Anger

Passages

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

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• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  The bicentennial, in Washington, D.C. Two ample Black women stand guard over household belonging piled haphazardly onto a sidewalk in front of a house. Furniture, toys, bundles of clothes. One woman absently rocks a toy horse with the toe of her shoe, back and forth. Across the street on the side of a building opposite is a sign painted in story-high black letters, GOD HATES YOU. Addie Mae Collins, Carol Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair. Four little Black girls, none more than ten years of age, singing their last autumn song in a Sunday church school in Birmingham, Alabama. After the explosion clears it is not possible to tell which patent leather Sunday shoe belongs to which found leg. What other human being absorbs so much virulent hostility and still functions? Black women have a history of the use and sharing of power, from the Amazon legions of Dahomey through the Ashanti warrior queen Yaa Asantewaa and the freedom fighter Harriet Tubman, to the economically powerful market-women guilds of present West Africa. We have a tradition of closeness and mutual care and support, from the all-woman courts of the Queen Mothers of Benin to the present-day Sisterhood of the Good Death, a community of old women in Brazil who, as escaped slaves, provided escape and refuge for other enslaved women, and who now care for each other.* We are Black women born into a society of entrenched loathing and contempt for whatever is Black and female. We are strong and enduring. We are also deeply scarred. As African women together, we once made the earth fertile with our fingers. We can make the earth bear as well as mount the first line of fire in defense of the King. And having killed, in his name and in our own (Harriet’s rifle speaks, shouldered in the grim marsh), we still know that the power to kill is less than the power to create, for it produces an ending rather than the beginning of something new. Anger — a passion of displeasure that may be excessive or misplaced but not necessarily harmful. Hatred — an emotional habit or attitude of mind in which aversion is coupled with ill will. Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does. Racism and sexism are grown-up words. Black children in america cannot avoid these distortions in their living and, too often, do not have the words for naming them. But both are correctly perceived as hatred. Growing up, metabolizing hatred like a daily bread. Because I am Black, because I am woman, because I am not Black enough, because I am not some particular fantasy of a woman, because I AM. On such a consistent diet, one can eventually come to value the hatred of one’s enemies more than one values the love of friends, for that hatred becomes the source of anger, and anger is a powerful fuel.

• From We Were Here (2011)

  WE WERE HERE CaptionMax Page 32 3/23/2011 2:13:58 PAUL (VO) (CONT’D) From their very opening statement, Silence Equals Death, it’s art, it’s culture, and it was, you know, it transformed the dialogue. [PROTEST CHANTING] 2:14:07 PROTESTORS (on archival video) Sixty thousand dead from AIDS! Where was George?! Fight back! Fight AIDS! Health care is a right! Health care is a right! 2:14:16 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on protest sign) GREED = DEATH STOP AIDS PROFITEERING 2:14:20 EILEEN (VO/ON) That was the first time I crossed a picket line. I wanted to go in to the AIDS conference because there was information I wanted to get inside. And what they were screaming and hollering about I agreed with, so-- But then I- I realized that everybody is doing what they need to do. They need to be out there screaming and hollering and pushing because things don’t happen unless you push, and I needed to go in to get that information so I could take care of them. And so maybe (chuckles) once I figured that out it was a little easier to cross that picket line. 2:14:58 PROTESTORS (on archival video) Act up! Fight back! Fight AIDS! Act up! 2:15:01 EILEEN (VO) I mean, that was when drugs weren’t on the fast track, where it took ten years to get a drug approved, and the activists really worked for that to change. 2:15:11 ON-SCREEN TEXT (on t-shirt) ACT UP 2:15:18 CLEVE JONES (VO) Neil Yeager. James Martin Case. 2:15:25 DANIEL (VO/ON) One of the way I s- came back into the world was through the Names Project, which was the AIDS memorial quilt, which Cleve Jones started. 2:15:35 CLEVE JONES …and my friend Marvin Feldman.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  The liberals were appalled by the apocalyptic fantasies of the conservatives. But instead of criticizing them on biblical and doctrinal grounds, they hit quite unjustifiably below the belt. Their assault reflected the acute anxieties of the postwar period and, at this time of national trauma, was calculated to elicit outrage, fury, and a determination to retaliate. Fundamentalism—be it Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—nearly always begins as a defensive movement; it is usually a response to a campaign of coreligionists or fellow countrymen that is experienced as inimical and invasive. In 1917, during a particularly dark period of the war, liberal theologians in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago launched a media offensive against the Moody Bible Institute on the other side of town. 27 They accused these biblical literalists of being in the pay of the Germans and compared them to atheistic Bolsheviks. Their theology was, according to the Christian Register, “the most astounding mental aberration in the field of religious thinking.” 28 The conservatives responded in kind, retorting that, on the contrary, it was the pacifism of the liberals that had caused America to fall behind in the arms race; 29 it was they who had been in league with the Germans, since the Higher Criticism that the liberals admired had caused the collapse of decent values in Germany. 30 For decades, the Higher Criticism had been surrounded with a nimbus of evil. This type of symbolism, which takes the debate beyond the realm of logic and dispassionate discussion, is a persistent feature of fundamentalist movements. In 1920, Dixon, Reuben A. Torrey, and William B. Riley officially established the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association to fight for the survival of both Christianity and the world. That same year, at a meeting of the Northern Baptist Convention, Curtis Lee Lewis defined the “fundamentalist” as a Christian who fought to regain territory already lost to the Antichrist and “to do battle royal for the fundamentals of the faith.” 31 The movement spread. Three years later, the fundamentalists were riding high, and it seemed as if they would succeed in gaining the upper hand in most of the Protestant denominations. But then a new campaign caught their attention, which brought fundamentalism, at least for a few decades, into disrepute. In 1920 the Democratic politician William Jennings Bryan (1860— 1925) launched a crusade against the teaching of evolution in schools and colleges; almost single-handedly, Bryan was responsible for ousting the Higher Criticism from the top of the fundamentalist agenda and putting Darwinism in its place. 32 He saw the two issues as indissolubly linked but regarded evolution as by far the more dangerous. Two books—Headquarter Nights (1917) by Vernon L.

• From City of Night (1963)

  The man with the camera approaches Chi-Chi, while his wife, looking on incredulously at the sight of her, muttered in amazement: “My God!—look at the shoulders on that fairy!” Quickly, the two close in on Chi-Chi in visible fascination, followed by the others in their group—two men and two women—each face stamped with that contemptuous, incredulous smile. As if she were an animal which may escape, they pin Chi-Chi against the wall—like hunters, the man’s camera a gun. Adjusting the camera, the man said loudly to Chi-Chi: “Okay, sweetheart: Now you. I want to show your picture back home.” “Otherwise theyll never believe it,” laughed his wife, her laughter echoed by the others. “I mean,” said the man—and he grins with all the contempt of his ancestry, “I mean that I wanna show everyone back home what a real big fairy looks like.” Chi-Chi shook her head in bewilderment, as if dazed. The man’s wife rocks with bitter laughter, as if Chi-Chi’s humiliation will vindicate something inside herself, or perhaps erase something lurking uncomfortably. She stretched the rubber-smile to the point where it seemed her mouth would snap. Looking into the camera as he inches closer to her, the man addresses Chi-Chi: “Come on, sweetheart, you go ahead and give us a real big fairy pose!” “And dont forget to say ‘cheethe,’ his wife lisped poisonously. Instantly!—as if a wire had been uncoiled—Chi-Chi sprang away from the supporting wall toward the man with the camera. She didnt even bother to adjust the lace dress; it clung carelessly to one leg, over the knee, revealing the powerful leg. She glared at the man for long seconds, with a hatred greater than she could possibly have felt toward one individual; and she gnashes suddenly at him: “You come on, father-fucker!” And she advanced toward him, toward the encircling group, advanced within that small clearing of grinning, hating faces which is like a symbol of her isolation. “Whats the matter?” says the rubbermouthed woman viciously. “Arent you a real lady?” Unflinchingly, Chi-Chi aimed her gaze very surely at the woman. Her terrifying owleyes rake the woman’s body significantly—the masculine-suited, frigid body. And Chi-Chi smiled as if at a private secret, just discovered, between her and the woman, who looks quickly away. Then the smile disappeared, and Chi-Chi turns again to the man with the camera, still unclicked as if the finger is frozen. “Come on!” Chi-Chi repeats. The cigarette holder fell to the ground, her hands tightened into enormous manfists. The paint on her face seemed suddenly to be disappearing—the calcimine powder stripping itself from the skin as if of some inner volition. The false breasts dangled absurdly.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  The novel appeared in 1976, only three years after the 1973 Supreme Court case Miller v. California that determined the criteria (in a three-tier test) of what constituted obscenity and was, therefore, either protected under or in direct violation of the First Amendment. The Court delineated that something might be adjudged obscene if and only if it presents conspicuously offensive hard-core sexual acts or conducts; is not imbued with (or is essentially void of) serious artistic, literary, scientific, or political value; and, finally, if it appeals to the prurient or arouses the sexual interest of an individual based on the (then) contemporary sociocommunal/community standards. In one of the advances of the sexual revolution, pornography becomes accessible in industrialized form for both public cinematic and private home consumption, changing the sexual landscape in public/private spheres. Some sexual revolutionaries even enacted public displays of nudity and sex acts to rescue sex and sexuality from a domain of repression in demonstrated efforts to reconstitute sex. Eva's Man should be read within these sociosexual, cultural, and legal contexts, as Jones participates in these while simultaneously subverting a black Victorianism-a "culture of dissemblance" and politics of silence-that compromises black sexuality. To this end, Eva's Man issues indictments, which, even as they are far more nuanced than overt, are nonetheless extensive. The novel, be it deliberately or inadvertently, offers a harsh castigation (one not always immediately transparent) of all who enable and enforce-whether through silent participation, acquiescence, or violent aggression-problematic racialized sexual entanglements and models. These encompass the infliction of sexualized violence; the suppression of discourses on and progressive practices regarding sexuality; the regulation of female sexuality through men; the embrace of male sexual aggression and domination as intrinsic, rather than detrimental, to heterosexual intimacy; and/or the positioning of heterosexuality as normative and hegemonic-which do not go without critique. It becomes an attack not only on the body, a corporeal infliction, but emblematizes a greater symbolic attack on the systematic violence against black women's (and men's) bodies historically. Published in 1976 during the Black Power and Black Aesthetics movements and under the editorship of Toni Morrison at Random House, Eva's Man does not subscribe to the conventional politics governing black literature or that of the black literary establishment of the post-196os (nationalist) era. Yet to reduce or subject Eva's Man to a narrow reading that suggests it excoriates (or dissociates itself from) black politics, such as those of racial uplift and black consciousness advanced by the nationalist agenda, would be simplistic at best and an oversight at worst. The novel critiques black people, but also, more importantly and harshly, the larger systems that methodically buttress or sanction problematic elements. Institutions that are emblematic of the system at large, including law, the authorities, prisons and law enforcement, are scrutinized in the novel for their accountability in creating social problems.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Henceforth, Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem would be the only legitimate national shrine. 38 Not content with this orgy of destruction, the Deuteronomists (D) also rewrote the history of Israel, making major additions to the JE narrative that gave even greater prominence to Moses, who had liberated the people from Egypt at a time when Josiah was trying to become independent of the pharaoh, and extending the saga to include the story of Joshua’s conquest of the northern highlands, to which Josiah (the new Joshua) had just laid claim. In some respects, Deuteronomy reads like a modern document. Had it been implemented, the reformers’ program would have included the establishment of a secular sphere and an independent judiciary separate from the cult; 39 a constitutional monarchy, which made the king subject to the Torah like any other citizen; 40 and a centralized state with a single, national shrine. 41 The reformers also rationalized Israelite theology to rid it of superstitious mythology. 42 You could not manipulate God by sacrifice, and God certainly did not live in his temple, which instead of being a sacred “center,” as of old, was merely a house of prayer. 43 But a rational, secular ideology is not necessarily any more tolerant than a mythical one. The Deuteronomists’ reform revealed the greatest danger of idolatry. In making their national God, now the only symbol of the divine, endorse the national will, they had crafted a god in their own image. In the past, Marduk’s power had always been challenged by Tiamat’s, Baal’s by Mot’s. For J and E, the divine was so ambiguous that it was impossible to imagine that Yahweh was infallibly on your side or to predict what he would do next. But the Deuteronomists had no doubt that they knew exactly what Yahweh desired and felt it a sacred duty to destroy anything that seemed to oppose his/their interests. When something inherently finite—an image, an ideology, or a polity—is invested with ultimate value, its devotees feel obliged to eliminate any rival claimant, because there can be only one absolute. The type of destruction described by the Deuteronomists is an infallible indication that a sacred symbol has become idolatrous. The vision of the Deuteronomists had been affected by the violence of their time. At about the same time as the sages of India had started to make ahimsa , “nonviolence,” essential to the religious quest, the Deuteronomists depicted Joshua slaughtering the inhabitants of Canaan like the Assyrian generals who had terrorized the region for over two hundred years. In the event, the Deuteronomists’ divinely articulated nationalism ended in tears. Their belligerent theology had blinded them to practical realities on the ground. It was only a matter of time before the great powers turned their attention to Judah. In 611 Pharaoh Necho II marched through Canaan in a bid to counter the rising power of Babylon.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  During the course of their relationship, Jerome rapes Renay, which leads to her pregnancy and, in turn, accounts for their decision to marry. Once wedded, Renay, miserable within the confines of her forced marriage, is expected to submit routinely to Jerome's will and to specific gender roles or, otherwise, suffer Jerome's violent beatings. Renay maintains the household, raising their daughter and working to pay the bills with little assistance from Jerome, who drinks heavily and never secures a steady job. Misdirecting and displacing his resentment (which stems from his inability to support his family and his abandoned dreams of finishing college and becoming a professional athlete) onto Renay, Jerome lambastes her as a salve for his bruised manhood: "You know we black men have a hard enough time as it is making it in the white man's world. [...] I could have been somebody if it wasn't for you. All you castrating black bitches want to keep a man down. Ruin him. [...] And you. What goddam good are you to a man? Not even a good screw!" (29). The myth of the black matriarchy resonates in Jerome's highly castigatory remarks (which fail, ironically, to acknowledge that his condition is the result of his own doing-of his having raped Renay). Promulgated by sociologist and later senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and later appropriated by some black nationalists, the myth assumes that black women, in collusion with the white power structure, emasculated black men, thereby preventing them from maintaining their "rightful" position in the black family and society at large.36 In his evocation of black matriarchy rhetoric, Jerome, as Shockley clearly intends, is equated allegorically with black nationalist discourse, which he epitomizes throughout the novel. Moreover, in his assertion that Renay serves no purpose for men-that she is, as he claims, "not even a good screw"-he not only objectifies her but, like those black nationalists who viewed black women's only position in the movement as "prone," he also reduces her to a marginal sexual role.37 Compensating for his inadequacy and negligence as a husband, father, and provider, Jerome espouses nationalist ideologies regarding "lost manhood" and asserts himself "by any means necessary"-through both physically and verbally abusive manners-as patriarch of his household.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Pat Parker, in Movement in Black (1978), critiques the compartmentalization of identities, namely race and sexual orientation, as well as the exclusive politics in black and homosexual communities; and she addresses the ways that black sexual minorities are almost inevitably "othered" and displaced, either because of their race or sexual orientation, in black and gay communities: If I could take all my parts with me when I go somewhere, and not have to say to one of them, "No, you stay home tonight, you won't be welcome," because I'm going to an all-white party where I can be gay, but not Black. Or I'm going to a Black poetry reading, and half the poets are antihomosexual, or thousands of situations where something of what I am cannot come with me. The day all the different parts of me can come along, we would have what I would call a revolution." While Parker critiques structures that demand and perpetuate the compartmentalizing of black sexual minorities' multiple consciousnesses or identities, she, perhaps most significantly, calls critical attention to the revolutionary possibilities of a simultaneous racial and (homo)sexual identity. It is, in fact, precisely this revolutionary notion of foregrounding racial and sexual identities concomitantly-rather than negating or situating them within hierarchical or diametrically oppositional categories-that accounts, in part, for the relatively under-considered discourse on same-gender loving. As a concept, same-gender loving materialized in the early 199os as a conduit for black sexual minorities-black women who love women (sexually and emotionally) and black men who love men (sexually and emotionally)-to express their sexuality in ways that resonate with the distinctiveness of black culture and life. Coined by activist Cleo Manago as a culturally affirming designation for black and "sexual minorities" of color, samegender loving, unlike the black and gay liberation movements and discourses, is dialogic: attentive to both the intersectionality and inseparability of racial and sexual identities. It does not marginalize individuals or demand the prioritization of either racial or sexual identity but provides a space for black sexual minorities to celebrate the totality of their experiences, struggles, multiple identities, and subject positions. While same-gender loving does not eradicate the pervasive homophobia, heterosexism, or racism in American society and culture, it challenges these oppressive forces and thereby serves as a pragmatic and ideological site of resistance. Forcing the black community to acknowledge the multiple and diverse ways of loving and sexuality, it allows for a more complex and inclusive self-definition of black sexuality. Moreover, it also challenges the ethnic invisibility, as well as the inscribed "whiteness," that gay and lesbian discourses and queer theory largely produce." The motivation of the same-gender loving movement, then, is to meet particular exigencies:

• From City of Night (1963)

  And then he—my father—that weak man—would take it out on me—hit me. ” He flayed himself with the thick belt he had removed from the dark pants. “But I showed him I was a Man! I wouldnt run away from him!... And he hit me and hit me and hit me with his belt—until I'd pass out.” Whack! —again the belt against his thigh. He didn’t flinch. “And then I wouldnt even faint any more,” he said. “I’d just—... let him.... And yet,” he whispered as if in a trance, “and yet—do you know?—that weak, dreadful man—my father—he—... He wore boots! Boots! —a symbol of the strength he’d given away so easily, without a fight! That pitiful man — dominated by my mother — had the guts to wear Boots! ... And then I found the Answer—Strength!... And when I found that out, I—... You want to know what my first gesture of—of Freedom!—from him and that woman—was?” He threw back his head and roared with pained laughter. He continued as if hypnotized by the remembrance of that ugly past: “I had gone to the movies—secretly because I wasnt even allowed to do that! It was a period picture.... And the hero—a strong, handsome, masculine man (everything my father wasnt!)—he was wearing Boots too. But on him they were Right: No woman would have dominated him! ... I sat through that movie several times especially for a scene in which that magnificent man was sitting in bed, putting on his Boots! He looped his fingers about the inside straps—and he slipped the boots on! I held my breath.... That night, when my father was asleep, I went into his bedroom. I stood looking at him: Even asleep he looked weak and dominated.... And staring at my—... father!—asleep—I hated him more than ever. I found his boots under the bed. I took them to my room. I got my mother’s scissors. And I snipped the straps off the insides of his boots!” He formed two fingers into a V and closed them with finality. He looked worn out. The studded costume he wore seemed like a ponderous burden on him. His face dropped toward his hands. Dispassionately, lifelessly, he echoed: “I snipped those straps from the insides of his boots. I cut them off, I stamped on them, I spit on them, I—I—...” And then he shouted: “ I pissed on them!” His voice quavered, broke, halted. He turned his face away from me. His shoulders trembled as if in a sudden cold wind. “So you see: power and strength—” he began weakly without finishing. I sat next to him, where he had sunk onto the bed. But is there anything you can say now to Neil? It’s too late.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Fundamentalism—be it Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—nearly always begins as a defensive movement; it is usually a response to a campaign of coreligionists or fellow countrymen that is experienced as inimical and invasive. In 1917, during a particularly dark period of the war, liberal theologians in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago launched a media offensive against the Moody Bible Institute on the other side of town.27 They accused these biblical literalists of being in the pay of the Germans and compared them to atheistic Bolsheviks. Their theology was, according to the Christian Register, “the most astounding mental aberration in the field of religious thinking.”28 The conservatives responded in kind, retorting that, on the contrary, it was the pacifism of the liberals that had caused America to fall behind in the arms race;29 it was they who had been in league with the Germans, since the Higher Criticism that the liberals admired had caused the collapse of decent values in Germany.30 For decades, the Higher Criticism had been surrounded with a nimbus of evil. This type of symbolism, which takes the debate beyond the realm of logic and dispassionate discussion, is a persistent feature of fundamentalist movements. In 1920, Dixon, Reuben A. Torrey, and William B. Riley officially established the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association to fight for the survival of both Christianity and the world. That same year, at a meeting of the Northern Baptist Convention, Curtis Lee Lewis defined the “fundamentalist” as a Christian who fought to regain territory already lost to the Antichrist and “to do battle royal for the fundamentals of the faith.”31 The movement spread. Three years later, the fundamentalists were riding high, and it seemed as if they would succeed in gaining the upper hand in most of the Protestant denominations. But then a new campaign caught their attention, which brought fundamentalism, at least for a few decades, into disrepute. In 1920 the Democratic politician William Jennings Bryan (1860— 1925) launched a crusade against the teaching of evolution in schools and colleges; almost single-handedly, Bryan was responsible for ousting the Higher Criticism from the top of the fundamentalist agenda and putting Darwinism in its place.32 He saw the two issues as indissolubly linked but regarded evolution as by far the more dangerous. Two books—Headquarter Nights (1917) by Vernon L. Kellogg and The Science of Power (1918) by Benjamin Kidd—had made a great impression on him. The authors reported interviews with German soldiers, who had testified to the influence that Darwinian ideas had played in Germany’s determination to declare war. This “research” convinced Bryan that evolutionary theory heralded the collapse of morality and decent civilization. His ideas were naive, simplistic, and incorrect, but people were beginning to be suspicious of science and he found a willing audience. When Bryan toured the United States, his lecture “The Menace of Darwinism” drew large crowds and got extensive media coverage. But an unexpected development in the South threw the campaign into even greater prominence.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Davis goes even further by locating her outside the "normative" in a degrading fashion that reduces her to stigmatization: "You ain't natural. [...] Shit, if you was natural, you wouldn't even be here, woman. You wouldn't even a let Davis Carter lay a hand on you. Not for free" (121). As when he initially met Eva, Davis imposes certain mischaracterizations upon her that mark her as licentious to the extent she embodies "illicit" sexuality; and his assertion that she is "unnatural" exacerbates thingssituating her as the embodiment of promiscuity that exceeds the confines of a sexually conventional and "natural/norm" culture. Eva's contestation manifests in reciprocity vis-a-vis her infliction of sexualized violence against Davis, who, in his verbal and physical sexual dehumanization, incites transgression. After lacing his drink with poison and killing him, Eva's transgressive behavior extends even further: I opened his trousers and played with his penis. My mouth, my teeth, my tongue went inside his trousers. I raised blood [...]. I got back on the bed and squeezed his dick in my teeth. I bit down hard. [...] I got the silk handkerchief he used to wipe me after we made love, and wrapped his penis in it. I laid it back inside his trousers, zipped him up. [...] The blood still came through. "Bastard." I reached in his pants, got my comb, took the key he'd promised, washed my hands, finished my brandy, wiped his mouth, and left. (129) Since black male bodies, when sexualized, are reduced to a fixation on the black male penis as "distillation of the essence of Black masculinity," in her contestation, Eva not only kills Davis but, in attacking his penis, the phallus and material embodiment of masculinist sexual hegemony, she also squelches his dominance sexually and otherwise. As sexual power and authority for men are linked to the phallus, it serves as a marker of masculinity.23 Eva refuses to be a passive or ornamental entity whose sexuality is regulated or confined in the service and sexual gratification of Davis and men. In taking the mutilated penis in bed, engaging with it on her own terms, she executes her own agency, pleasure, and gratification-sexual and empowering, even if grotesquethat diminishes masculinist sexual power and domination. In her transgressive behavior she, like transgression generally, not only marks the limit-crossing and violating it-but also designates the limit. Her contestatory act is, then, an instantiation of transgression. Contestation, as Foucault reminds us, "does not imply a generalized negation, but [...] a radical break of transitivity.[.. .C]ontestation is the act that carries them all to their limits"; thus, "to contest is to proceed until one reaches the empty core where being achieves its limit and where the limit defines being."24 "A Woman Got to Be Crazy to Do Something Like That. [...] Or Want You to Think She's Crazy": Madness and Transgression

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Ingersoll (1833–99), lawyer, orator, and state attorney general who became a leading spokesman of American agnosticism, humanity would soon outgrow God: one day everybody would recognize that religion was an extinct species. 64 For the American poet and novelist Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), “the loss of religious faith among the most civilized portions of the race is a step from childishness to maturity.” 65 By the 1870s, this conviction had hardened into a new myth that saw religion and science as locked in eternal and inevitable conflict. The champions of science constructed a revisionist history of the relations between the two, floridly told, that cast the heroes of “progress”— Bruno, Galileo, Luther—as the hapless victims of evil cardinals and fanatical puritans. For the American propagandist Joel Moody, religion was the “science of evil.” Men of generous culture or of great learning and women of eminent piety and virtue from the humble cottage to the throne have been led out for matters of conscience or butchered before a mindless rabble lusting after God. The limbs of men and women have been torn from their bodies, their eyes gouged out, their flesh mangled and slowly roasted, their children barbarously tortured before their eyes, because of religious opinion. 66 For Ingersoll, human history had been scarred by “a deadly conflict” in which the brave, lonely champions of truth, “straining against fear and mental slavery, prejudice and martyrdom,” had dragged humanity “inch by inch” closer to the truth. 6 7 In 1871, John William Draper (1811–82), head of the department of medicine at New York University, published The History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science , which went through fifty printings and was translated into ten languages. While Religion clung timidly to the unchangeable truths of revelation, Science forged expansively ahead, giving us telescopes, barometers, canals, hospitals, sanitation, schools, the telegraph, calculus, sewing machines, rifles, and warships. Only Science could liberate us from the tyranny of Religion (Draper habitually capitalized these terms so that they seemed like characters in a morality play). “The ecclesiastic must learn to keep himself within the domain he has chosen, and cease to tyrannize over the philosopher, who, conscious of his own strength and the purity of his motives, will bear such interference no longer.” 68 Ultimately, however, Draper’s polemic was marred by his blatantly anti-Catholic prejudice. Less immediately popular but more influential long-term was A History of the Warfare of Science and Theology in Christendom (1896) by the ardent secularist Andrew Dixon White (1832–1918), first president of Cornell University. In all modern history, interference with science in the supposed interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such interference may have been, has resulted in the direst evils both to religion and science—and invariably. And, on the other hand, all untrammelled scientific investigations no matter how dangerous to religion some of its stages may have seemed, for the time, has invariably resulted in the highest good of religion and of science. 69 The two were implacably opposed.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And because this is such a big thing in That life, youll hear untrue stories from almost everyone whos paid someone about the person hes paid. It’s a kind of petty vindication, to put down the hustler’s masculinity—whether correctly or not—at the same time that they seek it out. Standing on the street, Pete would always come on about the young girls that would breeze by like flowers, the wind lapping at their skirts coyly.... I found out Pete can be vengeful. I saw him in Bryant Park and he was fuming. The manager of a moviehouse one block away had refused to let him in. (I had seen the manager—a skinny, tall, nervous, gaunt, pale-faced man. The theater is one of the gayest in New York. Late at night men stand leaning along the stairways, waiting.) “Hes a queer,” Pete said angrily, “he dont give a fuck what goes on so long as it dont go on for money—thats why he wouldnt let me in.” Later, Pete tells everyone the place is crawling with plainclothes vice squad, ready to raid it: Stay Away! And the theater balcony was almost empty for weeks. He also told me that another hustler had taken a score from right under his nose in the park, and Pete went around telling people the other hustler had the clap.... “Make it anyway you can,” he said when he finished telling me that, “and when you cant make it, get even.” He knew almost everyone on the street who paid. He would point them out to me. “See that blond pale kid? He pimps for this old guy: real swank pad, too. And, man, what a weirdo that old guy is. Dig: he pays by the hour, and talks, talks, talks!—hes a teacher or something—laid up in bed from an accident. I used to fall asleep—I’d wear sunglasses—and he never knew the difference, just kept on talking....” At least once I regretted not listening to Pete’s advice. “See that one over there?” he said, pointing to a harmless-looking middle-aged man in a raincoat. “Stay away from him, spote, hes psycho.” But remembering what he had told everyone about the theater whose manager wouldnt let him in, and remembering what he’d done to the hustler whod taken his score in the park, I figured this may be some kind of revenge on the man for whatever reason. The man looked entirely harmless, and I went with him. After we had made a very ordinary scene—and I still hadnt got any money from him—his composure changed suddenly into savage rage. Before I knew it, he had pulled a knife on me. I dashed out, down the creaking steps. Like a demon—his shadow flung grotesquely down the stairs—he stands at the landing shouting: “God! Damn! You! God damn all of you!” 3 I also learned not always to trust Pete.

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  As for the wench, she was now spoiled, at least for my servant; and scarce eight and forty hours were gone round, before her insolence, on what had passed betwen Mr. H.... and her, gave me so fair an occasion to turn her away, at a minute’s warning, that, not to have done it would have been the wonder; so that he could neither disapprove it nor find in it the least reason to suspect my original motive. What became of her afterwards, I know not; but generous as Mr. H.... was, he undoubtedly made her amends: though, I dare answer, that he kept up no further commerce with her of that sort; as his stooping to such a coarse morsel, was only a sudden sally of lust, on seeing a wholesome looking, buxom country wench, and no more strange than hunger, or even a whimsical appetite’s making a fling meal of neck-beef, for change of diet. Had I considered this escapade of Mr. H.... in no more than that light and contented myself with turning away the wench, I had thought and acted right; but, flushed as I was with imaginary wrongs, I should have held Mr. H... to have been cheaply off, if I had not pushed my revenge farther, and repaid him, as exactly as could for the soul of me, in the same coin. Nor was this worthy act of justice long delayed: I had it too much at heart. Mr. H... had, about a fortnight before, taken into his service a tenant’s son, just come out the country, a very handsome young lad, scarce turned of nineteen, fresh as a rose, well sharped and clear limbed: in short, a very good excuse for any woman’s liking, even though revenge had been out of the question; any woman, I say, who was disprejudiced, and that wit and spirit enough to prefer a point of pleasure to a point of pride.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  After posting eight thousand dollars in sales in my first year, I was projecting sixteen thousand dollars in my second year, and according to my banker this was a very troubling trend. “A one hundred percent increase in sales is troubling ?” I asked. “Your rate of growth is too fast for your equity,” he said. “How can such a small company grow too fast? If a small company grows fast, it builds up its equity.” “It’s all the same principle, regardless of size,” he said. “Growth off your balance sheet is dangerous.” “Life is growth,” I said. “Business is growth. You grow or you die.” “That’s not how we see it.” “You might as well tell a runner in a race that he’s running too fast.” “Apples and oranges.” Your head is full of apples and oranges, I wanted to say. It was textbook to me. Growing sales, plus profitability, plus unlimited upside, equals quality company. In those days, however, commercial banks were different from investment banks. Their myopic focus was cash balances. They wanted you to never, ever outgrow your cash balance. Again and again I’d gently try to explain the shoe business to my banker. If I don’t keep growing, I’d say, I won’t be able to persuade Onitsuka that I’m the best man to distribute their shoes in the West. If I can’t persuade Onitsuka that I’m the best, they’ll find some other Marlboro Man to take my place. And that doesn’t even take into account the battle with the biggest monster out there, Adidas. My banker was unmoved. Unlike Athena, he did not admire my eyes of persuasion. “Mr. Knight,” he’d say, again and again, “you need to slow down. You don’t have enough equity for this kind of growth.” Equity. How I was beginning to loathe this word. My banker used it over and over, until it became a tune I couldn’t get out of my head. Equity—I heard it while brushing my teeth in the morning. Equity—I heard it while punching my pillow at night. Equity—I reached the point where I refused to even say it aloud, because it wasn’t a real word, it was bureaucratic jargon, a euphemism for cold hard cash , of which I had none. Purposely. Any dollar that wasn’t nailed down I was plowing directly back into the business. Was that so rash? To have cash balances sitting around doing nothing made no sense to me. Sure, it would have been the cautious, conservative, prudent thing. But the roadside was littered with cautious, conservative, prudent entrepreneurs. I wanted to keep my foot pressed hard on the gas pedal. Somehow, in meeting after meeting, I held my tongue. Everything my banker said, I ultimately accepted. Then I’d do exactly as I pleased. I’d place another order with Onitsuka, double the size of the previous order, and show up at the bank all wide-eyed innocence, asking for a letter of credit to cover it. My banker would always be shocked.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  In reality, the relations between science and faith had been more complex and nuanced. But this overblown polemic has remained the stock-in-trade of the atheist critique of religion and is widely accepted as a matter of fact. White’s misrepresentation of Augustine’s view of scripture is just one example of his bias. One of the most persistent of the apocryphal tales that developed at this time is the story of Huxley’s encounter with Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford (1805–73). In June 1860, shortly after the publication of Origin, they took part in a debate at a meeting of the British Association. Wilberforce is said to have played to the gallery and, having shown that he had absolutely no understanding of evolution, concluded by facetiously asking Huxley whether he claimed descent from a monkey through his grandmother or grandfather. Huxley retorted that he would rather be descended from an ape than a man like Wilberforce, who used his great talents to obscure the truth. It is a story that brilliantly encapsulates the “warfare” myth in its depiction of intrepid science victoriously triumphing over complacent, ignorant religion. But, as scholars have repeatedly demonstrated, there is no record of this exchange until the 1890s. It is not mentioned in contemporary accounts of the meeting. In fact, Wilberforce was entirely conversant with Darwinian theory; his speech at the British Institution summarized the recent review that he had written of Origin, which Darwin himself, acknowledging that Wilberforce had pointed out serious omissions in his argument that he would have to address, had considered “uncommonly clever.”71 Closely allied to the “warfare” myth in atheistic polemic was the view that belief in itself was immoral, which has also become an essential ingredient of atheist ideology. It dates from the publication of Ethics of Belief (1871) by William Kingdon Clifford (1845–79), professor of mathematics at University College, London, who argued that it was not only intellectually but morally perverse to accept any opinion—religious, scientific, or ethical—without sufficient evidence. He illustrated his thesis with the story of a shipowner who knew that his ship needed extensive repairs but decided to spare himself the expense, reflecting that it had survived many voyages and that God would not allow it to sink with so many passengers on board. When the ship went down in midocean, he was able to collect the insurance.

• From City of Night (1963)

  If she didnt see that, I will remember it in her; and the memory of Miss Destiny, planning her impossible Wedding—the memory, too, of Trudi, resigned to The Beads—the thought of Kathy—will fuse with that remembered sight of Chi-Chi—and I will wonder if Miss Destiny’s evil angel had not, that once, relented—was perhaps even smiling graciously, if only for a few moments, over Chi-Chi. Because Chi-Chi still stands menacingly before that man, those other people. And the man doesn’t move, as if the queen-eyes from a strange, forbidden world are not only making it difficult for his finger to click the shutter but are warning him in other, reverberating ways. Chi-Chi is unmistakably a man as he faces that entrapping group and yells: “Father-fuckers! I’ll take you on together or alone! Prove to Me what big men you are! Whos first?—whos first? All of you? Come on!” And the fists wait. Like moths attracted to this blazing inner light emanating from Chi-Chi, the other queens, silent and tense, watched as if seeing a part of themselves, long ago throttled, stunningly revealed in this wide-eyed Cassandra. And still, no one moves toward Chi-Chi to answer his challenge. And as the man makes a sudden nervous motion as if to take the picture, Chi-Chi lunges at him like a grotesque jack-in-the-box. The enormous fist crashes into his face. The camera falls to the ground, the bulb smashes. The man staggered, reeled against another man, and fell, sprawled on the ground, dazed, at his wife’s feet. Chi-Chi’s manfists are still clenched like a champion boxer’s, ready for the others. But no one moved. And was it only the sudden, ramming violence, the sudden smashing fist prepared to crush again and again, the sudden threatening image of this queen? Or was it, instead—or at least partly—Chi-Chi’s shouting for an instant acknowledgment of dignity?

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  While Sula's (and other black women's) sexual "misconduct" with white men is perceived, then, as threatening and intolerable, black men's sexual interactions with white women are, in a double standard, not judged in this way. As the novel's narratorial voice contends, one might think that "the willingness of black men to lie in the beds of white women [would be] a consideration that might lead them [black men] towards tolerance" (113). Yet, this is not the case, since in nationalist discourse and ideology, women-not men-"are typically construed," as feminist scholar Anne McClintock maintains, "as the symbolic bearers of the nation[,...] as biological reproducers of the members of national collectivities," and, of even greater magnitude, "as reproducers of the boundaries of national groups (through restrictions on sexual or marital relations)."33 And, too, it animates some of the competing sociosexual politics of particular segments of the nationalist movement-particularly the more concrete emphasis on black sexualized masculinity, male authority, and sexual prowess and virility-as displayed by some Black Panthers, among other segments of the black nationalist movement. Not only do the politics elucidate the way racial political ideologies regarding liberation manifest vis-a-vis black sexual politics; but they also illumine the appropriation by some black males-the "black machos"-of the very stereotypes that had historically endangered them, rendering them victims to lynchings and other (racialized/sexualized) U.S. terrorist hate crimes. Sula's story, in several regards, demonstrates Morrison's conscious and deliberate attempts to not only dialogize but critique black nationalist ideologies and proclivities that, both consciously and inadvertently, (re)inscribe and (re)inforce patriarchal and masculinist notions, as well as circumscriptions for women. Morrison's efforts to destabilize and resist nationalist tendencies that emphasize black men's oppression over, or at the expense of, black women is certainly evident in Sula's response to Jude's "observation that a Negro man had a hard row to hoe in this world" (103). And so, while Nel-following the protocol of the classical black female script-placates her husband's "whiney tale that peaked somewhere between anger and a lapping desire for comfort," Sula refuses to either commiserate or sympathize with Jude but asserts that "I don't know what the fuss is about. I mean, everything in the world loves you. [...] It looks to me like you the envy of the world" (103-4).

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  found that it contained, among other things, a list of eighteen athletic shoe distributors across the United States and a schedule of appointments with half of them. So there it was. In black and white. Some people say. The “some people” damning Blue Ribbon, poisoning Kitami against us, were our competitors. And he was on his way to visit them. Kill one Marlboro Man, twenty more rise up to take his place. I was outraged, of course. But mostly hurt. For seven years we’d devoted ourselves to Tiger shoes. We’d introduced them to America, we’d reinvented the line. Bowerman and Johnson had shown Onitsuka how to make a better shoe, and their designs were now foundational, setting sales records, changing the face of the industry—and this was how we were repaid? “And now,” I said to Woodell, “I have to go meet this Judas for cocktails.” First I went for a six-mile run. I don’t know when I’ve run harder, or been less present in my body. With each stride I yelled at the trees, screamed at the cobwebs hanging in the branches. It helped. By the time I’d showered and dressed and driven to meet Kitami at his hotel, I was almost serene. Or maybe I was in shock. What Kitami said during that hour together, what I said—no memory. The next thing I remember is this. The following morning, when Kitami came to the office, Woodell and I ran a sort of shell game. While someone whisked Kitami into the coffee room, Woodell blocked the door to my office with his wheelchair and I slid the folder back into the briefcase. ON THE LAST day of Kitami’s visit, hours before the big dinner party, I hurried down to Eugene to confer with Bowerman and his lawyer, Jaqua. I left Penny to drive Kitami down later in the day, thinking: What’s the worst that could happen? Cut to Penny, hair disheveled, dress smeared with grease, pulling up to Bowerman’s house. As she stumbled out of the car I thought for a moment that Kitami had attacked her, but she took me aside and explained that they’d had a flat. “That son of a bitch,” she whispered, “stayed in the car—on the highway—and let me fix the tire all by myself!” I steered her inside. We both needed something strong to drink. This wasn’t a simple matter, however. Mrs. Bowerman, a devout Christian Scientist, didn’t normally allow alcohol in her home. She was making an exception on this special night, but she’d asked me ahead of time to please be sure that everyone behaved and no one overdid it. So, though my wife and I both needed a stiff one, I was forced to make it a small one. Mrs. Bowerman now gathered us all in the living room. “In honor of our distinguished guests,” she announced, “tonight we are serving... mai tais!” Applause. Kitami and I still had at least one thing in common. We both liked mai tais.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Moreover, the cigarettes, conspicuously symbolic of sexuality, serve as phallic symbols. In the same way Tyrone's presence, sexually and otherwise, inverts and disrupts-even violates, figuratively and literally-the fidelity and sanctity of Eva's parents' marriage (and the family), so, too, are the cigarettes opened backward a metaphoric manifestation of the same inversion of (sexual) access. In other words, Tyrone's uncustomary opening of and access to his cigarettes are emblematic of the same breach and intrusion-adultery and infidelity-that are wreaking havoc in John and Marie's union. Of equal import, whereas there is no "politics of silence" in the form of dissemblance surrounding sexuality, silence is present in another overarching form that is equally deleterious: the silence, that is, that falsely appears as indifference regarding the violation of the sanctity of their marriage. This dynamic appears "normative" since John and Marie go on as if everything were fine: "What was really strange, though, was they still slept together. [... T]hey made love as if Tyrone wasn't happening" (29). Yet, on the other hand, in the absence of vocalized contestation, the silence transposes instead into physical enactments of sexualized aggression, such as John's displays of violent desire and perverse excess, in his invective "Act like a whore, I'm gonna fuck you like a whore. You act like a whore, I'm gonna fuck you like a whore" (37). As noted earlier, Jones plays with the pornographic, which reflects the temporal moment in which the book was published during the sexual revolution and "sex wars"/"porn wars" of the 1970s and 198os. In this context, John and Marie's sexual exchanges lend themselves to a complex, rather than monolithic, reading of the sexual, sexual aggression, and the pornographic-or what constitutes the obscene. The scene might be read, on the one hand, then, as John's attempts to (over)compensate, through violently aggressive and dominating sexual behavior, for his lack of control over his wife's sexuality and the overall sexual dynamics of their relationship, as well as the state of sanctity (or lack thereof) in their marriage. This sexualized violence and overall sexual exchange, sadomasochism of sorts, between the two is not eroticism but, rather, perversity of desire. In Audre Lorde's theorization of the erotic and pornographic, she argues that "the erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation" and has been falsely confused "with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.""