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“A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.”  -- bell hooks, All About Love : New Visions

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In chapter 12 of All About Love : New Visions, Hooks discusses how love has healing and redemptive powers. She begins by asserting, "Love heals. When we are wounded in the place where we would know love, is difficult to imagine that love really has the power to change everything...Mindful remembering [of our past wounds] lets us put the broken bits and pieces of hearts together again. This is the way healing begins." hooks then goes on to discuss specifically how love can heal. She suggests that the healing power of the mind and heart are always present because we have the ability to endlessly renew our spirits and restore our souls. She reminds us that the existence of pain is not an indicator of dysfunction because all people, even those void of dysfunction as we know it to be, experience pain. She encourages us to celebrate the absence of dysfunction just as much as we expose it as the truth. hooks also discusses the healing power of love when we take responsibility for our own well-being and then open our hearts to receive healing offered by those who care; she says that there is a such thing as "healthy inter-dependency" and that healing is much more powerful when we commune with both like-minded souls and the divine spirit (through prayer). hooks secondly focuses on the ways that redemptive love calls us towards healing. She asserts that "love redeems" by casting out fear and allowing a person to celebrate their ability to love without being afraid. She says, "As one gives and receives love, fear is let go. As we live in the understanding that "there is no fear in love" our anguish diminishes and we garner the strength to enter more deeply into loves paradise. When we are able to accept that giving ourselves over to love completely restores the soul, we are made perfect in love." This is significant to the work as a whole because it encompasses the the overall theme that acting in love, or giving and receiving love, allows an person to be healed and rest in knowing that their soul has been set free from past struggles.

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In Beyonce’s Lemonade, redemption is key to the overall theme. Near the end of the work she says, “Grandmother, the alchemist, you spun gold out of this hard life, conjured beauty from the things left behind, found healing where it did not live…” She then includes a clip of her own Grandmother speaking. Her Grandmother says, “I've had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up. I was served lemons, but I made lemonade.” It is from this clip that the central theme of the album lies. It is a theme of healing and redemption through finding love and forgiveness. Further, it is a theme of taking struggles (or sour lemons) and making them great (like sweet lemonade).

Like Beyonce, hooks also focuses on the themes of healing, redemption, love, and forgiveness in All About Love : New Visions. She preaches the idea that in order for a person to heal, they must become accountable for their struggles and act in order to overcome them – much like Beyonce’s Grandmother did when she took her struggles (sour lemons) and made them into something beautiful (sweet lemonade). Beyonce likens her Grandmother to an alchemist because she created beauty and greatness through some sort of imperceptible process. hooks also references alchemy in her work in reference to a person’s ability to turn struggle into beauty through encountering redemptive love. She says, “The alchemy of perfect love is such that it offers to us all a love that is able to vanquish fear. That which is rendered separate or strange through fear is made whole through perfect love. It is this perfect love that is redemptive – that can, like the intense heat of alchemical fire, burn away impurities and leave the soul free.” Here, hooks is suggesting that one must not simply encounter love, but must actively use it in order to be redeemed of struggles. Like hooks, Beyonce’s Grandmother actively used the love that she encountered to “spin gold out of this hard life” and create a life void of fear.

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                     Redemption in Beyonce's "Lemonade" and bell hooks' "All About Love : New Visions"

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                     Redemption in Beyonce's "Lemonade" and bell hooks' "All About Love : New Visions"

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Summary of Chapter 12 -'Healing: Redemptive Love' 

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Summary of Chapter 12 -'Healing: Redemptive Love' 

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In chapter one of her book, bell hooks says, “I spent years searching for a meaningful definition of the word "love," and was deeply relieved when I found one in psychiatrist M. Scott Peck's classic self-help book The Road Less Traveled, first published in 1978. Echoing the work of Erich Fromm, he defines love as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." Explaining further, he continues, "Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love." Since the choice must be made to nurture growth, this definition counters the more widely accepted assumption that we love instinctually.”

My question for you is: do you believe we love instinctively or do you believe we must choose to love?

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Softly Spoken Reading, 'All About Love : New Visions'

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Softly Spoken Reading, 'All About Love : New Visions'

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"The word 'love is most often defined as a noun, yet...we would all love better if we used it as a verb."

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Softly Spoken Reading, 'All About Love: New Visions' by Bell Hooks

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A video made by ASMR Aurette who has deleted her channel some time ago. I have permission to re-upload her videos to YouTube. If you would like me to upload one of her other videos please comment or message me.

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bell hooks on Love in Conversation with Gloria Steinam (Excerpt) 

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bell hooks on Love in Conversation with Gloria Steinam (Excerpt) 

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bell hooks on love in conversation with Gloria Steinem (excerpt)

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About the Book - 'All About Love : New Visions' 

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About the Book - 'All About Love : New Visions' 

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All About Love : New Visions is the first in hooks' trilogy, "Love Song to the Nation". It begs the question, "What is love?" and and offers a proactive new ethic regarding love for a people and society bereft with lovelessness. At the intersection of race, class, and gender, hooks skewers our view of love as romance and provides a new perspective of a love that is sacred, healing, and redemptive for individuals and for a nation. hooks uses both her own own search for love and emotional connection, as well as society's failure at providing a model for learning to love, to radically alter our ideals surrounding what love is.

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bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, is known as one of the most influential race scholars of all time. As a child, Watkins attended a racially segregated public school and performed her poetry at church events in her community. She grew up to attend Stanford University on scholarship, The University of Wisconsin at Madison thereafter to attain her M.A. in English, and the University of California-Santa Cruz for her PhD.

hooks first major book was Ain't I a Woman : Black Women in Feminism (1981) in which she focused on the intersection of race, sex, and class in the lives of black women. This book propelled hooks into the heart of intellectual studies regarding race, class, and sex - the central themes that characterize a majority of her later work including All About Love : New Visions.

hooks accepted an appointment in English and African American Studies at Yale University in 1985 and began teaching jointly at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1988. She has published over 30 books and scholarly articles dealing with race, class, and sex, and is among the leading intellectuals of her generation.

As a writer, she chose the pseudonym bell hooks in tribute to her mother and great-grandmother. She chose not to capitalize the name to place the focus on her work and ideas rather her name and personality.