From the Archives: "Love, the Verb" by Hawa Allan
This essay originally appeared online in April 2020 and is being republished to honor the passing of the incomparable bell hooks.
“Often in my lectures when I use the phrase ‘imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ to describe our nation’s political system,” writes bell hooks in The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, “audiences laugh.” But no one could ever explain to her what was so funny.
It is hooks’ catchphrase, and in America’s mass media-saturated culture where catchphrases are associated with sitcoms, maybe the term had become devoid of any meaning other than its association with hooks, the feminist theorist, and the fact that her audiences had been conditioned to laugh whenever she said it.
Yet “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” is also jargon—terminology that compresses complex concepts into one or a few words, typically for an audience that shares some specialized knowledge. Jargon presupposes an agreement on the definition of the relevant terms, allowing the one using it to communicate succinctly and without much context, usually in service of talking about something else. In works by hooks that I recently revisited and read, the “something else” is love.
Crooned of in song, captured in film, immortalized in poetry, love is discussed as if everyone knows what’s being talked about. For hooks, this presumed understanding is a fallacy. The word “love,” she claims, is practically devoid of meaning. Everyone thinks they know what love is, but most have no clue. Reading hooks' works on love, you’ll likely discover, for the most part, that nobody loves you. Not your family, not your friends, not your “lover.” You also might discover that you don’t love anyone either.
So, what is love? In All About Love: New Visions, hooks notes that out of the many books she read on the topic, almost all of them failed to provide any definition, leaving the meaning of love “cloaked in mystery.” Based on her readings and life experience, hooks offers her own definition: the will to nurture one’s own and another’s spiritual and emotional growth, as well as a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.
Here, hooks fuses meanings from two texts she repeatedly references—M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled and Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving. (I “love” that hooks deems self-help books like Peck’s worthy of critical examination.) Fundamentally, hooks’ definition is grounded in Fromm’s classic insistence that love is not solely a feeling but an action. In other words, hooks defines “love” not in its capacity as a noun, but as a verb.
This emphasis reframes the validity of the famous utterance “I love you,” which is often spoken to indicate how someone feels, and not what someone does. If you want to read about love as a feeling, go pick up A Lover’s Discourse, where you’ll find Roland Barthes depicting a tortured fluctuation between mania and depression. (“I am simultaneously and contradictorily happy and wretched” … “I am the sole witness of my lunacy.”) What Barthes describes, I’m sure hooks would say, is not love but cathexis—the focus of an emotional charge on an object, idea, or in Barthes’ case, a person. The love hooks explores requires more than passion; it requires a lot of hard work.
The art of loving, she writes, also requires making the choice to love. Instead of finding yourself with a feeling you’ve been conditioned to believe you have “fallen into” without choice, you should exercise your will by making a conscious decision to love. “If love were only a feeling,” Fromm writes in The Art of Loving, “there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever,” since feelings come and go.
However, what makes hooks’ definition of love so poignant is not her description of what love is, but her elaboration of what love is not. Page after page, chapter after chapter, book after book, hooks’ affirmation of love is darkened by the shadow of all too familiar examples of lovelessness.
In All About Love, she shares an anecdote about a “fun party” she attended where the other guests unanimously agreed on the need to physically punish their children. One woman bragged that instead of hitting her small son when he misbehaved, “she clamped down on his flesh, pinching him until he got the message.” Attempting to disrupt this consensus, hooks contended that the group would have been appalled if a man boasted that he pinched his girlfriend as hard as he could if she did something he didn’t like. Her argument, however, was to no avail. “All the parents in that room claim that they are loving,” hooks writes.
Regardless of whether parents practice corporal punishment, hooks describes the typical parent-child relationship as utilitarian. Quoting playwright Lorraine Hansberry in Salvation: Black People and Love: “We were fed and housed and dressed and outfitted with more cash than our associates and that was all. We were not a loving people.”
She also recalls fundamentally unloved and unloving lovers who have perfected false masks in order to attract the validation they crave. In All About Love, she writes:
“So many seekers after love are taught in childhood to feel unworthy, that nobody could love them as they really are, and they construct a false self. At some point, glimpses of the real self emerge and disappointment comes.”
Of the list of actions that constitute love—care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, trust, and nurturing of another’s spiritual growth—hooks says that most relationships reflect only one or two. In such cases, that Barthesesque fervor is accompanied by some kind of “care”—either in an emotional sense, as a form of validation or encouragement, or in a more concrete sense, in the way of physical affection or material provision like food, clothing, shelter, etc.
Everyone from our parents to our partners may have misinterpreted love as “random acts of care.” That’s harsh but illuminating.
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Under quarantine, I have started to experience myself as a kind of creature that I have been tasked with taking care of. I am like my own pet. Largely divorced from the performative task of interacting with others and going outside, I have been left without any excuse to, as hooks would advise, practice self-care, self-commitment, self-knowledge, self-responsibility, self-respect, self-trust, and to basically nurture my spiritual growth.
Sufficiently undistracted, I have also been left to contend with how little I feel like doing any of these things. Therefore, I have been reduced to talking to myself as if I were a small child who must be roused out of bed in the morning to get ready for school. It has been intriguing and humbling to be left hoping that, in learning to truly love, using myself as the guinea pig, loving would become a kind of muscle memory and eventually wouldn’t require any thought at all.
A conditioned, thoughtless response. Could that be another definition of love? Love, the noun? That unloving love one “falls” into unwittingly, as if through faulty cellar doors on a New York City sidewalk? If so, that conditioned, thoughtless response could be anything—infatuation, admiration, lust, longing. Pheromones activated by a genetically preferable mate, the flood of oxytocin in a mother tending to her child. An automatic appreciation of generic beauty standards, or recognition of qualities on some other unconscious checklist, perhaps a glimpse of traits shared by an absent parent. Love, the noun, can stand in for any or all of these things—or none of them. And that could be why I have never trusted it.
Having, like hooks, read and re-read Fromm’s The Art of Loving, I’m inspired by love, the verb. Love that is intentional. Love that doesn’t float around untethered until it attaches to some prewired emotion. Love that is grounded in everyday actions. Love that I can choose to practice even when I don’t feel like it.
It is this shift, from the unconscious to the conscious, from the mindless to the mindful, and from noun to verb, that transforms love from something conditioned into something unconditional.
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All of hooks’ love-themed works—All About Love, Salvation, Communion: The Female Search for Love, and The Will to Change—largely discuss heterosexual relationships, examining the systemic influences that can make them dysfunctional. Patriarchy is the main villain in hooks’ love story, ever thwarting her practice in the art of loving. “Patriarchy, like any colonizing system,” she writes in Communion, “does not create the context for women and men to love one another.”
Love, under patriarchy, has been assigned as women’s work, “degraded and devalued labor.” Although women are conditioned to be preoccupied with love, they rarely learn how, because “patriarchal men have been the most willing to substitute care for love, submission for respect.”
The “men” and “women” in these books do read like stereotypes, and to the extent they do, hooks argues that it is because they have been cast in patriarchal molds. That said, she doesn’t advocate essentialism; she’s denouncing systems of domination and control, which is apparent in her critiques of certain self-help books.
In her review of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, hooks accuses the author John Gray of himself trafficking in stereotypes, again suggesting that women are innately more loving than men, and normalizing male emotional withdrawal into what he calls the “cave”—some psychological dungeon women should allow the men they’re with to periodically retreat into without complaint. “Gray approaches problems in male-female relationships as if patriarchy did not exist and as if male domination were not a reality.”
Objecting to the notion that women are more loving, she raises examples of maternal sadism, and describes patriarchy as a hierarchical system where women may be violent towards those they have power over such as “children and weaker females.” She also disrupts the myth that most men are committed to acting as providers and protectors, recalling rampant cases of men failing to pay alimony and child support.
(However, hooks’ criticism of most self-help books doesn’t prevent her from applying their tactics. She describes her own experience of taking advice suggested in Women Who Love Too Much, by Robin Norwood. If a male partner does or says anything inappropriate, instead of initiating a discussion or requesting a change in behavior, simply utter “oh.” This is Norwood’s advice for avoiding conflict. “I used this strategy many times,” hooks writes. “It worked.”)
Much of hooks’ writing on love recalls the rigid gender binaries reminiscent of the 1950s. Perhaps this makes sense, given that hooks grew up in the fifties and came of age during the second wave of feminism in the late sixties and seventies, when feminist activists rigorously reexamined and attempted to undermine gender norms in public and private life. However, with hooks’ emphasis on how one loves rather than who one loves, she raises important questions of accountability and responsibility that could resonate across sexual orientations and gender identities.
In the end, what is most interesting about hooks’ project is her move to consider so-called “love” within societal constructs, instead of something that exists independently of such forces. Situating love within the societal constructs that distort it, as well as insisting on a grassroots effort to redefine the term, carries the potential to shake the “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” at its foundation.
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hooks had her own theory about her audiences’ laughter at her oft repeated watchword, which she said suggested that “the words themselves are problematic and not the system they describe.” Yet, here we are, in the midst of a pandemic when the president is more focused on hectoring than health, where aberrations of the stock market are more important than sickness and death, where first responders have scant access to protective gear, where closing borders and xenophobia are prescribed as viral remedies, where those bearing the brunt of the virus and the essential work are largely black and brown and marginalized. The examples from our current moment and throughout history that justify hooks’ terminology are far too long to list here or anywhere. It would be a tome with no end.
By the standards of love, the verb, we are living in a failed state. So many do not feel cared for or respected. They do not sense any serious commitment to their overall well-being. They don’t trust the information that they are being given or those disseminating it. And even if it is not possible for any government official to truly “know” all constituents, it is clear that many of the governed are taking grave offense at each of their precious lives being translated into an expendable statistic.
Extracting love from the ether, out of the desperate lyrics of a song, or from some projected yearning, and putting it to work as an action, a verb, can help recast governmental strategy and political wrangling as either loving, or not.
Is that laughable? Wanting the government to “love” you?
If so, then I don’t see what’s so funny. Most systems of thought produce streamlined courses of action. If you were to ask a Marxist and a proponent of laissez-faire policy how to regulate the economy, they would each have their own scripted answers. Perhaps the case should be the same with practitioners guided by a “love-ethic.”
The call by hooks to revolutionize love may be heard not only to transcend tired gender roles, but upend and transform lovelessness wherever it is found.
Hawa Allan writes cultural criticism, fiction, and poetry. Her work has appeared, among other places, in The Baffler, the Chicago Tribune, Lapham's Quarterly, and Tricycle magazine, where she is a contributing editor. Insurrection, a weaving of personal narrative and legal history, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.
