result of white-supremacist patriarchal structures that incapacitate them from accessing the tools to fully step into and realize the extent of their creativity, their genius? Collins certainly faced massive hardships. Before she could make her first film at 37 — she would die just nine years later — she tried securing funding for a screenplay and was met with such fierce resistance, it left her with a deep feeling of “discouragement,” to which she stated: “Forget it, I’ll never be able to make a film; I might as well do something else with my life.”

The denial of access to the tools to actualize a dream is criminal, yet prevalent in the experiences of black women attempting to do creative work. Their desire to create is challenged and often extinguished by deep discouragement at the hands of racist, sexist structures in creative fields and beyond. Is it having to stare down such defeat that allows fear to grow into the illness that robs these women of time? Or is it the dedication to persist beyond such racist sexist structures, such lack of power, and create anyway that requires the ultimate sacrifice of one’s life?

Eventually, Collins began making films — which required a fierce dedication, but also yielded mild success that arrived at the time of her first bout with cancer. Such was the same with the woman whom she drew great inspiration from, Lorraine Hansberry. The prolific playwright and critic died five years after she made history as the first black woman to write a stage play produced on Broadway. Was it fear that shortened Hansberry’s window? Or was it dedication?

Contrary to Collins’ theory on Hansberry’s death — a theory that eerily prophesied her own fate — James Baldwin believed Hansberry’s dedication to persist in her creative efforts was the culprit behind her early death. In “Sweet Lorraine,” the forward to Hansberry’s posthumously published book, To Be Young Gifted And Black, Baldwin writes:

“Perhaps it is just as well, after all,that she did not live to see with the outward eye what she saw so clearly with the inward one. And it is not at all farfetched to suspect that what she saw contributed to the strain which killed her, for the effort to which Lorraine was dedicated is more than enough to kill a man.”

Baldwin and Collins make a similar observation of timing in regards to Hansberry’s work and her illness. They both agree that she was ahead of her time, but differ in their interpretations of how she dealt with both time and illness. In Collins’ view, there was an element of fear that ate Hansberry up; in Baldwin’s, it was a fierce dedication. Are fear and dedication, then, mutually exclusive? Does one trump the other? Do either affect the amount of time black women are given to create?

In A Seat at the Table, we hear both Baldwin’s and Collins’ theories play out in a complex melee. Solange is not just providing anthems for us to sing in defense when outsiders try to touch our hair, or tell us not to bite the hand that feeds us, or that they should be able to use a word we’ve spent generations painfully reclaiming. She is not just providing an oration of her own family history, a history of Louisiana, or a man’s entrepreneurial accomplishments. Despite the beautiful melodies, and trance-like beats, the lyrics hold a weight that reveals Solange’s internal burden, which she’s carried while navigating through her sense of brokenness, grief, and fear in order to complete such an ambitious piece of work.

“I felt so many got to create my narrative and all I wanted to tell my story, our story, in my own words, and in my own voice.”

The same desire that propelled women like Collins, Hansberry, Lorde, and more is mirrored in Solange — and so are the struggles. Solange spoke about the need to maintain resources in order to complete her album and provide for her family. Her struggle speaks to the plurality of responsibility black women have had to face all while creating work. Beyond resisting the racist, sexist structures that attempt to defer their dreams, black women creators are also mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, and friends, all identities that carry their own individual responsibilities. On top of being someone’s mother, lover, and friend, black women are also balancing jobs in order to fund those for whom they care as well as for their own livelihood.

They do all of this while trying to not only feel their creative power and genius, but to manifest it. Collins likened the experience of trying to complete her first film while caring for her children to “going down a terribly long tunnel. It was frightening . . . ” So often are black women’s duties hyphenated between meeting the needs of loved ones and trying to reconcile their own personal desires, this pressure is enough to give rise to the fear of one’s capacity to realize one’s full creative genius.

Such dichotomies of duty to one’s family and one’s desires and the resulting grief, fear, and desolation that occur are also reflected in two of Solange’s darkest songs: “Weary” and “Cranes in the Sky.” In one song she is succumbing to that dark space of grief and doubt when she laments her weariness of finding her place in the world and retreats into herself, her exhaustion, her internal struggles, in order to find her body, her glory:

Be leery ‘bout your place in the world

You’re feeling like you’re chasing the world

You’re leaving not a trace in the world

But you’re facing the world

In the other, she is trying to live, to create beyond the looming darkness hanging over her like cranes. She speaks of the ways she’s tried to evade it, to overcome it — with money, with fashion, with frivolity, with isolation:

I tried to let go my lover

Thought if I was alone then maybe I could recover

Even today’s most wonderfully anomalous filmmaker, Ava DuVernay, with her accomplishments of having directed an Academy Award-winning film and being the first woman to direct a $100 million movie, cannot escape the dark reality of shrinking time for the black woman creative. She recently spoke with Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah about the pressure and anxiety time imposes on black women creatives:

“I feel like I have to make the most of this time, because there’s not anyone I can look to who’s had a long window who’s a woman, period. A black person, period . . . So for me it feels like a window that could close at any time. It doesn’t feel fast like, ‘Wow, this happened fast.’ It feels fast like, ‘Better get it in.’ Before it closes.”

Thirty-four years ago, Collins found herself in a similar position as she was the premiere black woman to write, direct, and produce a feature film. But she had no one to look to for guidance, no one who had lit a path before her, no one to encourage her that she could reach the zenith of her potential. Perhaps that was the cause of her fear, perhaps that’s what led to a dark time of discouragement, perhaps that’s what shortened the time of all of the women who followed Collins; they were firsts in their own rights, painstakingly carving out trails for the women after them to blaze. Such dedication required the ultimate sacrifice of their lives.

Solange taking her time to create a sole album is a, however inadvertent, subversive response to time’s maleficent treatment of black women creatives. Though she was faced with similar feelings of doubt, a lack of resources, and extra responsibilities, the privilege she had to create without a sense of urgency, without an illness lurking over her shoulder, without time threatening to snatch her life away, was bought and paid for by the sacrifices of the black women writers before her. Solange’s process exists as an anomaly, an exception to a terrifying rule we are reminded of as we grieve the recent and far too early death of Gloria Naylor.

This is where Solange and Collins diverge. Collins existed without a predecessor, while Solange has a varied assortment of examples from whom she can pull. The same goes for me. These women, and their lives, exist as more than omens; they are inspirations that fuel my dedication when I want to succumb to fear. They lift me up when I hear the echoing of the clock ticking, of doubt telling me I can’t do something. They remind me to create with a fervency, and whatever time I can afford to take a reprieve or to even go further into my own potential has been bought and paid for by the blood, sweat, tears, fears, and dedications of the women before me.

Perhaps Solange found a similar comfort in the fact that these women had done it, pulled off the creation of such ambitious work. Perhaps it served as reassurance that she could go into the depths of her soul and pull out something as magnificent as A Seat at the Table. The fact that she emerged from those depths healthy and able to live long enough to see the fruit of such labor is, indeed, a cause for celebration.

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