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The title of this new self-help book by bell hooks comes from Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters, whose opening sentence is "Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?" According to hooks, some of the black female students in her courses on black women writers once identified so strongly with Velma, the suicidal character to whom the question is addressed, that she felt compelled to organize a support group for them. She called it "Sisters of the Yam" in honor of Bambara and the collective efforts of the novel's two black women "ancestors" who can't understand why the daughters of the yam--the younger generation of black women--can no longer "draw up the powers from the deep like before." The aim of the support group was to provide "a space where black women could name their pain and find ways of healing," of drawing up the powers needed to recover and render whole a fragmented black and female self (13). Part of that naming involved learning "the myriad ways racism, sexism, class exploitation, homophobia, and various other structures of domination operate in our daily lives to undermine our capacity to be self-determining" (14). Sisters of the Yam is hooks's effort to share the group's strategies for resisting these structures, as a necessary first step to self-recovery, with a much broader range of black women who are sure that they want to be well. Therefore, although this is perhaps hooks's most "accessible" book in terms of its content and style, it nonetheless bears the weight of the heavily modified and redundant phrases she uses in her other works to describe American society. Phrases such as white-supermacist capitalist patriarchal culture seem much too pedantic and ideologically loaded for a self-help book whose intended audience is black women seeking ways "to make the hurt go away" (7).
Despite its ideological imperative to link personal self--recovery with a politics of "black liberation struggle," there is much practical advice in Sisters...