How do you write about a haunting? Toni Morrison gave us Beloved. Saidiya Hartman gave us critical fabulation. Christina Sharpe gave us In the Wake. bell hooks gave us Illumination. I have a search engine, their words to guide me, and my intuition.
At its simplest, this video documents how difficult it is to find a copy of Illumination: A Living Voice by bell hooks and James Hillman. Creatively, its a meditative experiment in dialoguing with my own research and releasing perfectionism. I hope that the grainy video and hollow audio and convey the presence of the ghostly muse that guided this series rather than render my point unintelligible.
“I feel like I'm too connected to the dead.” - bell hooks, Illumination, A Living Voice, p. 87
Transcript
I can't quite remember where I heard the phrase “writing with ghosts,” but I've been ruminating on it for months. To me the phrase refers to the ancestors and the stories of the past that still shape our world today. We do not get to choose our blood families. But sometimes, we get to make conscious choices about who we claim as our creative ancestors.
In many ways, this platform is a conversation with my own literary ancestors. After all, the title, Between Starshine and Clay, refers to a stanza from a famous poem by the inimitable Lucille Clifton. Every time I publish a dispatch under this title, It calls forth her ghost. Recently, I was eavesdropping on a chat between bell Hooks and James Hillman about systems of dominance in the United States in a book called Illumination: A Living Voice.
The book is a conversation between two friends near the end of one of their lives, so everything they say is also in conversation with their creative and intellectual ghost.
Illumination isn't in print anymore and it seems like you need to know someone who knows someone who knows someone else. The conversation is both reflective and visionary. Possessing the character of two elders sitting on a porch in rocking chairs watching children play. To the chagrin of every black mama that raised me, I interjected in their conversation, minding grown folks business and butting in where I should not, as if I were there on the porch with them.
Not disrespectfully, but with the precociousness of a nosy child who has sad attentive eyes. I don't think their ghosts would be haunting me. if they didn't want to talk to me.
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