Belonging : A Culture of Place by hooks bell

Author:hooks, bell [hooks, bell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humanities
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-10-10T19:35:56+00:00

10

Earthbound: On Solid Ground

Kentucky hills were the place of my early childhood. Surrounded by a wilderness of honeysuckle, wild asparagus, and sheltering trees, bushes shielding growing crops, the huge garden of a black landowner. Our concrete house on the hill, a leftover legacy from oil drilling, from the efforts of men to make the earth yield greater and greater profit stood as a citadel to capitalism’s need for a new frontier. A child of the hills, I was taught early on in my life the power in nature. I was taught by farmers that wilderness land, the untamed environment can give life and it can take life. In my girlhood I learned to watch for snakes, wildcats roaming, plants that irritate and poison. I know instinctively; I know because I am told by all knowing grown-ups that it is humankind and not nature that is the stranger on these grounds. Humility in relationship to nature’s power made survival possible.

Coming from “backwoods” folks, Appalachian outlaws, as a child, I was taught to understand that those among us who lived organically, in harmony and union with nature were marked with a sensibility that was distinct, and downright dangerous. Backwoods folks tend to ignore the rules of society, the rules of law. In the backwoods one learned to trust only the spirit, to follow where the spirit moved. Ultimately, no matter what was said or done, the spirit called to us from a place beyond words, from a place beyond man-made law. The wild spirit of unspoiled nature worked its way into the folk of the backwoods, an ancestral legacy, handed down from generation to generation. And its fundamental gift was the cherishing of that which is most precious, freedom. And to be fully free one had to embrace the organic rights of the earth.

Humankind, no matter how powerful, cannot take away the rights of the earth. Ultimately, nature rules. That is the great democratic gift earth offers us — that sweet death to which we all inevitably go — into that final communion. No race, no class, no gender, nothing can keep any of us from dying into that death where we are made one. To tend the earth is always then to tend our destiny, our freedom and our hope.

These lessons of my girlhood were the oppositional narratives that taught me to care for the earth, to respect country folk. This respect for the earth, for the country girl within, stood me in good stead when I left this environment and entered a world beyond the country town I was raised in. It was only when I left home, that country place where nature’s splendors were abundant and not yet destroyed, that I understood for the first time the contempt for country folk that abounds in our nation. That contempt has led to the cultural disrespect for the farmer, for those who live simply in harmony with nature. Writer, sometime farmer, and poet Wendell Berry, another Kentuckian, who loves our land,

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