Place as Fount of Political Philosophy -- Kentucky

Perhaps of all the titles selected for the fifty State tour, Belonging -- A Culture of Place sounded like it would be the most apropos book. Alas, I was pleased with only half of its essays; the ones that did not engage me were those that rang of polemics.

Bell Hooks, born and raised in the Kentucky hills, is at her best in the chapters dealing with black agrarian life, from the sustenance gained from raising tobacco to the solace of sewing quilts, from the scale of place determined by the distance one can walk to the sense of sisterhood fostered on a front porch. Her best stories rival those of Noel Perrin's love of the land and native flora and fauna of Vermont. Her appreciation of the need to be rooted to the land by farming it respectfully -- acknowledging the power of Nature as the leveler of man's pretense to domination -- segues well from The Worst Hard Time's theme of becoming disconnected from one's agricultural community, sinning against Nature.

However, there are other essays that read like diatribes. She is the "distinguished professor in residence of Appalachian Studies" at Berea College, a town and institution founded in 1853 to create a place of mixed races and equal classes. Hooks returns here, the prodigal daughter, seeking a place of comfort but clinging tenaciously to her terror of whites and her distrust of all the sources of power in America. Her writing style, so evocative in the stories about her grandparents and the hills and meadows, erodes to dialectic buzzwords as hegemony, patriarchy, dominator culture crop up like weeds in her otherwise cultivated reminiscences.

Large parts of these "Kentucky history made me politically what I am today" chapters contain entire paragraphs quoted from deconstructionist authors, revealing her to be yet another uber-liberal university instructor. With roots as an English major and graduate student, she advocates an entirely new language be created to permit dialogue between races. Large segments of her interview with Wendell Berry, a white Kentuckian whom she admires as a mentor for his writing about his friendship and love of black fold who lived nearly his childhood home, is merely her ranted about her perception of his motivations and her interpretations of their larger social context, with Berry replying more often than not that he had nothing of the sort in mind.

This anger seems so dissonant with the other lessons she learned in rural Kentucky and with her avowed philosophy to find contentment in a simple, earth-bound life. The interpretation of birth place as the source of religious and political groundings emerged in our books for Oregon and Nebraska, not to mention Utah. But while Hooks has some distance and wisdom that allows nature to restore her spiritually, she still fights proudly to maintain the "oppositional" habits she absorbed as a hillbilly.

Among her citations is a lengthy quote from the Different Drum by M. Scott Peck that includes: "While rugged individualism predisposes one to arrogance, the "soft" individualism of community leads to humility. Begin to appreciate each other's gifts and you begin to appreciate your own limitations. Witness other's brokenness ... and you will become able to accept your own inadequacy and imperfection."

She had brought back home some inspiration from her wanderings, but she has not converted them to insight. She id defiantly settled in the blue grass.