Homemade Love by bell hooks

Decolonising the Imagination

This picture book was published in 2002 and is intended for ages 2 to 6 years. hooks' first children's book was titled 'Happy to be Nappy' and was released in 1999. In 2008, hooks published Grump Groan Growl, a book that embraces the myriad feelings children experience and a warm acceptance of rage and anger.

‘Any Black child that has a healthy self-esteem will know how to deal with racism…any White child that is taught to be loving is not going to be a racist’ (hooks)

'the media has bomdbarded us with stories telling the public that little black children (and we are talking here primarily about girl children) prefer white dolls to black dolls, and think that white children are cleaner and nicer. The white-dominated media presents this knowledge to us as if it is solely some defect of black life that creates such aberrant and self-negating behavior, not white supremacy' (Sisters of the Yam, bell hooks)

bell hooks emphasises the role of imagination in resisting domination. I have the impression that nowadays a vast majority of picture books are unimaginative. They do transport you into wonderful imaginary worlds but many of them leave you wanting and yearning....for blonde hair and blue eyes; they leave you with a dislike for things that are brown and black, they leave you with a void and a confusion and with a vocabulary that doesn't necessarily fit your world. My brown-skinned 3-year-old picks up a light pink coloured pencil and says convincingly that it's the colour of skin. My five-year-old always colours the girls' hair blonde because it's more beautiful, she tells me and my little one protests or cries when I try to colour a face brown or black. 

White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy – big words that have become hollow from use and misuse. But not with bell hooks. Homemade love is about empowerment and resistance…but without the floodlights, loudspeakers and fanfare of 'diversity'. It is about resistance through love, healing, bonding…and all of this packaged and illustrated in a playful, flighty, poetic, kinetic style that opens up the book and invites the reader to partake in, seek out and sow this seed of love.

Reading the picture book Homemade Love with my kids is a simple act of joy and sharing. My little girl laughs with the girlpie protagonist hanging from her daddy’s legs and my older one happily reads aloud with me, ‘there is no all the time right. But all the time any hurt can be healed’. Homemade Love is a little big book with deceptively simple sentences that lets children know that they deserve and have a right to be loved. Making mistakes is part of life, hurt can always be healed, peace can be made again with the world… and the tender support of parents in guiding and loving us through all of this is crucial.

Girlpies have the space and cosiness at night-time to process all the things they experienced during the day. In this space of safety, love and alone-time, the little girlpie knows her place in the world, isn’t afraid of the dark place ‘cause everywhere is home’. 

My 5-year-old asks me at the end of our reading, ‘is it true that everywhere is home?’. Oh yes, I say. This comforting well-being that you carry within you…this little ‘Lichtergarten’ (our lit-up inner garden’) as Soheyla Sadr puts it in her picture book ‘Anne und Pfirsich’ is all the ‘home’ we need for self-actualisation, …to imagine and realise our world and to be at one with it.

Shaking Binarisms out

‘We live in a nation that is incredibly diverse but our language is incredibly binary…so we have to work to be inclusive’, notes bell hooks in an interview with Connie Doebele. And this is what bell hooks’ picture books do – they twist the language out of this binarism, let the words jump up and out at you. The words are ventilated, become almost free for each and every child and parent to dwell on, caress or interact with. 

The starting point of Homemade Love isn’t diversity or any of the other catchwords that we parents latch on to in the hope that our children can experience the diverse world that we live in. bell hooks is wary about children's books that start off with a negative - 'my hair is unruly and difficult to manage but I love it just the same'...'I am told by my classmates that I can't be Peter Pan because I'm not a boy and I'm Black but I'll show them'..and the list of examples go on and on. Too many of our children's picture books are stuck in this binarism; telling Black kids and kids of colour that the world is a harsh place for them, that they are not seen as equals, something is 'wrong' with their hair, their colour, their smell, their origin, their religion...but 'WE' will be your friend DESPITE this. We may have been decolonised but the minds and imaginations are still reeling from the stupor of colonisation.

‘How do we use our imagination in the service of our well-being?’, hooks urges us to ask ourselves. When the girlpie protagonist of Homemade Love lies in bed at night, knowing she is loved, knowing the arms that held her are still holding her, she is equipped to be at one in and with the world.

bell hooks has often joked – ‘I’m not happy, I’m an intellectual, how am I going to write books for children?’ But she recognised the energy inside her and wanted to manifest it because kids and more importantly, Black kids and kids of every colour desperately need to see this seed inside them, sow it and enjoy its fruits. Only then can our children begin to see their worth and potential and react to the many hurdles that they face daily.

And finally, I'd like to quote this lengthy passage from hooks' self-help book 'Sisters of the Yam', It shows the depth of the short statements we read in Homemade Love and the deeper meanings behind some of them. In this quote, she talks about embracing darkness and instilling a love for and comfort in it, especially among kids:

In a space before time and words, the world was covered in a thick blanket of darkness. It was a warm and loving covering. Since it was hard for the spirits who inhabited this space to see one another they learned to live by and through touch. So if you were running around lost you knew you were found when arms reached out in that loving darkness to hold you. And those arms that held the spirits in that beautiful dark space before time are holding us still. This is a little origin story I made up. I thought of it one day when I was trying to explain to a little brown girl where the babies lived before they were born—so I told her they lived in this world of loving darkness. I made up this story because I wanted this little brown girl to grow up dreaming the dark and its powerful blackness as a magic space she need never fear or dread. I made it up because I thought one day this little brown girl will hear all sorts of bad things about the darkness, about the powerful blackness, and I wanted to give her another way to look at it. (bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam, pg 92)

Spectacularly Beautiful. A Refugee's Story. Recommended for Ages 3 and up

Story by Lisa Lucas, pictures by Laurie Stein

'I want you to draw a memory. But not any memory. This one has to come from the place you were born', says the teacher Ms. Truong.
This is a common activity to get kids to express different emotions and to also discuss trauma or talk about different realities and histories.

Spectacularly beautiful is about Shahad's drawing - a pile of broken bricks and crabby looking faces.
She explains that those bricks in her drawing made her eye 'look like this...and my leg...like this' (we see two small scratches)

The teacher points out what's perfect in Shahad and helps her to see that too - the braids in her perfectly combed hair, for example.
Then Shahad asks the teacher - Do you think I'm beautiful?, to which she replies, 'I think you are spectacularly beautiful'.

On the last day of school, Ms. Truong announces that over the summer, she will be teaching children in a country that has a few problems. They will remind her of the girls and boys she is saying goodbye to.

After the summer, Ms. Truong returns with a scar of her own and asks Shahad if she is beautiful. 'I think you are spectacularly beautiful', is her reply.

This is a 'refugee story' about overcoming pain and trauma. Children need to feel loved, welcomed and yes, beautiful and perfect, despite their inner and outer scars. And when we give them this love and offer them open arms, that's what we will receive in return  - grateful, confident beings who exude the same warmth and happiness they receive.

The use of different colours for the children and teacher (purple, blue, green etc) and real pictures of a school and classroom give the book and story a sense of truth and connection. The 'fantasy' colours of the people allow kids reading this book to openly talk about painful things or sad memories without identifying a single country, ethnicity or folk.

All of the children seem to have an immigrant background and the names aren't the names one is accustomed to reading in picture books (Tim, Lucy, John, Lena, Pete, etc) - they are Trivien, Tuyet, Tierney and Shahad. On the one hand, one might argue it 'others' the reality of the child refugee or immigrant and places her in a parallel reality/society. Nonetheless, the stories of the children, through their drawings, show that no matter where you are from or what your story is, children are all the same - they like playing outdoors, riding their bikes, they hate eating the same food every day and they are sad when their homes are destroyed.

All in all, a noteworthy book because it manages to broach a sensitive topic- war, fleeing, trauma, loss of childhood, migration and a new home - with simplicity and love. Children need to feel loved and welcomed and need to be told they are beautiful too. Nonetheless, the book offers a closed world of refugees in a parallel classroom with no or little contact with other native groups. I believe minds and hearts can only be changed with the interaction and incorporation of these kids in a broader context. This may at first seem a daunting task since the refugee child's needs are initially more demanding. However, children have shown enormous resilience and empathy if exposed to each other under fair circumstances. This allows for learning and healing and building empathy.

Another dubious aspect in this book is the socialisation of girls to think they need to be physically beautiful in order to be acknowledged or accepted. A female child refugee is thus doubly othered - for sticking out as both physically different and female. However, the general message of empathy and focusing on what is positive in each human being is not altogether lost.