Let's Fall In Love

By Corey Devon Arthur

I love you. The only way we're going to make it, is if you love me too. bell hooks’ all about love walks us through her vision of love step by step from the trenches of human engagement, where people make choices to connect and conceive children. She also delves into the choices we make to keep and care for those children, or not. hooks explains how and why we love; first as an instinctive drive to survive as newborns, to love as intimacy, sex, solitude, and salvation through standing in solidarity as a single community. all about love merges our human instincts to love with a spiritual revolution to explore, express, and expand what love means on a universal level of necessity.

Love is an act of survival. The life of a single person depends on others choosing to love them. One person can not advance the human race alone. "Communities sustain life," wrote bell hooks. Empirical evidence confirms that human beings are a communal species. So does my life experience.

In 1979, I was two years old when my mother threw me out of the third story window of our burning apartment in Brooklyn, New York. She had no choice, because the flames from the fire were literally on her body. Mommy tossed me out the window and then jumped behind me, because our community was below waiting to catch her and I. This type of community care is constructed in a culture of love.

Love can be cultivated for good or corrupted for evil. all about love explained my understanding of love as a teenager in the carceral state. Although, I didn't know it back then. In 1994, I was 16 years old when I was arrested for selling drugs and sentenced to one to three years in adult male prison system. I was one of many teenagers being beat up by older and bigger prisoners. According to them, it was "an act of love to toughen us up." None of us teens could make these men stop by ourselves. As a result, we made a choice to collectively resist and make them leave us alone. This was a good kind of love.

Hate is often mistaken for the ultimate nemesis of love. When in fact, indifference is the hugest index wherever there is a lack of love. In 1977 my mother made a choice to birth me into this world, despite the lack of love she herself was living through. To assume otherwise would be to, "deny her full humanity, and thus fail to see the generosity in her acts," bell explains. My first engagement with love began when I was born to a single black teenage woman. My mom didn't have to risk her life giving birth to me. Nor, did she have to sacrifice what was left of her fucked up youth to raise me. Like momma, my father had a choice too. He just didn't choose mommy and me. I don't believe he hated us. Instead, he was just indifferent to our survival.

According to hooks, "We Choose to love." I disagree in part. As an infant I had no choice but to love someone or die. My first version of love was defined by being totally dependent on my mother for care. I had to love my mother because I needed her to survive. Greater free agency came with getting older. My dependency on my mother diminished. I still chose to love my mother, albeit dysfunctionally.

all about love articulated one of my mother's many fears for me. "I am afraid that they will grow up looking for intimacy without risk, pleasure without significant emotional reward," hooks wrote. Learning to love as a teen meant growing into a body that could explore new ways to experience pleasure with different people. I called them my friends.

We fuck our friends where I come from. "What we learned through these experiences is that our capacity to establish deep and profound connections in friendship strengthens all our intimate bonds." The outcomes from these social sexual engagements shaped how others and myself saw me in society. Unfortunately, things got twisted when I confused love, sex, and intimacy.

Sexual satisfaction was a sad substitute for what I really wanted, love. I wanted love from my mother who came up short because she hadn't been deeply loved herself. Furthermore, she couldn't offer me the love I wanted from a man in the form of a father.

The patriarch took over my father's role, and then my entire life. The carceral state showed me care; through custody and control. In 1994 they sent me into battle on Rikers Island C-74, dubbed "Adolescents At War" while waiting to be shipped to an adult male prison system for dealing drugs. At the time, it was the deadliest jail in America. When that didn't seem like enough love, they gave me another kind, solitary confinement.

Solitude as a silent solution may sound appealing in some parts. hooks spoke through theologian Henri Nouwen to explain why some of us search for community with others: "Knowing how to be solitary is the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a source of escape." Solitude becomes something else when it's not by choice.

The state's version of solitude snapped my mind when I was 16 years old locked up in Rikers Island in solitary confinement. I screamed but no one gave a damn about the damned in a den of drug dealers, thugs, and thieves. From that moment on the integrity of my love began its dive down a sliding state of degradation.

The total absence of love is death. It's worse when it occurs by murder. I know because in 1997 I participated in a robbery that resulted in the death of my 9th grade English teacher. I am extremely sorry and ashamed for what I did. My actions left a blackened hole in my heart, scorched and singed around the edges. The controversial component of all about love comes when "we have made the choice to be healed in love, faith that transformation will come gives us the peace of mind and the heart that is necessary when the soul seeks revolution," wrote hooks. Someone loved me enough to forgive me for being a selfish savage. Emily Nonko rescued me from the bottom. She's my Fearless Empowerment Avenue leader, friend, sheroe and I love her. Emily is the reason you're reading this book review.

Scumbags, sheroes, and scholars alike stand in solidarity with all about love. My brand of feminism defines love with a special kind of preciousness. Even the smallest spark of love has a trajectory towards life and equality. The further we travel in life along love's path, the stronger it gets, and the closer we become as a community. In other words, how we choose to love assigns life its value. It's priceless! We the people, as a community assigns love its societal value.

According to Sociologist Geographer and one of my sheroes, Dr. Ruth Gilmore, where life is precious, life is precious. Word in the streets says otherwise. "At the bottom life is cheap." You could get your rocks off, or get someone done dirty for a three dollar rock of crack or a pack of Newport 100. The former embraces love at its pinnacle. While the latter is a perversion of love, because it's selfish, destructive to all life. It corrodes the life of the practitioner, until they lay in crumbs at the bottom. Yet, all is not lost. All it takes is a little bit of love, because when it's all said and done living a good life is all about love.

hooks further confirms this analysis with the following advice for a fallen son like me: "a love I could still hope for lifted me out of the abyss I had fallen into." I found a comrade at the bottom of that abyss who loved me.

"Revolution is a love inspired act," wrote Comrade George L. Jackson. He died for me while in prison. The comrade did not hate white people or the prison guards who blew his head off. George violently fought against white supremacist prisoners and the carceral state because he loved his Black Guerilla Family. Since love isn't static, I theorize that the trajectory of George's revolution would have evolve into feminism. Unfortunately, the carceral state blew his head off before he had a chance to heal and grow into his fullness of love. George also authored Blood In My Eye. This and the overall legacy of his life is my evidence of his potential to love all of humankind. George made sure it was potent enough to bleed from the eyes of all revolutionaries, black, white, man, woman and all in between.

George L. Jackson's sacrifice was only but a stage of the revolution. His blood left a trail that dripped onto the words of my Sister Resistor, Audrey Lorde. "You can't use the master tools to dismantle the master's house." Lorde loved me enough to help me evolve into the next stage of being a revolutionary. I became a feminist because I came to realize that none of us can do it alone. Survival of the human race depends on this kind of love and reciprocal care. We can all begin to do this by reading all about love as a way to fall in love with the world.

Corey Devon Arthur is an incarcerated writer and artist who is part of the Empowerment Avenue Collective, with his work published in venues including, The Marshall Project, Writing Class Radio, The Drift, and Apogee. He exhibited his art at 2 galleries in Brooklyn, New York in early 2023. You can check out more of his work at dinartexpression on Instagram, and on Medium.

Book ReviewsMaya SinghalAugust 16, 2023Corey Devon Arthur, bell hooks, all about love