Embracing Our Painful Past

A reading response to bell hooks’ “writing autobiography"

Timothy Brown

August 28, 2012

Lang 120 - Hutchman

Within the excerpt from bell hooks’ book Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, we are introduced to an authors reflection on her childhood.  Often times when authors reflect on their childhood, it is filled with fond memories and experiences that they accept as positive influences on their adult life.  In contrary, within these few pages we discover that bell hooks, also known as Gloria Watkins, doesn’t like to reminisce on her past but rather tries to escape a past of an appalling nature. Within the first paragraph of the excerpt we sense her tone of distress and become drawn towards her words. We then follow her during her struggles of writing her autobiography before discovering her final insight.

In the beginning of the excerpt are a few phrases that grab our attention as readers and make most people offer true sympathy in her regard; phrases such as, “anguished childhood” and “always wrong, always punished, always subjected to some humiliation”.  These phrases show a deep sense of distress as hook is trying to explain to us the childhood she remembers and is trying to disconnect from.  In an effort to break from the painful memories of her past she decided to write an autobiography.  She tried numerous times to put her history on paper, and to finally gain liberation from the past she recalled so unpleasantly. Throughout many of her attempts to break from the past she often experienced failure as she found it difficult to let go of her past. I firmly believe that our individual pasts are what make us who we are today and as we try to forget where we come from and what we have experienced we begin to feel voids open in ourselves.  Our past may not always be appealing, but hook was right in trying to remember her past in order to grow from it rather than to suffer though the voids. 

Recollecting our past, pleasant or not, is still sometimes difficult.  We all have those memories that we vividly remember year after year while at the time losing some of the best memories of our lives. A factor that became a struggle for hook was that she had painful experiences that were “deeply imprinted” in her memory, while leaving other important aspects such as the enjoyable times too fuzzy to remember.  Her memories that were deeply imprinted were unpleasant, accounting for her profound sense of distress.  To rid herself of painful memories, hook tried to focus singularly on happy memories. Through recollection of pleasant memories, hook was finally able to finalize her first manuscript.

Through proofing her manuscript, hook was faced with the fact that her childhood was not as terrible as she recalled. A magnificent insight was discovered when hook realized that she had simply forgotten the good times. I feel as humans today, our societal ways of life have put us on a fast track where good experiences are taken for granted and unpleasant experiences become like wounds and fester.  I am fully guilty of letting bad days get the best of me, and always trying to prove how bad life is off of single events, but like hook, I have tried to pull those fond memories to the forefront in order to create a various mixture of memories.

Through hooks’ autobiography anyone that has had a hard time accepting their past or is even just too bound to their painful memories will gain a brief sense of liberation the same way hook did through the realization that there are more happy memories they have forgotten.  The author does a great job at expressing how important our past truly is.  Remembering our past is almost necessary to show us where we originated from and how far we’ve come.  Rather than trying to disconnect from our painful past we need to embrace it, for embracement is far more exhilarating.