Briefly, on love and a Hortense Spillers symposium

At the beginning of the semester, our advisor sat us down and told us that, essentially, we have six years to write a book. Well, at that point, even less than. Something like five years and change. I’ve struggled, throughout the semester, to trust that I can do “academic” writing. That I still have it in me. That I’ve ever had it in me.

To deal with this imposter syndrome, I’ve heard only one refrain: Write every day.

So that’s what I’ve been trying to do. In all of its messy work-in-progress-ness.

This weekend, I attended The Nicknames of Distortion: A Hortense Spillers symposium. Hortense J. Spillers donated her “papers” (e.g. articles, drafts, notes, poems, correspondence – literal papers filling up some thirty boxes in an attic) “to the Pembroke Center’s Feminist Theory Archive in the name of the Black Feminist Theory Project in 2019.”

In my very chaotic academic experience at LMU – of my own making, with stints as a minor in African-American Studies, Business, Theology, and English, and ultimately two majors – I was never settled enough in my studies to hear the name Hortense J. Spillers.

That’s all changed this semester. From her most well-known work Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book, “which critiques how Black women have been figured in the American imaginary” to her works on writing and criticism – I have been steeped in the work of Hortense J. Spillers.

My suspicion is that her work will become integral to my own. That the things she takes up – in discourses around literature, psychoanalysis, black feminist thought, and aesthetics – will be a model for my own thinking, even if I don’t yet know the how of it.

What I have been thinking about, though, is the experience of the symposium: it included the presentation of several papers and a keynote, before closing with a conversation between Professor Spillers and Professor Margo N. Crawford. The papers that were shared ran the gamut in terms of the format, aesthetic, and content. And I was enthralled by all of the ways that these scholars – traveling from places like Chicago and Texas and Cape Town – had taken up and extended the work of Professor Spillers. And even more consumed by thoughts of what that must have felt like for her.

What must it feel like to witness your legacy unfolding before your eyes?

I felt inspired to keep reading. Studying. And making. And deep gratitude for the opportunity to be in that space with those people. I was reminded, once more, about why I am here. And it worked on me in ways I don’t even have words for yet.

So, in the meantime, some words from Professor Spillers, when asked about love:

After all these years, love is one of the remaining mysteries. [Remembering something from Baldwin] whatever it is, without it, we don’t get through. I think I know what it feels like: coming at me and coming out of me. And whenever I am feeling anguished and embittered, but can open up, [love is there]. And in those moments, I grow just a little bit more.

I, too, don’t quite know what love is. But I know that this weekend – in all of its rigor and thoughtfulness, reverence and imagination – felt something like it. Love. Who knew I’d find it here.