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)

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

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  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. It has served me as fire in the ice zone of uncomprehending eyes of white women who see in my experience and the experience of my people only new reasons for fear or guilt. And my anger is no excuse for not dealing with your blindness, no reason to withdraw from the results of your own actions. When women of Color speak out of the anger that laces so many of our contacts with white women, we are often told that we are “creating a mood of hopelessness,” “preventing white women from getting past guilt,” or “standing in the way of trusting communication and action.” All these quotes come directly from letters to me from members of this organization within the last two years. One woman wrote, “Because you are Black and Lesbian, you seem to speak with the moral authority of suffering.” Yes, I am Black and Lesbian, and what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority. There is a difference. To turn aside from the anger of Black women with excuses or the pretexts of intimidation is to award no one power — it is merely another way of preserving racial blindness, the power of unaddressed privilege, unbreached, intact. Guilt is only another form of objectification. Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity. Black women are expected to use our anger only in the service of other people’s salvation or learning. But that time is over. My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I’m going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity. What woman here is so enamoured of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman’s face? What woman’s terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Women responding to racism means women responding to anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation. My anger is a response to racist attitudes and to the actions and presumptions that arise out of those attitudes. If your dealings with other women reflect those attitudes, then my anger and your attendant fears are spotlights that can be used for growth in the same way I have used learning to express anger for my growth. But for corrective surgery, not guilt. Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures. Because I do not want this to become a theoretical discussion, I am going to give a few examples of interchanges between women that illustrate these points. In the interest of time, I am going to cut them short. I want you to know there were many more. For example: • I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, “Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.” But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change? • The Women’s Studies Program of a southern university invites a Black woman to read following a week-long forum on Black and white women. “What has this week given to you?” I ask. The most vocal white woman says, “I think I’ve gotten a lot. I feel Black women really understand me a lot better now; they have a better idea of where I’m coming from.” As if understanding her lay at the core of the racist problem. • After fifteen years of a women’s movement which professes to address the life concerns and possible futures of all women, I still hear, on campus after campus, “How can we address the issues of racism? No women of Color attended.” Or, the other side of that statement, “We have no one in our department equipped to teach their work.” In other words, racism is a Black women’s problem, a problem of women of Color, and only we can discuss it. • After I read from my work entitled “Poems for Women in Rage,”* a white woman asks me: “Are you going to do anything with how we can deal directly with our anger? I feel it’s so important.” I ask, “How do you use your rage?” And then I have to turn away from the blank look in her eyes, before she can invite me to participate in her own annihilation. I do not exist to feel her anger for her.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  My first friend asking, “Why do you go around hitting all the time? Is that the only way you know how to be friends? What other creature in the world besides the Black woman has had to build the knowledge of so much hatred into her survival and keep going? It is shortly after the Civil War. In a grey stone hospital on 110th Street in New York City a woman is screaming. She is Black, and healthy, and has been brought here from the South. I do not know her name. Her baby is ready to be born. But her legs have been tied together out of a curiosity masquerading as science. Her baby births itself to death against her bone. Where are you seven-year-old Elizabeth Eckford of Little Rock, Arkansas? It is a bright Monday morning and you are on your way to your first day of school, draped in spittle, white hatred running down your pink sweater and a white mother’s twisted mouth working — savage, inhuman — wide over your jaunty braids held high by their pink ribbons. Numvulo has walked five days from the bleak place where the lorry deposited her. She stands in the Capetown, South Africa rain, her bare feet in the bulldozer tracks where her house once was. She picks up a piece of soaked cardboard that once covered her table and holds it over the head of her baby strapped to her back. Soon she will be arrested and taken back to the reserve, where she does not even speak the language. She will never get permission to live near her husband. 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.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  It has been said that Black men cannot be denied their personal choice of the woman who meets their need to dominate. In that case, Black women also cannot be denied our personal choices, and those choices are becomingly increasingly self-assertive and female-oriented. As a people, we most certainly must work together. It would be shortsighted to believe that Black men alone are to blame for the above situations in a society dominated by white male privilege. But the Black male consciousness must be raised to the realization that sexism and woman-hating are critically dysfunctional to his liberation as a Black man because they arise out of the same constellation that engenders racism and homophobia. Until that consciousness is developed, Black men will view sexism and the destruction of Black women as tangential to Black liberation rather than as central to that struggle. So long as this occurs, we will never be able to embark upon that dialogue between Black women and Black men that is so essential to our survival as a people. This continued blindness between us can only serve the oppressive system within which we live. Men avoid women’s observations by accusing us of being too “visceral.” But no amount of understanding the roots of Black woman- hating will bring back Patricia Cowan, nor mute her family’s loss. Pain is very visceral, particularly to the people who are hurting. As the poet Mary McAnally said, “Pain teaches us to take our fingers OUT the fucking fire.” * If the problems of Black women are only derivatives of a larger contradiction between capital and labor, then so is racism, and both must be fought by all of us. The capitalist structure is a many-headed monster. I might add here that in no socialist country that I have visited have I found an absence of racism or of sexism, so the eradication of both of these diseases seems to involve more than the abolition of capitalism as an institution. No reasonable Black man can possibly condone the rape and slaughter of Black women by Black men as a fitting response to capitalist oppression. And destruction of Black women by Black men clearly cuts across all class lines. Whatever the “structural underpinnings” (Staples) for sexism in the Black community may be, it is obviously Black women who are bearing the brunt of that sexism, and so it is in our best interest to abolish it. We invite our Black brothers to join us, since ultimately that abolition is in their best interests also. For Black men are also diminished by a sexism which robs them of meaningful connections to Black women and our struggles. Since it is Black women who are being abused, however, and since it is our female blood that is being shed, it is for Black women to decide whether or not sexism in the Black community is pathological.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  The Pentagon has admitted in secret Congressional briefings that it knew of the coup against Bishop two weeks before it happened.12 The Ranger unit participating in the invasion had spent six days between September 23 and October 2, 1983 practicing the takeover of an airport and the liberation of hostages, a maneuver about which the Pentagon had requested no publicity.13 One Senator disclosed that there were CIA agents accompanying the seventy students flown out of Grenada on October 26, the day after the invasion.14 There will be a long and painstaking search for answers to these questions. P.S.Y.O.P.S., the psychological operations unit of the U.S. occupation forces — a new development heard from in combat here for the first time — was quick to plaster St. Georges and the rest of Grenada with posters of Bernard Coard and General Hudson Austin, stripped naked and blindfolded, holding them up to ridicule and scorn as the slayers of the Grenadian people’s beloved Maurice Bishop. It is well known that had Bishop lived, Grenada would have fought any invasion down to the last child. So scapegoats for his death were essential. The details of the power struggles which occurred within the New Jewel Movement Party — if such they were — are yet to be known and assuredly complex. Yet months later, these men are still being held incommunicado in Richmond Hill prison, St. Georges, by “security forces,” non-Grenadian. They have not been charged nor brought to trial as of this writing, nor have the forty-odd other Grenadians still detained with them. Nothing is now heard of the two americans known to have been involved in the last days of the Bishop regime, one of whom was wanted on a weapons charge here in the U.S., and one of whom holds passports in two countries.15 Who were they working for and on what side? Their identities have never been divulged — a favorite tactic to cover destabilization operatives — and their existence attested to only by one line in the back pages of the New York Times. So, too, was the assertion by Ambassador to France Evan Galbraith on public TV that the U.S. was involved in Grenada “weeks before Bishop’s death.”16 A West German nurse working in Grenada, Regina Fuchs, reports she was jailed and relentlessly interrogated after being falsely accused of harboring fugitives by two americans, one of whom, Frank Gonzales, identified himself to her as CIA.17

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  A dumb beast endlessly recording inside the poisonous attacks of silence — meat gone wrong — what could ever grow in that dim lair and how does the child convert from sacrifice to liar? My blood sister, across her living room from me. Sitting back in her chair while I talk earnestly, trying to reach her, trying to alter the perceptions of me that cause her so much pain. Slowly, carefully, and coldly, so I will not miss one single scathing word, she says, “I am not interested in understanding whatever you’re trying to say — I don’t care to hear it.” I have never gotten over the anger that you did not want me as a sister, nor an ally, nor even a diversion one cut above the cat. You have never gotten over the anger that I appeared at all. And that I am different, but not different enough. One woman has eyes like my sister who never forgave me for appearing before she had a chance to win her mother’s love, as if anybody ever could. Another woman wears the high cheekbones of my other sister who wanted to lead but had only been taught to obey, so now she is dedicated to ruling by obedience, a passive vision. Who did we expect the other to be who is not yet at peace with our own selves? I cannot shut you out the way I shut the others out so maybe I can destroy you. Must destroy you? We do not love ourselves, therefore we cannot love each other. Because we see in each other’s face our own face, the face we never stopped wanting. Because we survived and survival breeds desire for more self. A face we never stopped wanting at the same time as we try to obliterate it. Why don’t we meet each other’s eyes? Do we expect betrayal in each other’s gaze, or recognition? If just once we were to feel the pain of all Black women’s blood flooding up to drown us! I stayed afloat buoyed by an anger so deep at my loneliness that I could only move toward further survival. When one cannot influence a situation it is an act of wisdom to withdraw. * Every Black woman in america has survived several lifetimes of hatred, where even in the candy store cases of our childhood, little brown niggerbaby candies testified against us. We survived the wind-driven spittle on our child’s shoe and pink flesh-colored bandaids, attempted rapes on rooftops and the prodding fingers of the super’s boy, seeing our girlfriends blown to bits in Sunday School, and we absorbed that loathing as a natural state. We had to metabolize such hatred that our cells have learned to live upon it because we had to, or die of it. Old King Mithridates learned to eat arsenic bit by bit and so outwitted his poisoners, but I’d have hated to kiss him upon his lips!

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Increasingly, despite opposition, Black women are coming together to explore and to alter those manifestations of our society which oppress us in different ways from those that oppress Black men. This is no threat to Black men. It is only seen as one by those Black men who choose to embody within themselves those same manifestations of female oppression. For instance, no Black man has ever been forced to bear a child he did not want or could not support. Enforced sterilization and unavailable abortions are tools of oppression against Black women, as is rape. Only to those Black men who are unclear about the pathways of their own definition can the self-actualization and self-protective bonding of Black women be seen as a threatening development. Today, the red herring of lesbian-baiting is being used in the Black community to obscure the true face of racism/sexism. Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men. Too frequently, however, some Black men attempt to rule by fear those Black women who are more ally than enemy. These tactics are expressed as threats of emotional rejection: “Their poetry wasn’t too bad but I couldn’t take all those lezzies.” The Black man saying this is code-warning every Black woman present interested in a relationship with a man — and most Black women are — that (1) if she wishes to have her work considered by him she must eschew any other allegiance except to him and (2) any woman who wishes to retain his friendship and/or support had better not be “tainted” by woman-identified interests. If such threats of labelling, vilification and/or emotional isolation are not enough to bring Black women docilely into camp as followers, or persuade us to avoid each other politically and emotionally, then the rule by terror can be expressed physically, as on the campus of a New York State college in the late 1970s, where Black women sought to come together around women’s concerns. Phone calls threatening violence were made to those Black women who dared to explore the possibilities of a feminist connection with non-Black women. Some of these women, intimidated by threats and the withdrawal of Black male approval, did turn against their sisters. When threats did not prevent the attempted coalition of feminists, the resulting campus-wide hysteria left some Black women beaten and raped. Whether the threats by Black men actually led to these assaults, or merely encouraged the climate of hostility within which they could occur, the results upon the women attacked were the same.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women — in the face of tremendous resistance — as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought. Simone de Beauvoir once said: “It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting.” Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears . Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices. * Comments at “The Personal and the Political Panel,” Second Sex Conference, New York, September 29, 1979. For a current catalog of books from Crossing Press visit our Web site: www.tenspeed.com What’s next on your reading list? Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now. Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving * Racism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance . Sexism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one sex and thereby the right to dominance . Heterosexism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one pattern of loving and thereby its right to dominance . Homophobia: The fear of feelings of love for members of one’s own sex and therefore the hatred of those feelings in others . T HE ABOVE FORMS of human blindness stem from the same root — an inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic human force, one which is enriching rather than threatening to the defined self, when there are shared goals. To a large degree, at least verbally, the Black community has moved beyond the “two steps behind her man” concept of sexual relations sometimes mouthed as desirable during the sixties. This was a time when the myth of the Black matriarchy as a social disease was being presented by racist forces to redirect our attentions away from the real sources of Black oppression. For Black women as well as Black men, it is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others — for their use and to our detriment. The development of self-defined Black women, ready to explore and pursue our power and interests within our communities, is a vital component in the war for Black liberation.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  The racism that coats the U.S. government lies about Grenada is the same racism that blinded american eyes to the Black faces of 131 Haitians washed up on shore in Miami, drowned fleeing the Duvalier regime. It is the same racism that keeps american eyes turned aside from the corrosive apartheid eating like acid into the face of White South Africa and the Reagan government which shares her bed under the guise of “constructive engagement.” White South Africa has the highest standard of living of any nation in the world, and 50 percent of Black South Africa’s children die before they are five. A statistic. The infant mortality rate for Black americans is almost twice that of white americans — in the most highly industrialized country in the world. White america has been well-schooled in the acceptance of Black destruction. So what is Black Grenada and its 110,000 Black lives? Unemployment in Grenada dropped 26 percent in four years. 10 On October 25, 1983 american Corsair missiles and naval shells and mortars pounded into the hills behind Grenville, St. Georges, Gouyave. American marines tore through homes and hotels searching for “Cubans.” Now the Ministries are silent. The state farms are at a standstill. The cooperatives are suspended. The cannery plant in True Blue is a shambles, shelled to silence. On the day after the invasion, unemployment was back up to 35 percent. A cheap, acquiescent labor pool is the delight of supply side economics. One month later, the U.S. Agency for International Development visits Grenada. They report upon the role of the private sector in Grenada’s future, recommending the revision of tax codes to favor private enterprise (usually foreign), the development of a labor code that will ensure a compliant labor movement, and the selling off of public sector enterprises to private interests. 11 How soon will it be Grenadian women who are going blind from assembling microcomputer chips at $.80 an hour for international industrial corporations? “I used to work at the radio station,” says a young woman on the beach, shrugging. “But that ended in the war.” This short, undeclared, and cynical war against Grenada is not a new direction for american foreign policy. It is merely a blatant example of a 160-year-old course of action called the Monroe Doctrine. In its name america has invaded small Caribbean and Central American countries over and over again since 1823, cloaking these invasions under a variety of names. Thirty-eight such invasions occurred prior to 1917 before the Soviet Union even existed. For example, in 1897, U.S. marines landed in Puerto Rico to fight the Spanish-American War. They never left . Beginning in 1981, the United States rehearsed the invasion of Grenada openly.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  You’re selfish, I hear a voice say. Isaac is dying and you’re thinking about how you feel. The voice is right. I stand up and dust the rice off my knees. Then I climb back up the ladder; the only indication I’m on overload is the trembling of my hands. I go back to the room to check on Isaac. He’s still breathing. That’s when I remember the book I found in the chest, at the base of the carousel bed. It always struck me as strange that our captor would put that book in the same house with a doctor. I shove open the lid to the chest and see the book lying at the bottom. There is a single puzzle piece resting on its cover. I dust it away. This was the only book I saved when we burned everything to keep warm. It makes no sense why I’d save it. I had Isaac to answer my medical questions. Isaac to stitch me up. I saved it for myself. Because on some level I knew the zookeeper put it here for me. My stomach clenches. I flip through the index. Page 546. Fever. The part I am looking for is highlighted. In pink. It’s a coincidence, I think. An old textbook bought at a yard sale or something. This person couldn’t possibly have known that Isaac would spike a fever that could kill him. Could he? I suddenly get chills. I look up, and when I do, I’m eye-to- eye with the black horse. I drop the book. This is a game. This move is mine. I go to the wood closet. There is no more shed; Isaac started storing the tools in the Chapter Nine wood closet. I pull the axe from where it is propped, ignoring the glossy pages that run up and down the inner walls. I touch the tip of my finger to the blade. Isaac kept it sharpened. Just in case. Just in case Senna loses her mind and needs it , I think. I make my way up the stairs and turn right into the carousel room. The book is facedown on the carpet where I dropped it. An ungraceful splat on the floor. I kick it aside and look at my horse. Right in the eye. This horse and I bonded once upon a time over an arrow through the heart. I feel as if it betrayed me. Made me love it with its bone saddle and death tokens and morbid obesity—morbesity. Fattened me up for the fall. “Give me what he needs,” I say. “I’ll do whatever you want. Just give me what he needs.” And then, “Checkmate.” I lift the axe and don’t stop lifting the axe until my arms are jello-fied and my teeth are clanging together hard enough to deliver a headache, and the horse is just a mess of jagged, ripped metal.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I exclaimed, aghast. “That is what you will call me in the future,” replied Wanda, throwing back her head with a movement of unutterable contempt. “Put your affairs in order within the next twenty-four hours. The day after to-morrow I shall start for Italy, and you will accompany me as my servant.” “Wanda—” “I forbid any sort of familiarity,” she said, cutting my words short, “likewise you are not to come in unless I call or ring for you, and you are not to speak to me until you are spoken to. From now on your name is no longer Severin, but Gregor .” I trembled with rage, and yet, unfortunately, I cannot deny it, I also felt a strange pleasure and stimulation. “But, madame, you know my circumstances,” I began in my confusion. “I am dependent on my father, and I doubt whether he will give me the large sum of money needed for this journey—” “That means you have no money, Gregor,” said Wanda, delightedly, “so much the better, you are then entirely dependent on me, and in fact my slave.” “You don’t consider,” I tried to object, “that as man of honor it is impossible for me—” “I have indeed considered it,” she replied almost with a tone of command. “As a man of honor you must keep your oath and redeem your promise to follow me as slave whithersoever I demand and to obey whatever I command. Now leave me, Gregor!” I turned toward the door. “Not yet—you may first kiss my hand.” She held it out to me with a certain proud indifference, and I the dilettante, the donkey, the miserable slave pressed it with intense tenderness against my lips which were dry and hot with excitement. There was another gracious nod of the head. Then I was dismissed. * * * * * Though it was late in the evening my light was still lit, and a fire was burning in the large green stove. There were still many things among my letters and documents to be put in order. Autumn, as is usually the case with us, had fallen with all its power. Suddenly she knocked at my window with the handle of her whip. I opened and saw her standing outside in her ermine-lined jacket and in a high round Cossack cap of ermine of the kind which the great Catherine favored. “Are you ready, Gregor?” she asked darkly. “Not yet, mistress,” I replied. “I like that word,” she said then, “you are always to call me mistress, do you understand? We leave here to-morrow morning at nine o’clock. As far as the district capital you will be my companion and friend, but from the moment that we enter the railway-coach you are my slave, my servant. Now close the window, and open the door.”

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  39–40. * Mina Shaughnessy (1924–78), then director of the SEEK Writing Program at the City College, City University of New York. ** “Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge”: A pre-baccalaureate program in compensatory education in the City University of New York in which a number of writer-teachers participated in the 1960s and early 1970s. * Zami: A New Spelling of My Name , originally published by Persephone Press in 1982 and reissued by Crossing Press in 1983. * The Black Unicorn (W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1978). * From “Need: A Choral of Black Women’s Voices” in Chosen Poems , p. 115. ** “Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving,” see p. 45. *** The Black Unicorn , pp. 108–110. * See “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” see p. 40. ** The Black Unicorn , p. 31. Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger * Where does the pain go when it goes away? ** E VERY B LACK WOMAN in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers. My Black woman’s anger is a molten pond at the core of me, my most fiercely guarded secret. I know how much of my life as a powerful feeling woman is laced through with this net of rage. It is an electric thread woven into every emotional tapestry upon which I set the essentials of my life — a boiling hot spring likely to erupt at any point, leaping out of my consciousness like a fire on the landscape. How to train that anger with accuracy rather than deny it has been one of the major tasks of my life. Other Black women are not the root cause nor the source of that pool of anger. I know this, no matter what the particular situation may be between me and another Black woman at the moment. Then why does that anger unleash itself most tellingly against another Black woman at the least excuse? Why do I judge her in a more critical light than any other, becoming enraged when she does not measure up?

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Too frequently, however, some Black men attempt to rule by fear those Black women who are more ally than enemy. These tactics are expressed as threats of emotional rejection: “Their poetry wasn’t too bad but I couldn’t take all those lezzies.” The Black man saying this is code-warning every Black woman present interested in a relationship with a man — and most Black women are — that (1) if she wishes to have her work considered by him she must eschew any other allegiance except to him and (2) any woman who wishes to retain his friendship and/or support had better not be “tainted” by woman-identified interests. If such threats of labelling, vilification and/or emotional isolation are not enough to bring Black women docilely into camp as followers, or persuade us to avoid each other politically and emotionally, then the rule by terror can be expressed physically, as on the campus of a New York State college in the late 1970s, where Black women sought to come together around women’s concerns. Phone calls threatening violence were made to those Black women who dared to explore the possibilities of a feminist connection with non-Black women. Some of these women, intimidated by threats and the withdrawal of Black male approval, did turn against their sisters. When threats did not prevent the attempted coalition of feminists, the resulting campus-wide hysteria left some Black women beaten and raped. Whether the threats by Black men actually led to these assaults, or merely encouraged the climate of hostility within which they could occur, the results upon the women attacked were the same. War, imprisonment, and “the street” have decimated the ranks of Black males of marriageable age. The fury of many Black heterosexual women against white women who date Black men is rooted in this unequal sexual equation within the Black community, since whatever threatens to widen that equation is deeply and articulately resented. But this is essentially unconstructive resentment because it extends sideways only. It can never result in true progress on the issue because it does not question the vertical lines of power or authority, nor the sexist assumptions which dictate the terms of that competition. And the racism of white women might be better addressed where it is less complicated by their own sexual oppression. In this situation it is not the non-Black woman who calls the tune, but rather the Black man who turns away from himself in his sisters or who, through a fear borrowed from white men, reads her strength not as a resource but as a challenge. All too often the message comes loud and clear to Black women from Black men: “I am the only prize worth having and there are not too many of me, and remember, I can always go elsewhere. So if you want me, you’d better stay in your place which is away from one another, or I will call you ‘lesbian’ and wipe you out.”

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Women respond to racism. My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also. Women responding to racism means women responding to anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation. My anger is a response to racist attitudes and to the actions and presumptions that arise out of those attitudes. If your dealings with other women reflect those attitudes, then my anger and your attendant fears are spotlights that can be used for growth in the same way I have used learning to express anger for my growth. But for corrective surgery, not guilt. Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures. Because I do not want this to become a theoretical discussion, I am going to give a few examples of interchanges between women that illustrate these points. In the interest of time, I am going to cut them short. I want you to know there were many more. For example: • I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, “Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.” But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change? • The Women’s Studies Program of a southern university invites a Black woman to read following a week-long forum on Black and white women. “What has this week given to you?” I ask. The most vocal white woman says, “I think I’ve gotten a lot. I feel Black women really understand me a lot better now; they have a better idea of where I’m coming from.” As if understanding her lay at the core of the racist problem. • After fifteen years of a women’s movement which professes to address the life concerns and possible futures of all women, I still hear, on campus after campus, “How can we address the issues of racism? No women of Color attended.” Or, the other side of that statement, “We have no one in our department equipped to teach their work.” In other words, racism is a Black women’s problem, a problem of women of Color, and only we can discuss it. • After I read from my work entitled “Poems for Women in Rage,” * a white woman asks me: “Are you going to do anything with how we can deal directly with our anger? I feel it’s so important.”

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  It’s someone playing games.” “How did we never notice that before?” I want to press my fingers into the sides of his face and force him to look at me. I want him to tell me that he hates me, because for some reason he is here as a result of me. But he doesn’t. Nothing he does is encumbered by blame or anger. I wish I could be like that. “We weren’t looking,” he says. “What else are we not seeing because we aren’t looking?” “I have to read what’s in there.” I stand up, but Isaac pulls me back. “It’s Chapter Nine.” Chapter Nine? I reach for it in my mind. Then I let it go. Chapter Nine hurts. I wish I hadn’t written it. I tried to get the publishers to take it out of the manuscript before the book went to print. But they felt it was necessary to the story. The day the book hit shelves, I sat in my white room, holding back my vomit, knowing that everyone was reading Chapter Nine and living my pain. I don’t want to read it, so I stay sitting. “Chapter Nine is—” I cut him off. “I know what it is,” I snap. “But why is it there?” “Because someone is obsessed with you, Senna.” “No one knew that was real! Who did you tell?” I am screaming; so angry I want to throw something large. But the zookeeper didn’t give us anything large to throw. Everything is bolted, sewn into the walls and floors like this is a dollhouse. “Stop it!” He grabs me, tries to slow me down. His voice is getting loud. I release mine, too. If he’s going to yell I’m going to yell louder. “Then why are you here?” I punch his chest with both of my fists. He sits down abruptly. It throws me off. I was all geared up to fight. “You’ve said those words to me so many times I’ve lost count. But this time it’s not my choice. I want to be with my wife. Planning for our baby. Not locked up like a prisoner with you. I don’t want to be with you.” His words hurt so bad. My pride keeps my knees stiff, otherwise I would have buckled from the pain. I watch him walk up the stairs, my heart pounding to the beat of his anger. I guess I was wrong about him. I was wrong about so many things with regard to him. I am wrapped in my cocoon again when Isaac comes up with dinner. He brings two plates and sets them on the floor by the fire before unwrapping me. “Food,” he says.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  Until nothing about me came easy, and he grew tired of trying. Nick and his words. Nick and his promises of never-ending love. I believed them all and then he left me. Love comes slow, but God does it go fast. He was beautiful—then he was ugly. I esteemed him, then I esteemed him not. Dr. Saphira Elgin had tried to teach me to control my anger. She wanted me to be able to pinpoint the source of it so I could rationalize my feelings. Talk myself down. I can never pinpoint the source. It runs around and around in my body without a point of origin. I blew her off. I always blew her off. But now I try to pinpoint it. I’m angry because… Isaac is touch, and he is sound. He is smell and he is sight. I tried to make him a single sense like I did with everyone else, but he is all of them. He overpowers my senses and that is exactly why I ran from him. I was afraid of feeling brightly—afraid I would become used to the color and sounds and smells, and they would be taken from me. I was a self-fulfilling prophecy; destroying before I could be destroyed. I wrote about women like that, I didn’t realize I was one. For years I believed that Nick left me because I failed him. I couldn’t be what he needed because I was empty and shallow. That’s what he insinuated. “Why can’t you love wedding cake, Brenna?” “Why can’t I take your darkness away?” “Why can’t you be who I need?” But, I didn’t fail Nick. He failed me. Love sticks, and it stays and it braves the bullshit. Like Isaac did. And I am mad at Isaac because he is all of that. And I am all of this. It’s irrational. We finish our project—the page project, as we call it. In the end we have four piles and only three books: Mine, Nick’s, and the nameless book. The fourth pile is the thickest and the most confusing. I stack each one with care that is mostly habit, lining up the corners until none of the pages poke past each other. The problem is, there is nothing on the pages. Each one is bone white. I have the fleeting thought that the zookeeper wants me to write a new book, then Yul Brenner reminds me that my personal Annie Wilkes didn’t leave me a pen. Can’t write a book without a pen. I wonder if I can resuscitate the old Bic we used when we first woke up here. It must be symbolic, like the pictures hung all over the house—pictures of hollow sparrows, and bearers of death. I stare at the piles of paper while Isaac makes us tea.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I moan. It’s an ugly, guttural sound. “Why did I forget all that?” I’m still treating her like she’s my shrink; asking her questions like she’s sane enough to know the answers. She’s your zookeeper. She tried to kill you. “It happens. We block out things that thrrreaten to break us. It’s the brain’s best defense mechanism.” I’m struggling for air. “This was all an experiment to you. You took advantage of your position. Of what I told you.” All my gusto is gone. I just need answers so I can get out of here. Get out of here and go where? Home, I tell myself. Whatever that is. “Do you remember what you asked me in our last session?” I stare at her blank faced. “You asked, ‘If there were a God, why would he let these terrible things happen to people?’” I remember. “With free will comes bad decisions; decisions to drink and drive and kill someone’s child. Decisions to murder. Decisions to choose whom we love, whom we spend our life with. If God decided to never let anything bad happen to people, he would have to take away their free will. He would become the dictator and they would be his puppets.” “Why are you talking about God? I want to talk about what you did to me!” And then I know. Saphira locking me in the house with Isaac, the man she believed was my safety and salvation, controlling the medicine, the food, what we saw, how we saw it—it was all her experimenting with free will. She became God. She’d said something once in one of our sessions: Picture yourself standing on a cliff where you not only fear falling, but dread the possibility of throwing yourself off. Nothing is holding you back, and you experience freedom. The cliff! Why hadn’t I seen it? “Do you know how many people there are just like you? I heard it every day; pain, sadness, regret. You wanted a second chance. So I gave it to you. I gave you not the person you wanted, but the person you needed.” I don’t know what to say. My ten minutes are almost over. “Don’t make out like you did this for me. You’re sick. You’re—” “ You are sick, my dear,” she interrupts. “You were self destructing. Ready to die. I just gave you some perspective. Helped you to see the truth.” “What’s the truth?” “Isaac is your truth. You were too blinded by your past to see that.” I’m breathless. My mouth hangs open as I stare at her. “Isaac has a wife. He has a baby. You act like you care so much, but you did this to him, too. Made him suffer for no reason. He almost died!” Detective Garrison chooses that exact moment to come back. I want more time with her.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  For the first time in an american war, the american press was kept out until the stage could be set. This extends by precedent the meaning of military censorship in this country. At the time, it also deflected attention from the invasion itself. Mission accomplished with “surgical precision” meant attempting to conceal the bombing and destruction of civilian homes, the destruction of a hospital and a radio station and police headquarters; attempting to conceal the american heavy transports left mangled on the side of the road by soldiers not trained to drive to the left, and the civilian cars those army vehicles collided with. It meant the appropriation, use, and destruction of homes and stores and other businesses with no compensation. When the american press was finally admitted after the cosmetic cleanup, we were treated to photographs of smiling Grenadians welcoming their conquerors (look what your tax dollars have bought). But no photos of the signs calling for information about neighbors. No photos of the signs throughout the countryside calling for an end to yankee imperialism. NO BISHOP NO REVO. So what did Revolution in Grenada mean? It meant the inauguration of an agro-industry which for the first time in the island’s history processed the island’s own fruit, its own coffee, under its own brand, Spice Isle Foods. Canned products from their own soil available in stores. The beginning of a fishing and fish-processing industry. In a country rich with tropical fruit, whose waters abound with fish, why should the most common fruit juice be Florida orange juice, the most commonly used fish, imported saltfish from Canada? It meant almost doubling the number of doctors on the island from twenty-three to forty, a health center set up in every parish for the first time, a dental clinic. It meant a public health anti-mosquito cleanup campaign implemented by the National Youth Organization that successfully protected Grenada from the wave of Dengue Fever sweeping through the rest of the Caribbean in the summer of 1981.20

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  We have been around within our communities for a very long time, and we have played pivotal parts in the survival of those communities: from Hat Shep Sut through Harriet Tubman to Daisy Bates and Fannie Lou Hamer to Lorraine Hansberry to your Aunt Maydine to some of you who sit before me now. In the 60s Black people wasted a lot of our substance fighting each other. We cannot afford to do that in the 80s, when Washington, D.C. has the highest infant mortality rate of any U.S. city, 60 percent of the Black community under twenty is unemployed and more are becoming unemployable, lynchings are on the increase, and less than half the registered Black voters voted in the last election. How are you practicing what you preach — whatever you preach, and who exactly is listening? As Malcolm stressed, we are not responsible for our oppression, but we must be responsible for our own liberation. It is not going to be easy, but we have what we have learned and what we have been given that is useful. We have the power those who came before us have given us, to move beyond the place where they were standing. We have the trees, and water, and sun, and our children. Malcolm X does not live in the dry texts of his words as we read them; he lives in the energy we generate and use to move along the visions we share with him. We are making the future as well as bonding to survive the enormous pressures of the present, and that is what it means to be a part of history. * Talk delivered at the Malcolm X Weekend, Harvard University, February 1982. Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger * Where does the pain go when it goes away? ** EVERY BLACK WOMAN in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers. My Black woman’s anger is a molten pond at the core of me, my most fiercely guarded secret. I know how much of my life as a powerful feeling woman is laced through with this net of rage. It is an electric thread woven into every emotional tapestry upon which I set the essentials of my life — a boiling hot spring likely to erupt at any point, leaping out of my consciousness like a fire on the landscape. How to train that anger with accuracy rather than deny it has been one of the major tasks of my life. Other Black women are not the root cause nor the source of that pool of anger.