People like her never die, they live on-wherever they may be in the cosmos-and through their incredible body of work continue to inspire women like me to show up as ourselves. In her first sentence of this now classic text she stated: “In a retrospective examination of the black female slave experience, sexism looms as large as racism as an oppressive force in the lives of black women.” Hook’s analysis of sexism, and the ways in which the institutions of slavery and white supremacy reinforced gender norms were like nothing I had read before. hooks helped me understand not only how racism functioned in society historically and in contemporary times, but placed sexism-a system I was made intimately aware of growing up as a girl in Ghana-on an equal footing with racism-a system which, until then, I had been sheltered from as a privileged middle class girl in a Black majority country. Reading that book not only changed my life, it made me the feminist that I am today. It was one of the assigned texts on my university reading list, and it was my introduction to feminism. I buried myself in my books, including bell hooks’ Ain’t I a Woman: Black women and feminism. I worked as a receptionist for the local branch of a popular chain of pizza restaurants, where I had to get used to customers screaming at me when I asked them to do things like spell out their address because I didn’t understand their accent. Unlike my mum, I wasn’t the child of a wealthy man, and so I studied part time, and worked to pay my fees as a home student. My experience in London was very different.
It was where The Famous Five had all these magical adventures, and where my own Dad, a civil servant, and my Mum, a bilingual secretary, had the romance which had resulted in me, their “love child.” My mum had told me many thrilling stories of the many years she spent in the U.K.-being educated in a fancy 6th form college, as an adult going to the Ritz for tea, and later meeting my Dad in Geneva, and reconnecting with him when he came to Oxford to study. For the first time in my life, I was living separately from my close-knit nuclear family, and while on one hand I was exhilarated by my newfound independence, on the other I felt challenged by the society I was now living in. The year was 1997, and I had just moved from Ghana to the United Kingdom to study for a degree in Communications.
I first came across the work of bell hooks when I was nineteen years old.
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