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 The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  •​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?” And then I have to turn away from the blank look in her eyes, before she can invite me to participate in her own annihilation. I do not exist to feel her anger for her. •​White women are beginning to examine their relationships to Black women, yet often I hear them wanting only to deal with little colored children across the roads of childhood, the beloved nursemaid, the occasional second-grade classmate—those tender memories of what was once mysterious and intriguing or neutral. You avoid the childhood assumptions formed by the raucous laughter at Rastus and Alfalfa, the acute message of your mommy’s handerkerchief spread upon the park bench because I had just been sitting there, the indelible and dehumanizing portraits of Amos’n Andy and your daddy’s humorous bedtime stories. •​I wheel my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket in Eastchester in 1967, and a little white girl riding past in her mother’s cart calls out excitedly, “Oh look, Mommy, a baby maid!” And your mother shushes you, but she does not correct you. And so fifteen years later, at a conference on racism, you can still find that story humorous. But I hear your laughter is full of terror and disease. •​A white academic welcomes the appearance of a collection by non-Black women of Color.* “It allows me to deal with racism without dealing with the harshness of Black women,” she says to me. •​At an international cultural gathering of women, a well-known white American woman poet interrupts the reading of the work of women of Color to read her own poem, and then dashes off to an “important panel.” If women in the academy truly want a dialogue about racism, it will require recognizing the needs and the living contexts of other women. When an academic woman says, “I can’t afford it,” she may mean she is making a choice about how to spend her available money. But when a woman on welfare says, “I can’t afford it,” she means she is surviving on an amount of money that was barely subsistence in 1972, and she often does not have enough to eat. Yet the National Women’s Studies Association here in 1981 holds a conference in which it commits itself to responding to racism, yet refuses to waive the registration fee for poor women and women of Color who wished to present and conduct workshops. This has made it impossible for many women of Color—for instance, Wilmette Brown, of Black Women for Wages for Housework—to participate in this conference. Is this to be merely another case of the academy discussing life within the closed circuits of the academy?

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Do not commit a crime with me. We will get caught. According to Soraya Chemaly, writer and social activist, women in particular are more likely to stuff their anger down than to express it. We’re socialized to use minimizing language, keep the peace, and be deferential. But no one can be an emotional shock absorber forever. Denying our stronger emotions is likely one of the reasons our bodies break down and get sick. Men don’t exactly have a cake walk when it comes to expressing themselves, either. They’re commonly punished for behaviors and emotions that are deemed too feminine. Fear, sadness, or anything considered “weak.” On the flip side, they’re often praised for showing emotions associated with masculinity, regardless of whether it’s toxic or not. Think: staying stoic in the face of deep pain, hauling off and hitting someone to “defend” their honor, or needing to be overly independent, as if asking for help (or directions!) is a sin. It’s a hot mess, y’all! Without question, anger was at the very top of Grandma’s “unbecoming” list. Anger is another taboo, especially misunderstood and vilified for women. But according to psychologist and anger researcher Dr. Ryan Martin, it’s good that we feel angry. When bad things happen, we hurt deeply. When we witness or experience injustice, anger is appropriate, damn it! The more I researched anger, the more I realized how pervasive it was. Our culture is riddled with rage. (Case in point: any online comment section on the Internet.) And yet, like grief, we don’t talk about it. Instead, we’re quick to point fingers, get outraged, and find fault with others. We’re afraid to look at our own anger. Research from the University of California–Berkeley illustrates that we usually learn how to experience and deal with anger from our families of origin. In some families, emotions are expressed regardless of the consequences, while other families can’t tolerate any show of emotion at all. Some members may be allowed to express certain emotions, while others aren’t. Double standards like these only heap on the resentment and generate more dysfunction. No wonder we’ve got trunks of baggage to unpack. Anger is especially common in the face of loss. We act out instead of crying out, because anger feels powerful, while grief feels powerless. Until I started doing this work, I had no idea how intertwined my grief and anger had become. I’d stuff, suppress, and contain my feelings until they migrated and mutated beyond my control. All that energy had to go somewhere. What follows are the messy stories of where it went. THE GOLDEN YEARS ARE FOR SHIT In the last year or so of his life, Dad began dropping wisdom bombs. Big life lessons like “Always keep the promises you make to yourself,” or “Tell people you love them.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “Where’s your father or mother”, he asked. “Haven’t got any”, I retorted. “Do they let children like you go to America” he cried, “What age are you?” I was furious with him for exposing my youth there in public before everyone. “How does it matter to you?” I asked disdainfully. “You’re not responsible for me, thank God!” “I am though”, he said, “to a certain degree at least. Are you really going to America on your own?” “I am”, I rejoined casually and rudely. “What to do?” was his next query. “Anything I can get” I replied. “Hum”, he muttered, “I must see to this.” Ten minutes later he returned again. “Come with me”, he said, and I followed him to his cabin—a comfortable stateroom with a good berth on the right of the door as you entered, and a good sofa opposite. “Are you really alone?” he asked. I nodded, for I was a little afraid he might have the power to forbid me to go and I resolved to say as little as possible. “What age are you?” was his next question. “Sixteen”, I lied boldly. “Sixteen!”, he repeated, “you don’t look it but you speak as if you had been well educated.” I smiled; I had already measured the crass ignorance of the peasants in the steerage. “Have you any friends in America?” he asked. “What do you want to question me for?” I demanded, “I’ve paid for my passage and I’m doing no harm.” “I want to help you”, he said, “will you stay here until we draw out and I get a little time?” “Certainly”, I said, “I’d rather be here than with those louts and if I might read your books—” I had noticed that there were two little oak bookcases, one on each side of the washing-stand, and smaller books and pictures scattered about. “Of course you may”, he rejoined and threw open the door of the bookcase. There was a Macaulay staring at me. “I know his poetry”, I said, seeing that the book contained his “Essays” and was written in prose. “I’d like to read this.” “Go ahead”, he said smiling, “in a couple of hours I’ll be back.” When he returned he found me curled upon his sofa, lost in fairyland. I had just come to the end of the essay on Clive and was breathless. “You like it?” he asked. “I should just think I did”, I replied, “it’s better even than his poetry”, and suddenly I closed the book and began to recite: “With all his faults, and they were neither few nor small, only one cemetery was worthy to contain his remains. In the Great Abbey—” The Doctor took the book from me where I held it. “Are you reciting from Clive?” he asked. “Yes”, I said, “but the essay on Warren Hastings is just as good”, and I began again:

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  One guy put his hand on my shoulder and said/slurred, “You’re pretty, come to a bar with us.” Another crawled into the back seat of our car. I lost track of the third one. He was probably puking in the bushes. “Not gonna happen,” I replied as I removed his grabby hand from my shoulder, before turning to his friend. “Hey, buddy. This isn’t an Uber. Please get out of our car.” He stared at me defiantly, while rifling through our things. It all happened so fast, it was disorienting. Though Brian was nearby talking to the attendant, he hadn’t registered what was going on yet. Not willing to take no for an answer, Grabby Hands made another attempt. This time leaning in closer. “Come on, baby, don’t be so lame. Have some fun with us.” “Dude! Back off. I’m not interested. And get your friend out of our car!” “Oh, fuck you, cunt,” he said, his tone suddenly turning dangerous. “You’re not even worth it—you’re just all that’s left.” Oopsy. . . . My brain went offline. All my unbecoming emotions gathered force, ready for battle. No, not ready—salivating. Longing to fight for every time I’d been demeaned, harassed, or assaulted. The stalker who terrorized me, the repairman who shoved his tongue down my throat, the date that turned dangerous the minute I entered his apartment, the stranger sitting next to me on the train. Glaring at me. Masturbating. Using my book to tidy up when he was finished. All the ways I had to abdicate my personal boundaries—to be quiet, clever, and just “take it”—to survive. I was used to those bad behaviors; many women are. How utterly audacious of me to indicate I’d had enough. “You have no idea what a cunt I can be, you drunk fuck, but you’re about to find out!” I screamed, followed by a deluge of more (very loud) and unbecoming expletives. By now, Brian was well aware of what was happening. Within seconds he’d separated me from the men, who were each bigger than the both of us combined. Security rushed in, demanding they leave the property. The hotel felt so bad that they gave us a free night. A courteous gesture, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted something I couldn’t have: moral fairness—as if that even exists. Those jackasses would get to keep living their sloppy, entitled lives, freely harassing women with no consequences. But my dad would be lucky if he lived another season? Bullshit! Under the light of unfairness, my rage made absolute sense to me. That is, until I turned and saw Dad standing there in shock. Helpless, rattled—fragile.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Again and again Jones swung, first with right hand and then with his left, hoping to knock me down again; but my training had been too varied and complete and the knock-down blow had taught me the necessary caution: I ducked his swings, or side-stepped them and hit him right and left in the face till suddenly his nose began to bleed and Stackpole cried out behind me in huge excitement: “that’s the way, that’s the way; keep on peppering him!” As I turned to smile at him, I found that a lot of the fags, former chums of mine, had come round to my corner and now were all smiling encouragement at me and bold exhortations to “give it him hard.” I then realized for the first time that I had only to keep on and be careful and the victory would be mine. A cold, hard exultation took the place of nervous excitement in me, and when I struck, I tried to cut with my knuckles as Raleigh had once shown me. The bleeding of Jones’s nose took some time to stop and as soon as he came into the middle of the ring, I started it again with another right-hander. After this round, his seconds and backers kept him so long in his corner that at length, on Stackpole’s whispered advice, I went over and said to him: “Either fight or give in: I’m catching cold.” He came out at once and rushed at me full of fight, but his face was all one bruise and his left eye nearly closed. Every chance I got, I struck at the right eye till it was in an even worse case. It is strange to me since that I never once felt pity for him and offered to stop: the truth is, he had bullied me so relentlessly and continually, had wounded my pride so often in public that even at the end I was filled with cold rage against him. I noticed everything: I saw that a couple of the Sixth went away towards the schoolhouse and afterwards returned with Shaddy, the second master. As they came round the haystack, Jones came out into the ring; he struck savagely right and left as I came within striking distance, but I slipped in outside his weaker left and hit him as hard as I could, first right, then left on the chin and down he went on his back. At once there was a squeal of applause from the little fellows in my corner and I saw that Stackpole had joined Shaddy near Jones’s corner. Suddenly Shaddy came right up to the ringside and spoke, to my astonishment, with a certain dignity:

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  By this time, some details about my BD had been fleshed out and verified. Over the years, Alice, a close friend of my paternal grandmother, Phyllis, would invite me over for tea and give me little trinkets from Phyllis, a landscape painter and an heir to a railroad fortune. That last part explained why my maternal grandmother made such a fuss about these sporadic visits, dressing me in handmade outfits (with endless ruffles), ostensibly to impress Phyllis by way of Alice’s recounting. Before our first meeting, my mother gently explained, in the sparest of terms, Alice’s connection to BD. Oh, I remember thinking. That made me try doubly hard to wow her. Once, on a visit with Alice, I forgot to put my teacup in the saucer, and it left a ring mark on her mahogany table, which mortified me. Even though I was young, these visits felt high stakes, like BD might actually want to get to know me after hearing Alice’s glowing reports (if only I hadn’t damaged her fancy furniture). But as it turns out, those visits were kept secret from BD, who had forbidden his mother to have any contact with her only granddaughter. So that explained the hush-hush, don’t-talk-aboutthat-guy vibe I’d been picking up on my whole life. Pieces of the real story kept coming. Eventually, I learned that my biological father hit the road not long after my mother told him she was pregnant with his baby. From that point on he spoke through lawyers who made it clear to my frightened and heartbroken young mother that he wanted nothing to do with us—especially me. At the age of 18, even though it felt risky, I decided to write Phyllis a letter. I didn’t want much from her—just a photo of my father so my brain could fill in at least that one blank: Did I look like him? On my maternal side, the women in my family all have dark shiny hair, olive skin, and big boobs. My hair and complexion are right out of an ’80s Def Leppard video. And the boobs? Let’s just say they skipped a generation. As fate would have it, Phyllis died before receiving my letter. Even though I’d never known her, Phyllis’s loss unleashed so many untapped feelings. Sorrow for experiences I didn’t get to have with her and resentment that BD kept me from my grandmother. Finally, I snapped. Raging at my mom, I yelled, “If he doesn’t want to know me, then he’ll have to tell me why himself!” I’m sure the last thing she wanted was to come face-to-face with an ex who abandoned her during her pregnancy. Yet in my fury, she could see that there was no getting around his shadowy presence anymore. So my mother conceded and reached out to him directly. Thankfully, BD’s wife was very supportive of the idea and paved the way for our connection.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  The husband and the servant jumped up instantly, but the sick woman was so enraged with them that her anger consumed the catarrhal humour that hindered her from speaking, so that she poured out upon them all the abuse she could think of. From that moment she be- Eighth day^^ QUEEN OF NA VARKE. 549 gan to mend ; but her husband had often to endure her reproaches for the little love he had shown for her * You see, ladies, how hypocritical men are, and how little is needed to console them for the loss of their wives. "How do you know," said Hircan, "but he had heard it was the best remedy for his wife's case ? Not being able to cure her by his care and kind offices, he wished to try if the contrary would not produce the de- sired effect. The experiment was a happy one ; and I am astonished that, being a woman as you are, you have so frankly portrayed the spirit of your sex, who do for spite what they cannot be brought to do by kind- ness." " Unquestionably, such provocation as that," said Longarine, " would make me rise not only from my bed but from my grave." " What harm did he do her in consoling himself, since he thought she was dead } " said Saffredent. " Do we not know that marriage binds only as long as life lasts, and that death gives a man back his liberty .■'" " Death releases a man from the obligation of his oath," said Oisille; "but a good heart never thinks itself dispensed from the obligation of loving. It was making great haste to console himself not to be able to wait until his wife had expired." "What seems strangest to me," said Nomerfide, "is that having death and the cross before his eyes, those two objects were not capable of hindering him from offending God." " That is a fine idea," said Simontault. " So, then, * This novel has been imitated by Noeldu Fail de la Herissaye \n his Conies d^ Euii apel, ch. v. 550 THE HEPTAMERO.V OF THE [Navel y 2. you would not be shocked at a naughty thing, providing it were done out of sight of the church and the cemetery?" " Make game of me as much as you will," replied Nomerfide, " but by your leave I maintain that the con- templation of death is enough to chill the heart, however young and fiery it may be." "I should think as you do," said Dagoucin, "had I not heard to the contrary from a princess." " That is as much as to say that she told you some tale to that effect," said Parlamente. " Such being the case, let us hear it." Dagoucin began thus. NOVEL LXXII. Continual repentance of a nun who had lost her virginity without violence and without love.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I think the organizers of the bookfair really believed that by inviting foreign Black women they were absolving themselves of any fault in ignoring input from local Black women. But we should be able to learn from our errors. They totally objectified all Black women by not dealing with the Black women of the London community. Now if anything is to be learned from that whole experience, it should be so that the next International Feminist Bookfair does not repeat those errors. And there must be another. But we don’t get there from here by ignoring the mud in between those two positions. If the white women’s movement does not learn from its errors, like any other movement, it will die by them. When I stood up for my first reading to a packed house with no Black women’s faces, after I’d gotten letter after letter from Black British women asking when was I coming to England, that was the kiss-off. I knew immediately what was up, and the rest is history. Of course, I was accused of “brutalizing” the organizers by simply asking why Black women were absent. And if my yelling and “jumping up and down” got dirty looks and made white women cry and say all kinds of outrageous nonsense about me, I know it also reinforced other Black women’s perceptions about racism here in the women’s movement, and contributed to further solidarity among Black women of different communities. Feminism must be on the cutting edge of real social change if it is to survive as a movement in any particular country. Whatever the core problems are for the people of that country must also be the core problems addressed by women, for we do not exist in a vacuum. We are anchored in our own place and time, looking out and beyond to the future we are creating, and we are part of communities that interact. To pretend otherwise is ridiculous. While we fortify ourselves with visions of the future, we must arm ourselves with accurate perceptions of the barriers between us and that future. June 21, 1984 Berlin Rather than siphoning off energies in vain attempts to connect with women who refuse to deal with their own history or ours, Black women need to choose the areas where that energy can be most effective. Who are we? What are the ways in which we do not see each other? And how can we better operate together as a united front even while we explore our differences? Rather than keep yelling at white women’s gates, we need to look at our own needs and start giving top priority to satisfying those needs in the service of our joint tasks. How do we deal across our differences of community, time, place, and history? In other words, how do we learn to love each other while we are embattled on so many fronts?

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  If America had not reduced me to penury I should probably not have written this book as boldly as the ideal demanded. At the last push of Fate (I am much nearer seventy than sixty) we are all apt to sacrifice something of Truth for the sake of kindly recognition by our fellows and a peaceful ending. Being that “wicked animal”, as the French say, “who defends himself when he is attacked” I turn at length to bay, without any malice, I hope, but also without any fear such as might prompt compromise. I have always fought for the Holy Spirit of Truth and have been, as Heine said he was, a brave soldier in the Liberation War of Humanity: now one fight more, the best and the last. There are two main traditions of English writing: the one of perfect liberty, that of Chaucer and Shakespeare, completely outspoken, with a certain liking for lascivious details and witty smut, a man’s speech: the other emasculated more and more by Puritanism and since the French Revolution, gelded to tamest propriety; for that upheaval brought the illiterate middle-class to power and insured the domination of girl-readers. Under Victoria, English prose literature became half childish, as in stories of “Little Mary”, or at best provincial, as anyone may see who cares to compare the influence of Dickens, Thackeray and Reade in the world with the influence of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola. Foreign masterpieces such as “Les Contes Drolatiques” and “L’Assommoir” were destroyed in London as obscene by a magistrate’s order; even the Bible and Shakespeare were expurgated and all books dolled up to the prim decorum of the English Sunday-school. And America with unbecoming humility worsened the disgraceful, brainless example. All my life, I have rebelled against this old maid’s canon of deportment, and my revolt has grown stronger with advancing years. In the “Foreword” to “The Man Shakespeare” I tried to show how the Puritanism that had gone out of our morals had gone into the language, enfeebling English thought and impoverishing English speech. At long last I am going back to the old English tradition. I am determined to tell the truth about my pilgrimage through this world, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, about myself and others, and I shall try to be at least as kindly to others as to myself. Bernard Shaw assures me that no one is good enough or bad enough to tell the naked truth about himself; but I am beyond good and evil in this respect. French literature is there to give the cue and inspiration: it is the freest of all in discussing matters of sex and chiefly by reason of its constant preoccupation with all that pertains to passion and desire, it has become the world literature to men of all races.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 5: Further, “If a man marry a wife and afterwards hate her, and seek occasions to put her away”* alleging that she was not a virgin when he married her, should he fail to prove this, he shall be beaten, and shall be condemned in a hundred sicles of silver, and he shall be unable to put her away all the days of his life (Dt. 22:13–19). [*The rest of the passage is apparently quoted from memory.] Therefore hatred is not a sufficient reason for divorce. I answer that, It is the general opinion of holy men that the reason for permission being given to divorce a wife was the avoidance of wife-murder. Now the proximate cause of murder is hatred: wherefore the proximate cause of divorce was hatred. But hatred proceeds, like love, from a cause. Wherefore we must assign to divorce certain remote causes which were a cause of hatred. For Augustine says in his gloss (De Serm. Dom. in Monte i, 14): “In the Law there were many causes for divorcing a wife: Christ admitted none but fornication: and He commands other grievances to be borne for conjugal fidelity and chastity.” Such causes are imperfections either of body, as sickness or some notable deformity, or in soul as fornication or the like which amounts to moral depravity. Some, however, restrict these causes within narrower limits, saying with sufficient probability that it was not lawful to divorce a wife except for some cause subsequent to the marriage; and that not even then could it be done for any such cause, but only for such as could hinder the good of the offspring, whether in body as barrenness, or leprosy and the like, or in soul, for instance if she were a woman of wicked habits which her children through continual contact with her would imitate. There is however a gloss on Dt. 24:1, “If . . . she find not favor in his eyes,” which would seem to restrict them yet more, namely to sin, by saying that there “uncleanness” denotes sin: but “sin” in the gloss refers not only to the morality of the soul but also to the condition of the body. Accordingly we grant the first two objections. Reply to Objection 3: Barrenness and other like things are causes of hatred, and so they are remote causes of divorce. Reply to Objection 4: No one is hateful on account of virtue as such, because goodness is the cause of love. Wherefore the argument does not hold. Reply to Objection 5: The husband was punished in that case by being unable to put away his wife for ever, just as in the case when he had corrupted a maid (Dt. 22:28–30).

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints Course Guidebook (2023)

  87 12. Saints and the Protestant Reformation Protestant Resistance to Cults The Protestant Reformation represented a significant and long-simmering backlash against Catholic practices and corruption in the Catholic Church. This was set against the backdrop of the 15th century, which had seen an explosion of new saints’ cults. The spiritual economy—the practice by which money, lands, and goods on earth could be exchanged for time off in purgatory—was booming. This was partly due to increased dedication of wealth to the refurbishment of chapels, churches, and shrines. It was also tied to the sale of indulgences, often available to pilgrims or other believers, for a fee. Protestant reformers responded strongly to the cult of the saints as a multitude of practices that they argued were embedded within larger institutional corruption. Some theologians criticized the resources that went to praising the holy dead, pointing out that money could have gone to charities that served the living poor. Pamphlets railed against the social disorder of saints’ feast days, which they complained led to drunkenness, sin, and licentious behavior. The feast days did add some 50 holidays to the annual calendar on which servants and employees did not work, which reformers complained also disrupted industry and the economy. Reformation beliefs varied enormously among regions and among leaders. English Protestantism, governed by the crown in the form of the English Church, tentatively continued to embrace saints—within limits. Martin Luther, too, allowed for the important role they played as exemplars and inspirations of faith. Others, such as John Calvin, railed against saints and their images as idolatrous.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  If I speak to you in anger, at least I have spoken to you: I have not put a gun to your head and shot you down in the street; I have not looked at your bleeding sister’s body and asked, “What did she do to deserve it?” This was the reaction of two white women to Mary Church Terrell’s telling of the lynching of a pregnant Black woman whose baby was then torn from her body. That was in 1921, and Alice Paul had just refused to publicly endorse the enforcement of the Nineteenth Amendment for all women—by refusing to endorse the inclusion of women of Color, although we had worked to help bring about that amendment. The angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate them with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves against the manner of saying. When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar. I have tried to learn my anger’s usefulness to me, as well as its limitations. For women raised to fear, too often anger threatens annihilation. In the male construct of brute force, we were taught that our lives depended upon the good will of patriarchal power. The anger of others was to be avoided at all costs because there was nothing to be learned from it but pain, a judgment that we had been bad girls, come up lacking, not done what we were supposed to do. And if we accept our powerlessness, then of course any anger can destroy us. But the strength of women lies in recognizing differences between us as creative, and in standing to those distortions which we inherited without blame, but which are now ours to alter. The angers of women can transform difference through insight into power. For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth. My response to racism is anger. That anger has eaten clefts into my living only when it remained unspoken, useless to anyone. It has also served me in classrooms without light or learning, where the work and history of Black women was less than a vapor.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth. It is not the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices. We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt. * One poem from this series is included in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1978), pp. 105–108. † This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, New York, 1984), first published in 1981. ‡ From “For Each of You,” first published in From A Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Press, Detroit, 1973), and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1982), p. 42. Fourth of July The first time I went to Washington, D.C. was on the edge of the summer when I was supposed to stop being a child. At least that’s what they said to us all at graduation from the eighth grade. My sister Phyllis graduated at the same time from high school. I don’t know what she was supposed to stop being. But as graduation presents for us both, the whole family took a Fourth of July trip to Washington, D.C., the fabled and famous capital of our country. It was the first time I’d ever been on a railroad train during the day. When I was little, and we used to go to the Connecticut shore, we always went at night on the milk train, because it was cheaper. Preparations were in the air around our house before school was even over. We packed for a week. There were two very large suitcases that my father carried, and a box filled with food. In fact, my first trip to Washington was a mobile feast; I started eating as soon as we were comfortably ensconced in our seats, and did not stop until somewhere after Philadelphia. I remember it was Philadelphia because I was disappointed not to have passed by the Liberty Bell. My mother had roasted two chickens and cut them up into dainty bite-size pieces. She packed slices of brown bread and butter and green pepper and carrot sticks.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood; For nothing now can ever come to any good. So go W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” sixteen lines that, during the days and weeks immediately after John died, spoke directly to the anger—the unreasoning fury, the blind rage—that I found myself feeling. I later showed “Funeral Blues” to Quintana. I told her that I was thinking of reading it at the memorial service she and I were then planning for John. She implored me not to do so. She said she liked nothing about the poem. She said it was “wrong.” She was vehement on this point. At the time I thought she was upset by the tone of the poem, its raw rhythms, the harshness with which it rejects the world, the sense it gives off of a speaker about to explode. I now think of her vehemence differently. I now think she saw “Funeral Blues” as dwelling on it. On the afternoon she herself died, August 26, 2005, her husband and I left the ICU overlooking the river at New York Cornell and walked through Central Park. The leaves on the trees were already losing their intensity, still weeks from dropping but ready to drop, not exactly faded but fading. At the time she entered the hospital, late in May or early in June, the blue nights had been just making their appearance. I had first noticed them not long after she was admitted to the ICU, which happened to be in the Greenberg Pavilion. In the lobby of the Greenberg Pavilion there hung portraits of its major benefactors, the most prominent of whom had played founding roles in the insurance conglomerate AIG and so had figured in news stories about the AIG bailout. During the first weeks I had reason to visit the ICU in the Greenberg Pavilion I was startled by the familiarity of these faces in the portraits, and, in the early evening, when I came downstairs from the ICU, would pause to study them. Then I would walk out into the increasingly intense blue of that time of day in that early summer season. This routine seemed for a while to bring luck. It was a period when the doctors in the ICU did not seem uniformly discouraging.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  According to Soraya Chemaly, writer and social activist, women in particular are more likely to stuff their anger down than to express it. We’re socialized to use minimizing language, keep the peace, and be deferential. But no one can be an emotional shock absorber forever. Denying our stronger emotions is likely one of the reasons our bodies break down and get sick. Men don’t exactly have a cake walk when it comes to expressing themselves, either. They’re commonly punished for behaviors and emotions that are deemed too feminine. Fear, sadness, or anything considered “weak.” On the flip side, they’re often praised for showing emotions associated with masculinity, regardless of whether it’s toxic or not. Think: staying stoic in the face of deep pain, hauling off and hitting someone to “defend” their honor, or needing to be overly independent, as if asking for help (or directions!) is a sin. It’s a hot mess, y’all! Without question, anger was at the very top of Grandma’s “unbecoming” list. Anger is another taboo, especially misunderstood and vilified for women. But according to psychologist and anger researcher Dr. Ryan Martin, it’s good that we feel angry. When bad things happen, we hurt deeply. When we witness or experience injustice, anger is appropriate, damn it! The more I researched anger, the more I realized how pervasive it was. Our culture is riddled with rage. (Case in point: any online comment section on the Internet.) And yet, like grief, we don’t talk about it. Instead, we’re quick to point fingers, get outraged, and find fault with others. We’re afraid to look at our own anger. Research from the University of California–Berkeley illustrates that we usually learn how to experience and deal with anger from our families of origin. In some families, emotions are expressed regardless of the consequences, while other families can’t tolerate any show of emotion at all. Some members may be allowed to express certain emotions, while others aren’t. Double standards like these only heap on the resentment and generate more dysfunction. No wonder we’ve got trunks of baggage to unpack. Anger is especially common in the face of loss. We act out instead of crying out, because anger feels powerful, while grief feels powerless. Until I started doing this work, I had no idea how intertwined my grief and anger had become. I’d stuff, suppress, and contain my feelings until they migrated and mutated beyond my control. All that energy had to go somewhere. What follows are the messy stories of where it went. THE GOLDEN YEARS ARE FOR SHITIn the last year or so of his life, Dad began dropping wisdom bombs. Big life lessons like “Always keep the promises you make to yourself,” or “Tell people you love them. If you feel it, say it, because life is too precious to hold back.”

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  THE ANGER ICEBERGAnother reason anger is such a powerful emotion is that it rarely shows up alone. Instead, it’s usually accompanied by other emotions that you may not know how to access or express, or think you have a right to feel, like grief, guilt, shame, embarrassment, anxiety, loneliness, hopelessness, or a combination thereof. Researchers from the Gottman Institute say that it can be helpful to think of anger like an iceberg. With icebergs, the tip may look like a large mass, but in reality it’s only a small part that we see. Most of the iceberg is actually hidden below the water. This is how anger can work, too. In fact, anger is commonly referred to as a secondary or “indicator” emotion. It steps in and points out a whole host of other big and raw emotions roiling under the surface. For example, let’s say you’re annoyed that you have to go to a friend’s baby shower. Having had a miscarriage yourself, the last thing you want is to be around cute babies or happy mothers. You’re envious your friend got pregnant so easily, when it’s been so hard and painful for you to conceive. These complicated feelings are completely justified. They don’t make you a jerk; they make you a normal, hurting human. I’ll be honest, if I had to watch a father-daughter dance at a wedding after Dad passed, I’d have tossed a banana peel on the floor and prayed for a full-on wipeout (and pileup). Anger indicates that there’s more to the story than meets the eye. It asks us to be courageous and go deeper. To explore the pain beneath the outrage. The heartbreak, rejection, sadness, fear, betrayal, and so on. Our anger never needs to be justified to make sense. Your pain, like mine, isn’t looking for validation; it just wants permission to exist. Now, we may not always be able to identify the whole emotional enchilada right away. It’s easy to go from zero to 60 without realizing what else is at work. But as we become more skilled at approaching our anger with curiosity, compassion, and care, instead of feeling shame, we’re better able to regulate our emotions and less likely to lash out at ourselves and others. CARING FOR YOUR ANGERWhen it comes to defusing red-hot rage, the goal is to quell the fire and calm your nervous system. Below are many suggestions, but you don’t have to try them all or apply them in any particular sequence. You’ll also notice that some suggestions overlap with tips from other chapters—that’s because the methods for restoring your nervous system are very similar.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  So go W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” sixteen lines that, during the days and weeks immediately after John died, spoke directly to the anger—the unreasoning fury, the blind rage—that I found myself feeling. I later showed “Funeral Blues” to Quintana. I told her that I was thinking of reading it at the memorial service she and I were then planning for John. She implored me not to do so. She said she liked nothing about the poem. She said it was “wrong.” She was vehement on this point. At the time I thought she was upset by the tone of the poem, its raw rhythms, the harshness with which it rejects the world, the sense it gives off of a speaker about to explode. I now think of her vehemence differently. I now think she saw “Funeral Blues” as dwelling on it. On the afternoon she herself died, August 26, 2005, her husband and I left the ICU overlooking the river at New York Cornell and walked through Central Park. The leaves on the trees were already losing their intensity, still weeks from dropping but ready to drop, not exactly faded but fading. At the time she entered the hospital, late in May or early in June, the blue nights had been just making their appearance. I had first noticed them not long after she was admitted to the ICU, which happened to be in the Greenberg Pavilion. In the lobby of the Greenberg Pavilion there hung portraits of its major benefactors, the most prominent of whom had played founding roles in the insurance conglomerate AIG and so had figured in news stories about the AIG bailout. During the first weeks I had reason to visit the ICU in the Greenberg Pavilion I was startled by the familiarity of these faces in the portraits, and, in the early evening, when I came downstairs from the ICU, would pause to study them. Then I would walk out into the increasingly intense blue of that time of day in that early summer season. This routine seemed for a while to bring luck. It was a period when the doctors in the ICU did not seem uniformly discouraging. It was a period when improvement seemed possible. There was even mention of a step-down unit, although the step-down unit never exactly materialized. Then one night, leaving the ICU and pausing as usual by the AIG portraits, I realized: there would be no step-down unit. The light outside had already changed. The light outside was no longer blue. She had so far since entering this ICU undergone five surgical interventions. She had remained ventilated and sedated throughout. The original surgical incision had never been closed. I had asked her surgeon how long he could continue doing this. He had mentioned a surgeon at Cornell who had done eighteen such interventions on a single patient. “And that patient lived,” the surgeon had said. In what condition, I had asked.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Today as well we have a large unbalanced electorate that is regularly convinced to vote against its collective self-interest. These people are told that East Coast college professors brainwash the young and that Hollywood liberals make fun of them and have nothing in common with them and hate America and wish to impose an abhorrent, godless lifestyle. The deceivers offer essentially the same fear-laden message that the majority of southern whites heard when secession was being weighed. Moved by the need for control, for an unchallenged top tier, the power elite in American history has thrived by placating the vulnerable and creating for them a false sense of identification—denying real class differences wherever possible. The dangers inherent in that deception are many. The relative few who escape their lower-class roots are held up as models, as though everyone at the bottom has the same chance of succeeding through cleverness and hard work, through scrimping and saving. Can Franklin’s “nest egg” produce Franklin the self-made man? Hardly. Franklin himself needed patrons to rise in his colonial world, and the same rules of social networking persist. Personal connections, favoritism, and trading on class-based knowledge still grease the wheels that power social mobility in today’s professional and business worlds. If this book accomplishes anything it will be to have exposed a number of myths about the American dream, to have disabused readers of the notion that upward mobility is a function of the founders’ ingenious plan, or that Jacksonian democracy was liberating, or that the Confederacy was about states’ rights rather than preserving class and racial distinctions. Sometimes, all it took was a name: before becoming known as a Reconstruction-era southern white who identified with black uplift or Republican reforms, the scalawag was defined as an inferior breed of cattle. The scalawag of today is the southern liberal who is painted by conservative ideologues as a traitor to the South for daring to say that poor whites and poor blacks possess similar economic interests. And that is how we return to the language of breeding, so well understood in an agrarian age, so metaphorically resonant in the preindustrial economy in which restrictive social relations hardened. If the republic was supposedly dedicated to equality, how did the language of breeds appeal as it did? To speak of breeds was to justify unequal status among white people; it was the best way to divide people into categories and deny that class privilege exists. If you are categorized as a breed, it means you can’t control who you are and you can’t avert your appointed destiny. Breeding. The erstwhile experts in this socially prescriptive field of study interpolated from the science and widespread practices of animal husbandry. The mongrel inherited its (or his or her) parent’s incapacities, they said, just as towheaded children with yellowish skin were produced through living on bad soil and inbreeding.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  He was a slaveholding planter whose reputation situated him not in the halls of power but among the common stock. In the Tennessee backcountry, where settlement came much later than it did on the East Coast, landowning and class stations ostensibly had shallower roots. As one New England journalist wondered aloud during Jackson’s first run for president in 1824, who precisely were these “hardy sons of the West”? 40 In the popular imagination, Jackson was inseparable from a wild and often violent landscape. After his celebrated victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, he was identified as a “green backwoodsman” who had bested the “invincible” British foe. To another, he was “Napoleon of the woods.” His political rise came through violence, having slaughtered the Red Stick faction of the Creek Nation in the swamps of Alabama in 1813–14, while leaving hundreds of British soldiers dead in the marshes of New Orleans in January 1815. Jackson bragged about the British death toll, as did American poets. One extolled, “Carnage stalks wide o’er all the ensanguin’ plain.” And it was no exaggeration. Bodies floated in rivers and streams, and bones of the vanquished were found by travelers decades later. 41 Jackson did not look or act like a conventional politician, which was a fundamental part of his appeal. When Jackson arrived in Philadelphia from Tennessee to take his seat in the U.S. Senate in 1796, Pennsylvania congressman Albert Gallatin described a “tall, lank, uncouth-looking personage, with long locks hanging over his face, and a queue down his back tied in eel skin.” In later years, the gaunt general struck observers as stiff in carriage, and weatherworn. Backwater diseases stalked him. Saying nothing of his external appearance, Thomas Jefferson perceived in Jackson a man of savage instincts. Once he observed him so overcome with anger that he was left speechless. (Speechlessness was the classic signifier of primitive man and untamed beast.) 42 His fiery temper and lack of scholarly deportment permanently marked him. A sworn enemy put it best: “Boisterous in ordinary conversation, he makes up in oaths what he lacks in arguments.” Not known for his subtle reasoning, Jackson was blunt in his opinions and quick to resent any who disagreed with him. Shouting curses put him in the company of both common soldiers and uncouth crackers. In “A Backwoodsman and a Squatter” (1821), one satirist captured such frontier types, folks known to “squale loose jaw and slam an angry oath.” 43 Jackson’s aggressive style, his frequent resorting to duels and street fights, his angry acts of personal and political retaliation seemed to fit what one Frenchman with Jacksonian sympathies described as the westerner’s “rude instinct of masculine liberty.”

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  We live in a time where the president of the United States flouts all conventions of the office, decorum, and decency. Police brutality persists, unabated. Women share their experiences with sexual harassment or violence but rarely receive any kind of justice. It seems like things have only gotten worse since the height of Lorde’s career when she was writing about the very things we continue to deal with— the place of women and, more specifically, black women in the world, what it means to raise black girls and boys in a world that will not welcome them, what it means to live in a world so harshly stratified by class, what it means to live in a vulnerable body, what it means to live. There are very few voices for women and even fewer voices for black women, speaking from the center of consciousness, from the I am out to the we are, but Lorde was, throughout her storied career, one such voice. In her poem “Power,” Lorde wrote about a white police officer who murdered a ten-year-old black boy and was acquitted by a jury of eleven of his peers and one black woman who succumbed to the will of those peers. She captured the rage of such injustice and how futile it feels to try and fight such injustice, but she also demonstrated that even in the face of futility, silence is never an option. A great deal of Lorde’s writing was committed to articulating her worldview in service of the greater good. She crafted lyrical manifestos. The essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” made the case for the importance of poetry, arguing that poetry “is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” In “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Lorde examines women using their erotic power to benefit themselves instead of benefiting men. She notes that women are often vilified for their erotic power and treated as inferior. She suggests that we can rethink and reframe this paradigm. This is what is so remarkable about Lorde’s writing—how she encourages women to understand weaknesses as strengths. She writes, “As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of all aspects of our lives and our work, and how we move toward and through them.” In this, she offers an expansive definition of the erotic, one that goes well beyond the carnal to encompass a wide range of sensate experiences. Rethinking and reframing paradigms is a recurring theme in Lorde’s writing. As the child of immigrants who came to the United States for their American dream only to have that dream shattered by the Great Depression, Lorde understood the nuances of oppression from an early age.