Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  As Black women, we have shared so many similar experiences. Why doesn’t this commonality bring us closer together instead of setting us at each other’s throats with weapons well-honed by familiarity? The anger with which I meet another Black woman’s slightest deviation from my immediate need or desire or concept of a proper response is a deep and hurtful anger, chosen only in the sense of a choice of desperation — reckless through despair. That anger which masks my pain that we are so separate who should most be together — my pain — that she could perhaps not need me as much as I need her, or see me through the blunted eye of the haters, that eye I know so well from my own distorted images of her. Erase or be erased! I stand in the Public Library waiting to be recognized by the Black woman library clerk seated a few feet behind the desk. She seems engrossed in a book, beautiful in her youth and self-assuredness. I straighten my glasses, giving a tiny shake to my bangles in the process just in case she has not seen me, but I somehow know she has. Otherwise motionless, she slowly turns her head and looks up. Her eyes cross mine with a look of such incidental hostility that I feel pilloried to the wall. Two male patrons enter behind me. At that, she rises and moves toward me. “Yes,” she says, with no inflection at all, her eyes carefully elsewhere. I’ve never seen this young woman before in my life. I think to myself, “now that’s what you call an attitude,” recognizing the rising tension inside of me. The art, beyond insolence, of the Black girl’s face as she cuts her elegant sidelong glance at me. What makes her eyes slide off of mine? What does she see that angers her so, or infuriates her, or disgusts her? Why do I want to break her face off when her eyes do not meet mine? Why does she wear my sister’s face? My daughter’s mouth turned down about to suck itself in? The eyes of a furious and rejected lover? Why do I dream I cradle you at night? Divide your limbs between the food bowls of my least favorite animals? Keep vigil for you night after terrible night, wondering? Oh sister, where is that dark rich land we wanted to wander through together? Hate said the voice wired in 3/4 time printed in dirty type all the views fit to kill, me and you, me or you. And whose future image have we destroyed — your face or mine — without either how shall I look again at both — lacking either is lacking myself. And if I trust you what pale dragon will you feed our brown flesh to from fear, self-preservation, or to what brothered altar all innocent of loving that has no place to go and so becomes another face of terror or of hate?

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  In the light of what Black women often willingly sacrifice for our children and our men, this is a much needed exhortation, no matter what illegitimate use the white media makes of it. This call for self-value and self-love is quite different from narcissism, as Staples must certainly realize. Narcissism comes not out of self-love but out of self-hatred. The lack of a reasonable and articulate Black male viewpoint on these questions is not the responsibility of Black women. We have too often been expected to be all things to all people and speak everyone else’s position but our very own. Black men are not so passive that they must have Black women speak for them. Even my fourteen-year-old son knows that. Black men themselves must examine and articulate their own desires and positions and stand by the conclusions thereof. No point is served by a Black male professional who merely whines at the absence of his viewpoint in Black women’s work. Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves. For Staples to suggest, for instance, that Black men leave their families as a form of male protest against female decision making in the home is in direct contradiction to his own observations in “The Myth of the Black Matriarchy.” * Now I am sure there are still some Black men who marry white women because they feel a white woman can better fit the model of “femininity” set forth in this country. But for Staples to justify that act using the reason it occurs, and take Black women to task for it, is not only another error in reasoning; it is like justifying the actions of a lemming who follows its companions over the cliff to sure death. Because it happens does not mean it should happen, nor that it is functional for the well-being of the individual nor the group. It is not the destiny of Black america to repeat white america’s mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life. If Black men continue to define “femininity” instead of their own desires, and to do it in archaic european terms, they restrict our access to each other’s energies. Freedom and future for Blacks does not mean absorbing the dominant white male disease of sexism. As Black women and men, we cannot hope to begin dialogue by denying the oppressive nature of male privilege. And if Black males choose to assume that privilege for whatever reason — raping, brutalizing, and killing Black women — then ignoring these acts of Black male oppression within our communities can only serve our destroyers. One oppression does not justify another.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  But I don’t want to deny them. I know I can’t afford to. I may have to take a long hard look and say, “Is this something I can use? What do I do with this?” I have to try to stand back and not become immersed in what you so forcefully are pronouncing. So there’s a piece of me that wants to resist wholly, and a piece that wants to accept wholly, and there’s some place in between where I have to find my own ground. What I can’t afford is either to wipe out your perceptions or to pretend I understand you when I don’t. And then, if it’s a question of racism — and I don’t mean just the overt violence out there but also all the differences in our ways of seeing — there’s always the question: “How do I use this? What do I do about it?” Audre: “How much of this truth can I bear to see/ and still live/ unblinded?/ How much of this pain/ can I use?” * What holds us all back is being unable to ask that crucial question, that essential step deflected. You know the piece I wrote for The Black Scholar? ** The piece was useful, but limited, because I didn’t ask some essential question. And not having asked myself that question, not having realized that it was a question, I was deflecting a lot of energy in that piece. I kept reading it over, thinking, this isn’t quite what it should be. I thought at the time I was holding back because it would be totally unacceptable in The Black Scholar. That wasn’t it, really. I was holding back because I had not asked myself the question: “Why is women loving women so threatening to Black men unless they want to assume the white male position?” It was a question of how much I could bear, and of not realizing I could bear more than I thought I could at the time. It was also a question of how could I use that perception other than just in rage or destruction. Adrienne: Speaking of rage and destruction, what do you really mean by the first five lines of “Power”? *** Audre: “The difference between poetry/ and rhetoric/ is being/ ready to kill yourself/ instead of your children.” What was I feeling? I was very involved in a case ... Adrienne: The white policeman who shot the Black child and was acquitted. We had lunch around the time you were writing that poem and you were full of it. Audre: I was driving in the car and heard the news on the radio that the cop had been acquitted.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  I also came for reassurance, to see if Grenada had survived the onslaught of the most powerful nation on earth. She has. Grenada is bruised but very much alive. Grenadians are a warm and resilient people (I hear my mother’s voice: “Island women make good wives. Whatever happens, they’ve seen worse”), and they have survived colonizations before. I am proud to be of stock from the country that mounted the first Black english-speaking People’s Revolution in this hemisphere. Much has been terribly lost in Grenada, but not all — not the spirit of the people. Forward Ever, Backward Never22 is more than a mere whistle in the present dark. Notes1. P. Tyler, Washington Post, October 10, 1983, p. A14.2. A. Cockburn, Village Voice, November 8, 1983, p.11.3. B.D. Ayers, New York Times, October 22, 1983, p. A5 and J. McQuiston, New York Times, October 26, 1983, p. A20.4. Text of Treaty, New York Times, October 26, 1983, p. A19.5. S. Taylor, New York Times, October 26, 1983, p. A19.6. A. Lewis, New York Times, November 3, 1983 and A. Cockburn, Village Voice, November 8, 1983, p. 10.7. S. Mydans, New York Times, January 15, 1984, p. 9.8. Christian Science Monitor, November 7, 1983.9. A. Schlesinger, Jr., Wall Street Journal, October 26, 1983.10. C. Sunshine, ed., Grenada — The Peaceful Revolution (E.P.I.C.A., Washington, D.C., 1982).11. C. Sunshine, The Guardian, December 28, 1983.12. E. Ray and B. Schaap, “U.S. Crushes Caribbean Jewel,” Covert Action Bulletin # 20, Winter 1984, p. 11. 13. Ibid., p. 13. 14. Ibid., p. 5.15. S. Taylor, New York Times, November 6, 1983, p. 20.16. Ibid.17. Washington Post, November 21, 1983.18. CBS Evening News, December 18, 1983.19. The London Guardian, November 4, 1983.20. Grenada — The Peaceful Revolution, p. 87.21. Carriacou — In the Mainstream of the Revolution (Fedon Publishers, St. Georges, Grenada, 1982), pp. 54–57.22. Slogan of the Grenadian Revolution * I spent a week in Grenada in late December, 1983, barely two months after the U.S. invasion of the Black Caribbean island my parents left some sixty years earlier. It was my second visit in five years. This is an interim essay, a report written as the rest of Sister Outsider was already being typeset. [image file=image_rsrc1DT.jpg] [image file=image_rsrc1DU.jpg] For a current catalog of books from Crossing Press visit our Web site: www.tenspeed.com [image "Penguin Random House publisher logo" file=image_rsrc1DV.jpg] What’s next on your reading list?Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now.

• From Between Us

  A typical U.S. child’s reply was to communicate anger to their father “so that he would realize it was only a mistake,” and to tell him “you can have the eraser, but you do not need to hit me.” Cole and her colleagues suggest that in a society that emphasized self-reliance and self-assertion, children have learned that feeling and communicating anger is acceptable and effective. How very different were the emotions of Tamang children, whose community valued egalitarianism, tolerance, and minimization of psychological distress! In keeping with their values, the Tamang children often blamed themselves for the unfortunate turn of events: “I snatched the eraser,” they might say. Whereas the U.S. kids felt and showed anger (and blamed their father or friend) with the objective of changing the situation to their benefit, Tamang children blamed themselves to maintain harmony. Parents and other caregivers may play a larger role than they imagine in socializing anger. The observational study of German and Japanese mothers and their five-year-old disobedient children (described above) suggested that mothers play a significant role in socializing their children’s anger. The German mothers in this study were not nearly as patient with their disobedient children as the Japanese mothers had been. Rather than accepting their children’s behavior as immature, as the Japanese mothers had done, the German mothers were quick to infer that their disobedient child had been acting on purpose. Remarks such as “he wants to make me angry” were not uncommon, and many German mothers reacted to their child’s disobedience with their own anger. As an unintended side effect, the German interactions often escalated, with the child and the mother both being angry. My reading is that German mothers treated the disobedience of their children as a power conflict between two individuals with different interests (whereas the Japanese mothers felt responsible for their children and the relationship). Notably, the anger that German five-year-old kids showed during these interactions with their mother, predicted their aggression nine years later (and also explained that, nine years later, the same German children were more aggressive than the Japanese children who had participated in the study). The German mothers may not have so much wanted their children to be angry, but by assuming their child’s individuality and intention, and by showing anger themselves, they created the circumstances for anger. Psychologists Peggy Miller and Linda Sperry followed three working-class mothers who lived in South Baltimore, each with a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. The mothers also encouraged anger, but not completely in the same way as the German mothers.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  To examine Black women’s literature effectively requires that we be seen as whole people in our actual complexities — as individuals, as women, as human — rather than as one of those problematic but familiar stereotypes provided in this society in place of genunine images of Black women. And I believe this holds true for the literatures of other women of Color who are not Black. The literatures of all women of Color recreate the textures of our lives, and many white women are heavily invested in ignoring the real differences. For as long as any difference between us means one of us must be inferior, then the recognition of any difference must be fraught with guilt. To allow women of Color to step out of stereotypes is too guilt provoking, for it threatens the complacency of those women who view oppression only in terms of sex. Refusing to recognize difference makes it impossible to see the different problems and pitfalls facing us as women. Thus, in a patriarchal power system where whiteskin privilege is a major prop, the entrapments used to neutralize Black women and white women are not the same. For example, it is easy for Black women to be used by the power structure against Black men, not because they are men, but because they are Black. Therefore, for Black women, it is necessary at all times to separate the needs of the oppressor from our own legitimate conflicts within our communities. This same problem does not exist for white women. Black women and men have shared racist oppression and still share it, although in different ways. Out of that shared oppression we have developed joint defenses and joint vulnerabilities to each other that are not duplicated in the white community, with the exception of the relationship between Jewish women and Jewish men. On the other hand, white women face the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power. This possibility does not exist in the same way for women of Color. The tokenism that is sometimes extended to us is not an invitation to join power; our racial “otherness” is a visible reality that makes that quite clear. For white women there is a wider range of pretended choices and rewards for identifying with patriarchal power and its tools .

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also. Women responding to racism means women responding 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. Because I do not want this to become a theoretical discussion, I am going to give a few examples of interchanges between women that illustrate these points. In the interest of time, I am going to cut them short. I want you to know there were many more. For example : • I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, “Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.” But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change? • The Women’s Studies Program of a southern university invites a Black woman to read following a week-long forum on Black and white women. “What has this week given to you?” I ask. The most vocal white woman says, “I think I’ve gotten a lot. I feel Black women really understand me a lot better now; they have a better idea of where I’m coming from.” As if understanding her lay at the core of the racist problem. • After fifteen years of a women’s movement which professes to address the life concerns and possible futures of all women, I still hear, on campus after campus, “How can we address the issues of racism? No women of Color attended.” Or, the other side of that statement, “We have no one in our department equipped to teach their work.” In other words, racism is a Black women’s problem, a problem of women of Color, and only we can discuss it. • After I read from my work entitled “Poems for Women in Rage,” * a white woman asks me: “Are you going to do anything with how we can deal directly with our anger? I feel it’s so important.” I ask, “How do you use your rage?”

• From Going Clear (2013)

  He wouldn’t learn the real significance of Snow White for some time. Hubbard had set in motion an operation so daring and dangerous that it threatened to destroy Scientology forever. On April 20, 1973, Hubbard wrote a secret order, “Snow White Program,” in which he noted a dangerous trend in the gradual reduction since 1967 of countries available to Scientology. He put the blame on the American and British governments, which he said were spreading false allegations against the church. He proposed to swamp the countries that had turned against the church in a vast campaign of litigation with the aim of expunging defamatory files and leaving Hubbard and the Apollo “free to frequent all western ports and nations without threat.” In Hubbard’s absence, Mary Sue exerted increased control over the church’s operations. Hubbard had already appointed her the head of the Guardian’s Office, a special unit with a broad mandate to protect the religion. Among its other duties, the GO functioned as an intelligence agency, gathering information on critics and government agencies around the world, generating lawsuits to intimidate opponents, and waging an unremitting campaign against mental health professionals. It was the GO that Hubbard tasked with Snow White. Under Mary Sue’s direction, the GO infiltrated government offices around the world, looking for damning files on the church. Within the next few years, as many as five thousand Scientologists were covertly placed in 136 government agencies worldwide. Project Grumpy, for instance, covered Germany, where the Guardian’s Office was set up to infiltrate Interpol as well as German police and immigration authorities. In addition, there was a scheme to accuse German critics of the church of committing genocide. Project Sleepy was to clear files in Austria; Happy was for Denmark, Bashful for Belgium, and Dopey for Italy. There were also Projects Mirror, Apple, Reflection, and so on, all drawn from elements of the fairy tale. Projects Witch and Stepmother both targeted the UK, the source of Scientology’s immigration problems. Project Hunter was the United States, where Scientologists penetrated the IRS, the Justice, Treasury, and Labor Departments, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as foreign embassies and consulates; private companies and organizations, such as the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the Better Business Bureau; and newspapers—including the St. Petersburg Times, 8 the Clearwater Sun, and the Washington Post— that were critical of the religion. In an evident attempt at blackmail, they stole the Los Angeles IRS intelligence files of celebrities and political figures, including California governor Jerry Brown, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, and Frank Sinatra. Nothing in American history can compare with the scale of the domestic espionage of Operation Snow White.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Black women’s literature is full of the pain of frequent assault, not only by a racist patriarchy, but also by Black men. Yet the necessity for and history of shared battle have made us, Black women, particularly vulnerable to the false accusation that anti-sexist is anti-Black. Meanwhile, womanhating as a recourse of the powerless is sapping strength from Black communities, and our very lives. Rape is on the increase, reported and unreported, and rape is not aggressive sexuality, it is sexualized aggression. As Kalamu ya Salaam, a Black male writer points out, “As long as male domination exists, rape will exist. Only women revolting and men made conscious of their responsibility to fight sexism can collectively stop rape.”* Differences between ourselves as Black women are also being misnamed and used to separate us from one another. As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom from oppression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live. My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition. Only then can I bring myself and my energies as a whole to the service of those struggles which I embrace as part of my living. A fear of lesbians, or of being accused of being a lesbian, has led many Black women into testifying against themselves. It has led some of us into destructive alliances, and others into despair and isolation. In the white women’s communities, heterosexism is sometimes a result of identifying with the white patriarchy, a rejection of that interdependence between women-identified women which allows the self to be, rather than to be used in the service of men. Sometimes it reflects a die-hard belief in the protective coloration of heterosexual relationships, sometimes a self-hate which all women have to fight against, taught us from birth.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Yet at what cost! In order to withstand the weather, we had to become stone, and now we bruise ourselves upon the other who is closest. How do I alter course so each Black woman’s face I meet is not the face of my mother or my killer? I loved you. I dreamed about you. I talked to you for hours in my sleep sitting under a silk-cotton tree our arms around each other or braiding each other’s hair or oiling each other’s backs, and every time I run into you on the street or at the post office or behind the Medicaid desk I want to wring your neck. There are so many occasions in each of our lives for righteous fury, multiplied and dividing. • Black women being told that we can be somehow better, and are worse, but never equal. To Black men. To other women. To human beings. • The white academic feminist who tells me she is so glad This Bridge Called My Back * exists, because now it gives her a chance to deal with racism without having to face the harshness of Black undiluted by other colors. What she means is she does not have to examine her own specific terror and loathing of Blackness, nor deal with the angers of Black women. So get away with your dirty ugly mean faces, all screwed up all the time! • The racist filmstrip artist who I thought I had handled so patiently and well. I didn’t blow up his damned machine. I explained how his racial blindness made me feel and how his film could be altered to have some meaning. He probably learned something about showing Black images. Then I came home and almost tore up my house and my lover because some invitations happened to be misprinted. Not seeing where the charge of rage was born. • A convicted Black man, a torturer of women and children, army-trained to be a killer, writes in his journal in his death cell: “I am the type of person you are most likely to find driving a Mercedes and sitting in the executive offices of 100 big corporations.” And he’s right. Except he’s Black. How do we keep from releasing our angers at them upon ourselves and each other? How do I free myself from this poison I was force- fed like a Strasburg goose until I vomited anger at the least scent of anything nourishing, oh my sister the belligerent lift of your shoulder the breath of your hair.... We each learned the craft of destruction. It is all they knew to allow us, yet look how our words are finding each other again. It is difficult to construct a wholesomeness model when we are surrounded with synonyms for filth.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  As Black women, we have shared so many similar experiences. Why doesn’t this commonality bring us closer together instead of setting us at each other’s throats with weapons well-honed by familiarity? The anger with which I meet another Black woman’s slightest deviation from my immediate need or desire or concept of a proper response is a deep and hurtful anger, chosen only in the sense of a choice of desperation — reckless through despair. That anger which masks my pain that we are so separate who should most be together — my pain — that she could perhaps not need me as much as I need her, or see me through the blunted eye of the haters, that eye I know so well from my own distorted images of her. Erase or be erased! I stand in the Public Library waiting to be recognized by the Black woman library clerk seated a few feet behind the desk. She seems engrossed in a book, beautiful in her youth and self-assuredness. I straighten my glasses, giving a tiny shake to my bangles in the process just in case she has not seen me, but I somehow know she has. Otherwise motionless, she slowly turns her head and looks up. Her eyes cross mine with a look of such incidental hostility that I feel pilloried to the wall. Two male patrons enter behind me. At that, she rises and moves toward me. “Yes,” she says, with no inflection at all, her eyes carefully elsewhere. I’ve never seen this young woman before in my life. I think to myself, “now that’s what you call an attitude,” recognizing the rising tension inside of me. The art, beyond insolence, of the Black girl’s face as she cuts her elegant sidelong glance at me. What makes her eyes slide off of mine? What does she see that angers her so, or infuriates her, or disgusts her? Why do I want to break her face off when her eyes do not meet mine? Why does she wear my sister’s face? My daughter’s mouth turned down about to suck itself in? The eyes of a furious and rejected lover? Why do I dream I cradle you at night? Divide your limbs between the food bowls of my least favorite animals? Keep vigil for you night after terrible night, wondering? Oh sister, where is that dark rich land we wanted to wander through together? Hate said the voice wired in 3/4 time printed in dirty type all the views fit to kill, me and you, me or you. And whose future image have we destroyed — your face or mine — without either how shall I look again at both — lacking either is lacking myself. And if I trust you what pale dragon will you feed our brown flesh to from fear, self-preservation, or to what brothered altar all innocent of loving that has no place to go and so becomes another face of terror or of hate?

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  We are functioning under a government ready to repeat in El Salvador and Nicaragua the tragedy of Vietnam, a government which stands on the wrong side of every single battle for liberation taking place upon this globe; a government which has invaded and conquered (as I edit this piece) the fifty-three square mile sovereign state of Grenada, under the pretext that her 110,000 people pose a threat to the U.S. Our papers are filled with supposed concern for human rights in white communist Poland while we sanction by acceptance and military supply the systematic genocide of apartheid in South Africa, of murder and torture in Haiti and El Salvador. American advisory teams bolster repressive governments across Central and South America, and in Haiti, while advisory is only a code name preceding military aid. Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to bed at night. Recently, it was suggested that senior citizens be hired to work in atomic plants because they are close to the end of their lives anyway. Can any one of us here still afford to believe that efforts to reclaim the future can be private or individual? Can any one here still afford to believe that the pursuit of liberation can be the sole and particular province of any one particular race, or sex, or age, or religion, or sexuality, or class? Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other’s difference with respect. We share a common interest, survival, and it cannot be pursued in isolation from others simply because their differences make us uncomfortable. We know what it is to be lied to. The 60s should teach us how important it is not to lie to ourselves. Not to believe that revolution is a one-time event, or something that happens around us rather than inside of us. Not to believe that freedom can belong to any one group of us without the others also being free. How important it is not to allow even our leaders to define us to ourselves, or to define our sources of power to us.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The later procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.10 The shadow, including its erotic manifestations, holds the key to the whole self, as opposed to the limited self to which most of us have become accustomed. When shadow material is denied an outlet, pressure builds for it to push beyond the safe boundaries of the imagination and become destructive. The shadow is darkest when we refuse to look at it. In this section our goal is to gaze at the shadow of eros to comprehend its motives. EROS AND THE HOSTILE IMAGINATIONIn a remarkable book, Sexual Excitement, psychoanalyst Robert Stoller makes a stunning assertion: Putting aside the obvious effects that result from direct stimulation of erotic body parts, it is hostility—the desire, overt or hidden, to harm another person—that generates and enhances sexual excitement [italics added]. The absence of hostility leads to sexual indifference and boredom. The hostility of erotism [sic] is an attempt, repeated over and over, to undo childhood traumas and frustrations that threatened the development of one’s masculinity and femininity.11 Stoller’s emphasis on hostility as the motivating force behind high excitement is difficult to accept, although it is a bit easier for us because we have already become familiar with anger as an emotional aphrodisiac. I’m sure you can also see Stoller’s contribution to my concept of the CET as a formula for transforming unfinished emotional business into arousal. However, I disagree with him on several points. I believe hostility is just one of many emotions that energize our eroticism and not necessarily the most important. In addition, Stoller has little to say about how readily hostility can coexist with, or transform into, positive feelings. Finally, I believe that any threats to our self-esteem—not just those involving gender identity—can become intertwined with our eroticism. But I strongly concur that to understand our deepest erotic impulses, especially our strategies for undoing traumas from the past, we must face our psychic wounds, and with them our hidden desire to avenge ourselves. Nadine: Turning the tables Several members of The Group recognize the presence of hostility in their peak turn-ons. Nadine, a graduate student of psychology in her mid-thirties, confronts her shadow as she recounts this fantasy: I’m a pubescent girl in the care of a middle-aged man I don’t know. He takes good care of me but forces me to have sex with him and his friends and strangers. They examine, fondle, and praise my body parts. They strip me while they’re dressed except for their penises sticking out. They touch and prod me everywhere—my mouth, ass, pussy. Some squeeze my breasts while others are jacking off and coming all over me. Before long I’m dripping with semen.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  When the world moved against me with a disapproving frown / It was sister put the ground back under my feet.* Hearing those words sung has always provoked the most profound and poignant sense of loss within me for something I wanted to feel and could not because it had never happened for me. There are some Black women for whom it has. For others of us, that sense of being able to depend upon rock bottom support from our sisters is something we dream about and work toward, knowing it is possible, but also very problematic across the realities of fear and suspicion lying between us. Our anger, tempered over survival fires, shuttered behind downcast eyelids, or else blazing out of our eyes at the oddest times. Looking up from between the legs of a lover, over a notebook in the middle of a lecture and I almost lost my train of thought, ringing up groceries in the supermarket, filling out the form behind the unemployment office window, stepping out of a, cab in the middle of Broadway on the arm of a businessman from Lagos, sweeping ahead of me into a shop as I open the door, looking into each others eyes for a split second only — furious, cutting, sisters. My daughter asking me all the time when she was a little girl, “Are you angry about something, Mommy?” As Black women, we have wasted our angers too often, buried them, called them someone else’s, cast them wildly into oceans of racism and sexism from which no vibration resounded, hurled them into each other’s teeth and then ducked to avoid the impact. But by and large, we avoid open expression of them, or cordon them off in a rigid and unapproachable politeness. The rage that feels illicit or unjustified is kept secret, unnamed, and preserved forever. We are stuffed with furies, against ourselves, against each other, terrified to examine them lest we find ourselves in bold print fingered and named what we have always felt and even sometimes preferred ourselves to be — alone. And certainly, there are enough occasions in all our lives where we can use our anger righteously, enough for many lifetimes. We can avoid confrontation with each other very readily. It is so much easier to examine our anger within situations that are (relatively) clearcut and emotionally unloaded. It is so much easier to express our anger in those middle depth relationships that do not threaten genuine self-exposure. And yet always that hunger for the substance known, a hunger for the real shared, for the sister who shares.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  So often this fear is stoked between Black women by the feared loss of a male companion, present or sought after. For we have also been taught that a man acquired was the sole measure of success, and yet they almost never stay. One Black woman sits and silently judges another, how she looks, how she acts, how she impresses others. The first woman’s scales are weighted against herself. She is measuring the impossible. She is measuring the self she does not fully want to be. She does not want to accept the contradictions, nor the beauty. She wishes the other woman would go away. She wishes the other woman would become someone else, anyone other than another Black woman. She has enough trouble dealing with being herself. “Why don’t you learn to fly straight,” she says to the other woman. “Don’t you understand what your poor showing says about us all? If I could fly I’d certainly do a better job than that. Can’t you put on a more together show? The white girls do it. Maybe we could get one to show you how.” The other woman cannot speak. She is too busy keeping herself from crashing upon the ground. She will not cry the tears which are hardening into little sharp stones that spit from her eyes and implant themselves in the first woman’s heart, who quickly heals over them and identifies them as the source of her pain. V There are myths of self-protection that hold us separate from each other and breed harshness and cruelty where we most need softness and understanding. 1. That courtesy or politeness require our not noticing each other directly, only with the most covert of evaluating glances. At all costs, we must avoid the image of our fear. “How beautiful your mouth is” might well be heard as “Look at those big lips.” We maintain a discreet distance between each other also because that distance between us makes me less you, makes you less me. When there is no connection at all between people, then anger is a way of bringing them closer together, of making contact. But when there is a great deal of connectedness that is problematic or threatening or unacknowledged, then anger is a way of keeping people separate, of putting distance between us. 2. That because we sometimes rise to each other’s defense against outsiders, we do not need to look at devaluation and dismissal among ourselves. Support against outsiders is very different from cherishing each other. Often it is a case of “like needs like.”

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  I was really sickened with fury, and I decided to pull over and just jot some things down in my notebook to enable me to cross town without an accident because I felt so sick and so enraged. And I wrote those lines down — I was just writing, and that poem came out without craft. That’s probably why I was talking to you about it because I didn’t feel it was really a poem. I was thinking that the killer had been a student at John Jay and that I might have seen him in the hall, that I might see him again. What was retribution? What could have been done? There was one Black woman on the jury. It could have been me. Now I am here teaching in John Jay College. Do I kill him? What is my effective role? Would I kill her in the same way — the Black woman on the jury. What kind of strength did she, would I, have at the point of deciding to take a position … Adrienne: Against eleven white men … Audre: … that atavistic fear of an articulated power that is not on your terms. There is the jury — white male power, white male structures — how do you take a position against them? How do you reach down into threatening difference without being killed or killing? How do you deal with things you believe, live them not as theory, not even as emotion, but right on the line of action and effect and change? All of those things were riding in on that poem. But I had no sense, no understanding at the time, of the connections, just that I was that woman. And that to put myself on the line to do what had to be done at any place and time was so difficult, yet absolutely crucial, and not to do so was the most awful death. And putting yourself on the line is like killing a piece of yourself, in the sense that you have to kill, end, destroy something familiar and dependable, so that something new can come, in ourselves, in our world. And that sense of writing at the edge, out of urgency, not because you choose it but because you have to, that sense of survival — that’s what the poem is out of, as well as the pain of my spiritual son’s death over and over. Once you live any piece of your vision it opens you to a constant onslaught. Of necessities, of horrors, but of wonders too, of possibilities. Adrienne: I was going to say, tell it on the other side.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Black women eating our own hearts out for nourishment in an empty house empty compound empty city in an empty season, and for each of us one year the spring will not return — we learned to savor the taste of our own flesh before any other because that was all that was allowed us. And we have become to each other unmentionably dear and immeasurably dangerous. I am writing about an anger so huge and implacable, so corrosive, it must destroy what it most needs for its own solution, dissolution, resolution. Here we are attempting to address each others’ eyes directly. Even if our words taste sharp as the edge of a lost woman’s voice, we are speaking. IIA Black woman, working her years, committed to life as she lives it, the children fed and clothed and loved as she can into some strength that does not allow them to encyst like horse chestnuts, knowing all the time from the start that she must either kill them or eventually send them into the deathlands, the white labyrinth. I sat at our Thanksgiving Day table listening to my daughter talk about the university and the horrors of determined invisibility. Over the years I have recorded her dreams of death at their hands, sometimes glorious, sometimes cheap. She tells me of the teachers who refuse to understand simple questions, who look at her as if she were a benign — meaning powerless — but unsightly tumor. She weeps. I hold her. I tell her to remember the university doesn’t own her, that she has a home. But I have let her go into that jungle of ghosts, having taught her only how to be fleet of foot, how to whistle, how to love, and how not to run. Unless she has to. It is never enough. Black women give our children forth into a hatred that seared our own young days with bewilderment, hoping we have taught them something they can use to fashion their own new and less costly pathways to survival. Knowing I did not slit their throats at birth tear out the tiny beating heart with my own despairing teeth the way some sisters did in the slaveships chained to corpses and therefore was I committed to this very moment. The price of increasing power is increasing opposition.* I sat listening to my girl talk about the bent world she was determined to reenter in spite of all she was saying, because she views a knowledge of that world as part of an arsenal which she can use to change it all. I listened, hiding my pained need to snatch her back into the web of my smaller protections. I sat watching while she worked it out bit by hurtful bit — what she really wanted — feeling her rage wax and wane, feeling her anger building against me because I could not help her do it nor do it for her, nor would she allow that.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Black children of lesbian couples have an advantage because they learn, very early, that oppression comes in many different forms, none of which have anything to do with their own worth. To help give me perspective, I remember that for years, in the namecalling at school, boys shouted at Jonathan not — “your mother’s a lesbian” — but rather — “your mother’s a nigger.” When Jonathan was eight years old and in the third grade we moved, and he went to a new school where his life was hellish as a new boy on the block. He did not like to play rough games. He did not like to fight. He did not like to stone dogs. And all this marked him early on as an easy target. When he came in crying one afternoon, I heard from Beth how the corner bullies were making Johathan wipe their shoes on the way home whenever Beth wasn’t there to fight them off. And when I heard that the ringleader was a little boy in Jonathan’s class his own size, an interesting and very disturbing thing happened to me. My fury at my own long-ago impotence, and my present pain at his suffering, made me start to forget all that I knew about violence and fear, and blaming the victim, I started to hiss at the weeping child. “The next time you come in here crying ...,” and I suddenly caught myself in horror. This is the way we allow the destruction of our sons to begin — in the name of protection and to ease our own pain. My son get beaten up? I was about to demand that he buy that first lesson in the corruption of power, that might makes right. I could hear myself beginning to perpetuate the age-old distortions about what strength and bravery really are. And no, Jonathan didn’t have to fight if he didn’t want to, but somehow he did have to feel better about not fighting. An old horror rolled over me of being the fat kid who ran away, terrified of getting her glasses broken. About that time a very wise woman said to me, “Have you ever told Jonathan that once you used to be afraid, too?” The idea seemed far-out to me at the time, but the next time he came in crying and sweaty from having run away again, I could see that he felt shamed at having failed me, or some image he and I had created in his head of mother/woman. This image of woman being able to handle it all was bolstered by the fact that he lived in a household with three strong women, his lesbian parents and his forthright older sister. At home, for Jonathan, power was clearly female.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I scream. He created a monster, now he’s going to meet her. Every little crevice. “I am crazy! Because of you! I can do it alone. I’ve always done it alone. How dare you think I haven’t.” He grabs my wrists, and tries to subdue me. I’m not having it. I rip away from him and walk to the center of my white room, rage rolling in waves. I can ride them, but someone’s going to get hurt. “You see this,” I say, throwing my arms up, “this is you. You made me feel so much good, then you made me feel so much bad. So I decided to just stop feeling.” He’s artist enough to understand me. “What do you want me to say? I’m here now.” That’s it. That’s all he has to say and the truth hits me like an icy wind. My hair rises on its hackles. I feel flushed and bereaved. I grab my head at the temples and squeeze with the heels of my hands. I am petrified. Never in my life have I been this afraid. Not of the cancer, not of being alone, not of my future or of my past. I am afraid of never seeing Isaac again. Of never having him hold me when life is so absolute in its unfairness that all I can do is scream. I turn to Nick. Nick, who is here now. “Now?” I whisper, incredulous. “Now? Where were you when I was raped, or when I had my breasts cut off? Where were you when someone stole me away in the middle of the night and starved me in the middle of the goddamn arctic tundra?” I cut off the space between us and pound three hard times on his chest. “Where. Did. You. Go.” He’s shaking. I’m dropping things on him like a hailstorm, but I don’t give a fuck. I even say things like fuck now, because I don’t want to waste another second on the white room way I lived my life. He’s here now. But, Isaac was here then … and then … and then … and then. “I was so hung up on you that I missed it,” I say. I’m shaking so bad. I’m shaking worse than Nick, who looks like the weak, trembling leaf he’s always been. I want to crush him between my fingertips. “What did you miss, Brenna?” I don’t like the way he says my name. “Ahhh … agh…” I bend at the waist. Succulent, heavy tears drop right out of my eyes and onto the floor. Splat. I cry now, I think. All the time. And it’s so much fun. “I missed my chance,” I say, standing up straight and crushing the tears with the toe of my shoe. “With my soulmate.”

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  The action in Grenada served many purposes for the United States, provided the grounds for many tests. A major one was addressed to the concern long expressed by the Pentagon as to whether or not Black american soldiers could be gotten to fire upon other Black people. This becomes a vital question as the U.S. military-industrial complex executes increasingly military solutions to this country’s precarious position in the Third World, where the U.S. either ignores or stands upon the wrong side of virtually every single struggle for liberation by oppressed peoples. Of course, there were also lesser tests. In addition to trying out new armaments, there was the question of whether the marines liked their new Nazi-style helmets. They did not because they couldn’t shave in them. And whether the new army uniforms were too heavy to be worn comfortably in the tropics. They were.18 Listen to the language that came from the Pentagon, orchestrated by the psychological warfare experts operating in Grenada. • We got there just in time. • Not an invasion, a rescue mission. • Mopping up. • It was our turf. We had every right. • Armed thugs (the Grenadian militia). • An Idi Amin-type character, capable of taking hostages (General Austin.) • Imprisoned for spreading ill will among the people. This language is calculated to reduce a Black nation’s aspirations in the eyes and ears of white americans already secretly terrified by the Black Menace, enraged by myths of Black Progress, at the same time encouraged by government action never to take the life of a Black person seriously. Even many Black americans, threatened by some spectre of a socialism that is mythic and undefined at best, have bought the government line of “them” against “us.” But which one of us as a Black american has ever taken the time to examine this threat of socialism for any reality nearly as destructive as racism is within all of our lives? With the constant manipulation of the media, many Black americans are honestly confused, defending “our” invasion of Black Grenada under a mistaken mirage of patriotism. Nineteen eighty-four is upon us, and doublethink has come home to scramble our brains and blanket our protest.