Belonging: A Culture of Place

Porches emerge as spaces that symbolize community, visibility, and resistance, particularly for women. For hooks, the porch of her childhood home was a feminine sanctuary where women and girls could gather, converse, and watch the world. However, this space was also vulnerable to patriarchal intrusion, such as when her father’s violent outburst destroyed its sense of safety. In her later life, hooks reclaims the porch as a site of anti-racist resistance and civility, a place to practice connection across difference while honoring the fellowship once nurtured there.

Braided tobacco leaves appear as a symbol of protection, memory, and rootedness. Stored in Baba’s chests to keep away insects, the braids also carry a deeper cultural resonance, linking hooks to rural Black agrarian traditions and to a crop historically tied to both survival and exploitation. She keeps these braids among her personal treasures, using them as a tangible link to her ancestors and as guardians of the home, embodying the protective and sustaining power of heritage.

The motif of nature functions as a restorative and grounding force throughout Belonging. Hooks repeatedly recalls the hills, meadows, trees, and waterways of Kentucky as sites of spiritual renewal, freedom, and healing. Nature offers an enduring counterpoint to the exploitative systems of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, providing protection even under oppressive ownership structures. Her vision of belonging is inseparable from a reciprocal relationship with the earth, where land is not merely a resource but an active participant in human well-being.

Vernacular language, particularly the Black Kentucky dialect of hooks’s grandparents, symbolizes authenticity, cultural identity, and resistance to assimilation. For hooks, returning to her vernacular is a way of reconnecting with the “voice of the primal mother” (172) and grounding herself in the rhythms and meanings of her upbringing. This language holds histories, values, and ways of knowing that mainstream, “neutral” speech often erases, making it a vital thread in sustaining cultural belonging.