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War. Terrorist attacks against Israeli Jews. War crimes and genocide. Infliction of starvation and violence on vulnerable and dehumanized Gaza newborns, children and adults. The rise of fascism and totalitarianism. The penal colony murder of a courageous political opponent who risked his life for democracy and his country’s liberation, The excruciating decay of language and truth since 2015. The U.S. Presidential primary wins of a rapist, tax cheat and con artist who along with his cult-members and the craven GOP U.S. Congressional Representatives and Senators tried to overthrow a lawful election. A country’s highest court taking an appealed judicial opinion that already ruled a former U.S. president cannot shoot someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue and get away with it or order Seal Team 6 to kill a political opponent.
This has been 2024, and we are only five days into March.
The relentless barrage of ugly news revealing and enforcing the worst of humanity can defeat us, enrage us or numb us. Worse of all, it’s mainly brought to us by a cynical and shallow mainstream U.S. media corrupted by capitalism, neoliberalism and whiteness. (Anderson Cooper’s patronizing and aggressive both-sides verbal dismissal of former Ohio state senator Nina Turner when she shared her thoughts on the Gaza is just one example of corporate media’s racism and misogynoir.) Oscar-winner Paddy Chayefsky wasn’t just the writer behind the satirical film classic Network where he created a world where corporate interests annihilate the integrity of network news and human life. The novelist, playwright and screenwriter was a prophet.
Some days I believe I can’t endure or find the resolve to resist. Often I feel alone, dismissed, ignored, targeted and futile. While I try to manage it, my anger still rises. Its deformed mouth masticates me then swallows me. Yesterday was one of those days.
The latest news to ignite my anger was the Supreme Court of the United States’ (SCOTUS) unanimous decision Monday to keep inmate number P01135809 on the election ballot. Despite inmate number P01135809 fomenting Insurrection and the attempted assassination of his former Vice President Mike Pence, SCOTUS ruled that only Congress could remove inmate number P01135809. Even though U.S. states manage their own elections, SCOTUS said Colorado removing inmate number P01135809 was unconstitutional. As I read the news article and waited for the bus to take me to my eye doctor appointment, anger ignited the wick of my existential dread and inflamed my “"meh” Monday-morning mood.
I know I am not the only person who experiences this. Or develops migraines from them. One of my fellow writing tutors often tells me she’s overwhelmed and at her wit’s end.
Anger, nonetheless, is not always a negative emotion. Anger makes us active and determined. As John Lydon wrote for Public Image Ltd.’s “Rise,” “Anger is an energy.” The trick is making that energy productive instead of vengeful. Pinpointing our anger’s energy toward injustice is what gives us agency, moves the needle and creates change.1
To help me with my anger, that I hope is righteous, I always turn to Audre Lorde and her feminist classic Sister Outsider. Her essay “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” specifically tells women to not fear our anger toward racism and racial injustice but use it as a reply
to anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation.
My anger is a response to racist attitudes and to the actions and presumptions that arise out of those attitudes. If your dealings with other women reflect those attitudes, then my anger and your attendant fears are spotlights that can be used for growth in the same way I have used learning to express anger for my growth. But for corrective surgery, not guilt. Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures.2
Lorde emphasizes that anger must be “translated into action in the service of our vision and our future . . . .”3 with equitable and anti-racist change as the final goal.4
While this essay focused on racism and the essential need for Black women, Indigenous women, women of color and white women to listen to each other, dialogue, acknowledge hurt and injustice and work as a team to dismantle racism and misogynoir, Lorde’s feminist theory on anger put into practice provides a framework for anger becoming an unstoppable force for creating healthy change.
Stacey Abraham founding of Fair Fight after she lost the Georgia governor’s race to Brian Kemp is an example of this. Her anger transformed from an emotion to an action and her organizing helped the state flip from red to blue in 2020. No matter how small our own work or action kicked off by our anger, that work toward a better society and world matters.
My writing — whether the genre is fiction or non-fiction — and this newsletter I hope are a drop of water within a collective wave to cleanse the U.S. and world of this madness. I hope my anger will not be in vain.
Lorde’s wisdom tells us and specifically informs women
[a]s we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.
For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, "beautiful/ and tough as chestnut/stanchions against (y)our nightmare of weakness/" and of impotence.
These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.5
Institutions like SCOTUS and the U.S.’s electoral system, racism, war, desecration of humanity and ineffective and broken governments can make us feel small and ineffective, but the truth bears out that we’re not.
Punk-poet goddess Patti Smith wrote “that people have the power to redeem the work of fools.” Because we have the power, we can channel our anger’s energy into writing (poetry, songwriting, fiction, non-fiction, composing a letter to an elected government official or newspaper), organizing, volunteering at a food bank or animal shelter, painting, filmmaking, sculpture, digital art, performance art, speaking truth to power at a Congressional town hall or school board meeting or participating in a protest. Most of all, we can vote if we still have the right or work toward gaining or keeping that vital right.
Lorde says the difference between anger and fury is that fury contains hate.6 Anger is an energy fueled by love. Over ten years ago, Madonna called for a Revolution of Love inspired by what she encountered overseas during her MDNA tour and her admiration for James Baldwin. Using our anger and love make us active. Makes us powerful. Using anger and love collectively makes a difference .
Audre Lorde,“The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984; reis, Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), 127.
Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” 124.
Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” 127.
Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” 129.
Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984; reis, Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), 36-37.
Lorde, “The Uses of Anger,” 129.
Don’t lose heart. What you are accomplishing with your writing is significant; goodness will prevail however it is tested. Remember, we out number them!
Thank you for the encouragement. 🙂!