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 Henry and June (1986)

  Hateful, infuriating. I run away from Clichy and think I carry my secret away with me. I have the hope that Henry has not grasped it too well. I fear the uncanny analysis of his eyes. I slip out of his bed and run away while he sleeps. I rush home and fall asleep, deeply, for many hours. I must choke the child. Tomorrow I can meet Henry, face him, be woman. This would have remained a vague, meaningless incident. Now, because of psychoanalysis, it is heavy with significance. Analysis makes me feel as if I were masturbating instead of fucking. Being with Henry is to live, to flow, to suffer, even. I do not like to be with Allendy and to press dry fingers on the secrets of my body. When I talk just a little about the fear of cruelty to Eduardo, he says what I say, “But one uses one’s weaknesses. One can make something of them.” And I have done that. Yet I can see no good in my childish admiration of older men, my adoration of John and Henry. I can see nothing in it but interference with the progress of maturity, the abdication of my own personality. As Henry says, “It is beautiful to see you sleep. You lie like a doll, where one has put you. Even in sleep you do not sprawl and take too much room.” Allendy’s questions crackle at me. “What did you feel about our first talk?” “I felt that I needed you, that I didn’t want to be left alone to think my life over.” “You loved your father devotedly, abnormally, and you hated the sexual reason which caused him to abandon you. This may have created in you a certain obscure feeling against sex. This feeling asserts itself in your unconscious in that scene with John. You willed him to a kind of castration.” “Then why was I so unhappy, in such despair when it happened, and why did I love him for two years?” “Perhaps you loved him more because of what happened.” “But I have despised him since then for his lack of impulsive passion.” “The ambivalent need of dominating man, of being conquered by him and of being superior to him. You really loved him because he did not dominate you, because you were superior to him in passion.” “No, because now that I have found a man who has conquered me I am tremendously happy.” Allendy asks questions about Henry. He finally notes that I dominate him socially. He notes also that I have chosen to put myself in the situation of the rival of a woman I know will conquer, therefore seeking pain for myself. That I have loved men weaker than I and have suffered from this. At the same time I have an extreme fear of pain, and it makes me divide my loves so that each one serves as a refuge against another. Ambivalence.

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

  In vain I pleaded for his life, declared that he ought to be tried, that it was better to let off ten guilty men than hang one innocent one, but my foreign accent robbed my appeal, I think, of any weight and before my eyes the man was strung up. It filled me with rage; it seemed to me a dreadful thing to have done: the cruelty of the executioners, the hard purpose of them, shut me away from my kin. Later I was to see these men from a better angle. By the early morning the fire had destroyed over a mile deep of the town and was raging with unimaginable fury. I went down on the lakeshore just before daybreak. The scene was one of indescribable magnificence: there were probably a hundred and fifty thousand homeless men, women and children grouped along the lake shore. Behind us roared the fire; it spread like a red sheet right up to the zenith above our heads, and from there was borne over the sky in front of us by long streamers of fire like rockets: vessels four hundred yards out in the bay were burning fiercely, and we were, so to speak, roofed and walled by flame. The danger and uproar were indeed terrifying and the heat, even in this October night, almost unbearable. I wandered along the lake shore, noting the kind way in which the men took care of the women and children. Nearly every man was able to erect some sort of shelter for his wife and babies, and everyone was willing to help his neighbor. While working at one shelter for a little while, I said to the man I wished I could get a drink. “You can get one”, he said, “right there”, and he pointed to a sort of makeshift shanty on the beach. I went over and found that a publican had managed to get four barrels down on the beach and had rigged up a sort of low tent above them; on one of the barrels he had nailed his shingle, and painted on it were the words, “What do you think of our hell? No drinks less than a dollar!” The wild humor of the thing amused me infinitely and the man certainly did a roaring trade.

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

  The creed we professed and the creed we practised were poles apart. Never I believe in the world’s history was there such confusion in man’s thought about conduct, never were there so many different ideals put forward for his guidance. It is imperatively necessary for us to bring clearness into this muddle and see why we have gone wrong and where. For the world-war is only the last of a series of diabolical acts which have shocked the conscience of humanity. The greatest crimes in recorded time have been committed during the last half century almost without protest by the most civilised nations, nations that still call themselves Christian. Whoever has watched human affairs in the last half century must acknowledge that our progress has been steadily hell-ward. The hideous massacres and mutilations of tens of thousands of women and children in the Congo Free State without protest on the part of Great Britain who could have stopped it all with one word, is surely due to the same spirit that directed the abominable blockade (continued by both England and America long after the Armistice) which condemned hundreds and thousands of women and children of our own kith and kin to death by starvation. The unspeakable meanness and confessed fraud of the Peace of Versailles with its tragic consequences from Vladivostock to London and finally the shameless, dastardly war waged by all the Allies and by America on Russia, for money, show us that we have been assisting at the overthrow of morality itself and returning to the ethics of the wolf and the polity of the Thieves’ Kitchen. And our public acts as nations are paralleled by our treatment of our fellows within the community. For the small minority the pleasures of living have been increased in the most extraordinary way while the pains and sorrows of existence have been greatly mitigated, but the vast majority even of civilised peoples have hardly been admitted to any share in the benefits of our astounding material progress. The slums of our cities show the same spirit we have displayed in our treatment of the weaker races. It is no secret that over fifty per cent of English volunteers in the war were below the pigmy physical standard required and about one half of our American soldiers were morons with the intelligence of children under twelve years of age: “vae victis” has been our motto with the most appalling results. Clearly we have come to the end of a period and must take thought about the future.

• 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)

  JEROME. It was not enough for the Chief Priests to have crucified the Lord the Saviour, if they did not guard the sepulchre, and do their utmost to lay hands on Him as He rose from the dead. RABANUS. By the Parasceve is meant ‘preparation;’ and they gave this name to the sixth day of the week, on which they made ready the things needed for the Sabbath, as was commanded respecting the manna, On the sixth day they gathered twice as much. (Exod. 16:22.) Because on the sixth day man was made, and on the seventh God rested; therefore on the sixth day Jesus died for man, and rested the Sabbath day in the tomb. The Chief Priests although in putting the Lord to death they had committed a heinous crime, yet were they not satisfied unless even after His death they carried on the venom of their malice once begun, traducing His character, and calling one, whom they knew to be guileless, a deceiver. (John 11:49.) But as Caiaphas prophesied without knowing it, that it is expedient that one man should die for the people, so now, Christ was a deceiver,1 not from truth into error, but leading men from error to truth, from vices to virtue, from death to life. REMIGIUS. They say that He had declared, After three days I will rise again, in consequence of that He said above, As Jonas was three days and, three nights in the whale’s belly, &c. (Matt. 12:40.) But let us see in what way He can be said to have risen again after three days. Some would have the three hours of darkness understood as one night, and the light succeeding the darkness as a day, but these do not know the force of figurative language. The sixth day of the week on which He suffered comprehended the foregoing night; then follows the night of the Sabbath with its own day, and the night of the Lord’s day includes also its own day; and hence it is true that He rose again after three days. AUGUSTINE. (‘Aug. in Serm.’ non occ.) He rose again after three days, to signify the consent of the whole Trinity in the passion of the Son; the three days’ space is read figuratively, because the Trinity which in the beginning made man, the same in the end restores man by the passion of Christ. RABANUS. Command therefore that the sepulchre be made sure until the third day. For Christ’s disciples were spiritually thieves; stealing from the unthankful Jews the writings of the New and Old Testament, they bestowed them to be used by the Church; and while they slept, that is, while the Jews were sunk in the lethargy of unbelief, they carried off the promised Saviour, and gave Him to be believed on by the Gentiles.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Sometimes I have the eeriest feeling that I’m living some macabre soap opera. And too besides, it’s being recorded in vivid living color. If so, I hope it’ll be useful someday for something, if only for some other Black sister’s afternoon entertainment when her real life gets to be too much. It’ll sure beat As the World Turns. At least there will be real Black people in this one, and maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll get to drag the story on interminably for twenty or thirty years like the TV soaps, until the writer dies of old age or the audience loses interest—which is another way of saying they no longer need to discharge the tensions in their lives that lie behind that particular story. November 6, 1986 New York City Black mother goddess, salt dragon of chaos, Seboulisa, Mawu. Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away. Women who have asked me to set these stories down are asking me for my air to breathe, to use in their future, are courting me back to my life as a warrior. Some offer me their bodies, some their enduring patience, some a separate fire, and still others, only a naked need whose face is all too familiar. It is the need to give voice to the complexities of living with cancer, outside of the tissue-thin assurance that they “got it all,” or that the changes we have wrought in our lives will insure that cancer never reoccurs. And it is a need to give voice to living with cancer outside of that numbing acceptance of death as a resignation waiting after fury and before despair. There is nothing I cannot use somehow in my living and my work, even if I would never have chosen it on my own, even if I am livid with fury at having to choose. Not only did nobody ever say it would be easy, nobody ever said what faces the challenges would wear. The point is to do as much as I can of what I came to do before they nickel and dime me to death. Racism. Cancer. In both cases, to win the aggressor must conquer, but the resisters need only survive. How do I define that survival and on whose terms?

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  A. will lend us the money to go to Switzerland, and Frances will come with me. I think they will be able to find out what is really wrong with me at the Lukas Klinik, and if they say these growths in my liver are malignant, then I will accept that I have cancer of the liver. At least there they will be able to adjust my Iscador dosage upward to the maximum effect, because that is the way I have decided to go and I’m not going to change now. Obviously, I still don’t accept these tumors in my liver as cancer, although I know that could just be denial on my part, which is certainly one mechanism for coping with cancer. I have to consider denial as a possibility in all of my planning, but I also feel that there is absolutely nothing they can do for me at Sloane [sic] Kettering except cut me open and then sew me back up with their condemnations inside me. December 7, 1985 New York City My stomach x-rays are clear, and the problems in my GI series are all circumstantial. Now that the doctors here have decided I have liver cancer, they insist on reading all their findings as if that were a fait accompli. They refuse to look for any other reason for the irregularities in the x-rays, and they’re treating my resistance to their diagnosis as a personal affront. But it’s my body and my life and the goddess knows I’m paying enough for all this, I ought to have a say. The flame is very dim these days. It’s all I can do to teach my classes at Hunter and crawl home. Frances and I will leave for Switzerland as soon as school is over next week. The Women’s Poetry Center will be dedicated at Hunter the night before I leave. No matter how sick I feel, I’m still afire with a need to do something for my living. How will I be allowed to live my own life, the rest of my life? December 9, 1985 New York City A better question is—how do I want to live the rest of my life and what am I going to do to ensure that I get to do it exactly or as close as possible to how I want that living to be? I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes—everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor! December 13, 1985 New York City

• 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

  To the white women present who recognize these attitudes as familiar, but most of all, to all my sisters of Color who live and survive thousands of such encounters—to my sisters of Color who like me still tremble their rage under harness, or who sometimes question the expression of our rage as useless and disruptive (the two most popular accusations)—I want to speak about anger, my anger, and what I have learned from my travels through its dominions. Everything can be used / except what is wasteful / (you will need / to remember this when you are accused of destruction.)* Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in those assumptions underlining our lives. I have seen situations where white women hear a racist remark, resent what has been said, become filled with fury, and remain silent because they are afraid. That unexpressed anger lies within them like an undetonated device, usually to be hurled at the first woman of Color who talks about racism. But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies. Anger is loaded with information and energy. When I speak of women of Color, I do not only mean Black women. The woman of Color who is not Black and who charges me with rendering her invisible by assuming that her struggles with racism are identical with my own has something to tell me that I had better learn from, lest we both waste ourselves fighting the truths between us. If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister’s oppression and she calls me on it, to answer her anger with my own only blankets the substance of our exchange with reaction. It wastes energy. And yes, it is very difficult to stand still and to listen to another woman’s voice delineate an agony I do not share, or one to which I myself have contributed.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change. But our time is getting shorter. We have been raised to view any difference other than sex as a reason for destruction, and for Black women and white women to face each other’s angers without denial or immobility or silence or guilt is in itself a heretical and generative idea. It implies peers meeting upon a common basis to examine difference, and to alter those distortions which history has created around our difference. For it is those distortions which separate us. And we must ask ourselves: Who profits from all this? Women of Color in america have grown up within a symphony of anger, at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive, it is in spite of a world that takes for granted our lack of humanness, and which hates our very existence outside of its service. And I say symphony rather than cacophony because we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us apart. We have had to learn to move through them and use them for strength and force and insight within our daily lives. Those of us who did not learn this difficult lesson did not survive. And part of my anger is always libation for my fallen sisters. Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change. To those women here who fear the anger of women of Color more than their own unscrutinized racist attitudes, I ask: Is the anger of women of Color more threatening than the woman-hatred that tinges all aspects of our lives? It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us but our refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment. I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  It means that high-powered Black women are told it is not safe to attend a Conference on the Status of Women in Nairobi simply because we are Lesbians. It means that in a political action, you rob yourselves of the vital insight and energies of political women such as Betty Powell and Barbara Smith and Gwendolyn Rogers and Raymina Mays and Robin Christian and Yvonne Flowers. It means another instance of the divide-and-conquer routine. How do we organize around our differences, neither denying them nor blowing them up out of proportion? The first step is an effort of will on your part. Try to remember to keep certain facts in mind. Black Lesbians are not apolitical. We have been a part of every freedom struggle within this country. Black Lesbians are not a threat to the Black family. Many of us have families of our own. We are not white, and we are not a disease. We are women who love women. This does not mean we are going to assault your daughters in an alley on Nostrand Avenue. It does not mean we are about to attack you if we pay you a compliment on your dress. It does not mean we only think about sex, any more than you only think about sex. Even if you do believe any of these stereotypes about Black Lesbians, begin to practice acting like you don’t believe them. Just as racist stereotypes are the problem of the white people who believe them, so also are homophobic stereotypes the problem of the heterosexuals who believe them. In other words, those stereotypes are yours to solve, not mine, and they are a terrible and wasteful barrier to our working together. I am not your enemy. We do not have to become each other’s unique experiences and insights in order to share what we have learned through our particular battles for survival as Black women. . . . There was a poster in the 1960s that was very popular: HE’S NOT BLACK, HE’S MY BROTHER! It used to infuriate me because it implied that the two were mutually exclusive—he couldn’t be both brother and Black. Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized. I am a Black Lesbian, and I am your sister. A Burst of Light Living with Cancer though we may land here there is no other landing to choose our meaning we must make it new. —MURIEL RUKEYSER INTRODUCTION The year I became fifty felt like a great coming together for me. I was very proud of having made it for half a century, and in my own style. “Time for a change,” I thought, “I wonder how I’m going to live the next half.” On February 1, two weeks before my fiftieth birthday, I was told by my doctor that I had liver cancer, metastasized from the breast cancer for which I had had a mastectomy six years before.

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

  Breathe: Anger tells your brain that you’re in crisis. Breathwork reminds you that right now, in this moment, you are safe. We explored the power of elongating your exhale in the last chapter. My next favorite exercise is called box breathing. Give it a try now. Inhale through your nose for four counts. Hold your breath for four counts. Exhale through your mouth for four counts. Hold your breath for four counts. Repeat this three times or as many as needed. As you do this, you’ll literally begin to feel yourself moving out of your stress response (fight, flight, freeze) and into your relaxation response (rest and digest). Allow yourself to feel your anger: Identify that what you’re feeling is actually anger. Call it out: “I am angry.” If expressing anger is hard for you, this might be difficult at first. But you are not expected to gloss over your angry feelings with positivity. Get down with what’s coming up. Where is it located in your body? Your throat or chest? Breathe into those areas and allow them to release. Investigate your trigger: What set you off? Loud chewing! Slow drivers! Rude people! I get it; that stuff ticks me off, too. But it’s not the full story. What’s going on under the surface? I feel out of control. Ignored. Unimportant. Or maybe you were reminded of an earlier experience in your life that was unfair. Anger always contains important messages for your growth. Understanding your triggers can help you stay grounded. Explore your pre-anger state: Your mood before the incident occurred can also play a role in how you responded. When I’m hungry, I’m far less patient. Get that girl a sandwich, stat! Perhaps you tipped back one too many Manhattans the night before. Maybe you were already riled up about something else, or you were just having a pressure-filled day. Understanding the context can help you care for your anger going forward. Identify your “do differently’s”: So you snapped. Shit happens. How do you want to respond differently next time? What kind of support do you need for that to happen? Sometimes it’s therapy; other times it could be a day off, a good cry, a much-needed infusion of joy. It’s easy to get pissed off when you’re in a joy famine or you’ve been ignoring your own needs for too long. Don’t shoot the messenger, but in these cases, you’re probably most angry with yourself.

• 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.