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)

  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)

  So we have only who we are, with or without the courage to use those selves for further exploration and clarification of how what lies between us as Black women affects us and the work we do together. Yet if we do not do it here between us, each one of us will have to do it somewhere else, sometime. I know these things: I do not yet know what to do about them. But I do want to make them fit together to serve my life and my work, and I don’t mean merely in a way that feels safe. I don’t know how they can further and illuminate your life and work, but I know they can. It is sometimes both the curse and the blessing of the poet to perceive without yet being able to order those perceptions, and that is another name for Chaos. But of course it is out of Chaos that new worlds are born. I look forward to our meeting eye to eye. Audr e III There has been so much death and loss around me recently, without metaphor or redeeming symbol, that sometimes I feel trapped into one idiom only — that one of suffering and its codicil, to bear. The same problem exists with anger. I have processed too much of it recently, or else the machinery is slowing down or becoming less efficient, and it creeps into my most crucial interchanges. Perhaps this is why it is often easier for Black women to interact with white women, even though those interactions are often a dead end emotionally. For with white women there is a middle depth of interaction possible and sustainable, an emotional limit to relationships of self upon self acknowledged. Now why is this not so with Frances, who is white, and whom I meet at a depth beyond anyone? When I speak of Frances and me I am talking about a relationship not only of great depth but one of great breadth also, a totaling of differences without merging. I am also speaking of a love shaped by our mutual commitment to hard work and confrontation over many years, each of us refusing to settle for what was easy, or simple, or acceptably convenient. That middle depth of relationship more usually possible between Black and white women, however, is less threatening than the tangle of unexplored needs and furies that face any two Black women who seek to engage each other directly, emotionally, no matter what the context of their relationship may be. This holds true for office workers and political activists as well as lovers. But it is through threading this tangle that new visions of self and possibility between Black women emerge. Again, I am speaking here of social relationships, for it is crucial that we examine dynamics between women who are not lovers as well as between women who are.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Although elements of these attitudes exist for all women, there are particular resonances of heterosexism and homophobia among Black women. Despite the fact that woman-bonding has a long and honorable history in the African and African-american communities, and despite the knowledge and accomplishments of many strong and creative women-identified Black women in the political, social and cultural fields, heterosexual Black women often tend to ignore or discount the existence and work of Black lesbians. Part of this attitude has come from an understandable terror of Black male attack within the close confines of Black society, where the punishment for any female self-assertion is still to be accused of being a lesbian and therefore unworthy of the attention or support of the scarce Black male. But part of this need to misname and ignore Black lesbians comes from a very real fear that openly women-identified Black women who are no longer dependent upon men for their self-definition may well reorder our whole concept of social relationships. Black women who once insisted that lesbianism was a white woman’s problem now insist that Black lesbians are a threat to Black nationhood, are consorting with the enemy, are basically un-Black. These accusations, coming from the very women to whom we look for deep and real understanding, have served to keep many Black lesbians in hiding, caught between the racism of white women and the homophobia of their sisters. Often, their work has been ignored, trivialized, or misnamed, as with the work of Angelina Grimke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Lorraine Hansberry. Yet women-bonded women have always been some part of the power of Black communities, from our unmarried aunts to the amazons of Dahomey. And it is certainly not Black lesbians who are assaulting women and raping children and grandmothers on the streets of our communities. Across this country, as in Boston during the spring of 1979 following the unsolved murders of twelve Black women, Black lesbians are spearheading movements against violence against Black women. What are the particular details within each of our lives that can be scrutinized and altered to help bring about change? How do we redefine difference for all women? It is not our differences which separate women, but our reluctance to recognize those differences and to deal effectively with the distortions which have resulted from the ignoring and misnaming of those differences. As a tool of social control, women have been encouraged to recognize only one area of human difference as legitimate, those differences which exist between women and men. And we have learned to deal across those differences with the urgency of all oppressed subordinates. All of us have had to learn to live or work or coexist with men, from our fathers on. We have recognized and negotiated these differences, even when this recognition only continued the old dominant/subordinate mode of human relationship, where the oppressed must recognize the masters’ difference in order to survive.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Inevitably, you begin to feel the need to control your lover. You have crucial emotional interests to protect because your well-being now seems to depend on the actions and feelings of someone else. In addition, you naturally want to express the enlarged sense of self he or she has stimulated. You want your beloved to recognize and respond to your needs, preferably knowing what they are as if by magic. You may resort to manipulation and ultimatums to get your way, strategies not noted for winning affection. The intensity and insecurity of the romantic situation can push both surrender and control to their destructive extremes. Dr. Person sums up the danger: “When the pursuit of merger is unchecked, the lover becomes either a slave or a tyrant.”8 In her classic book The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir speculates that extremes of romantic surrender may be a natural outgrowth of feminine psychology, especially the inferior social standing of women. At the same time, men—having learned to react to danger with aggression and force—are probably more prone to slip into dominance. Love’s darkest aspects frequently loom largest when limerence is about to die. Occasionally, romantic intensity merely sputters out. More commonly, dying love turns rancid for a time. The same selective and exaggerated perceptions that idealized the beloved in early limerence now reverse and turn him or her into a monster. As love turns to hate, mental energies that once concentrated on adoration are now directed toward fantasies of revenge, sometimes leading to destructive, occasionally murderous acts. Dr. Person eloquently gets to the heart of the matter: The deep irrational force in love, so necessary to the projects of transcendence and transformation, may sometimes run amok. This is, of course, why love is so often likened to madness. Passionate love, like all the experiences that open up the self, verges on the borders of self-harm and aggression. In fact, such hazards are intrinsic to all the great creative projects. Rare though the descent from passion to madness may be, its very possibility is the main inspiration for the cautionary approach to love, and for the futile attempt to rationalize and tame it, to declare “rational” mature love as the happy alternative to passionate love.9 She believes, as I do, that the romantic experience can only move and change us—for better or worse—to the extent that the usual barriers between conscious and unconscious, ideal self and dark self, are temporarily let down. No wonder the romantic adventure is fraught with risk.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  Simple food that my hollow stomach can handle: bread and something that is white and mushy. I push the food aside and ask for coffee. They say, “No.” When I try to stand up and tell them that I’m getting my own, they bring me coffee. The police come next. All official looking. I tell them I want to speak to Saphira before I speak to them. They want my statement; they’re clicking the little buttons on the ends of their pens and pushing tape recorders at me, but I stare at them tight lipped until I can speak to Saphira. “You can speak to her when you’re well enough to come in to the station,” they tell me. A chill runs through my body. They have her. Here. “That’s when I’ll speak to you, then,” I tell them. A day before I am discharged I am visited by two doctors; one is an oncologist and the other an orthopedic surgeon. The ortho guy holds up the x-rays they took of my leg. “The bone didn’t heal straight, which is why you have pain when you put too much pressure on it. I’ve scheduled you for—” “No,” I tell him. He brings his eyes to my face. “No?” “I’m not interested in fixing it. I’ll leave it how it is.” I open the magazine on my lap to signal that the conversation is over. “Ms. Richards, with all due respect, the irregular fusion of your bone that was caused by the accident will be something that pains you for the rest of your life. You will want to have the surgeries needed to repair it.” I close my magazine. “I like pain. I like when it lingers. It reminds a person of what they’ve lived through.” “That’s a very unique perspective,” he says. “But not practical.” I fling the magazine across the room. It flies with surprising force and hits the door with a healthy thud. Then I pull down my hospital gown—all the way—until the scars on my chest are exposed. He looks like he might pass out. “I like my scars,” I say. “I earned them. Now, get out.” As soon as the door shuts behind him, I scream. The nurses come rushing in, but I throw my water jug at them. At the rate I’m going they’re going to put me in the psych ward. “Get out!” I scream at them. “Stop telling me how to live my life!” I am much nicer to the oncologist. She got my file from the hospital in Seattle and ran the yearly tests that I’d missed during my imprisonment. When she gives me the results she sits on the edge of my bed. It reminds me so much of Isaac that I feel overwhelmed. When she is finished she tells me that I am built to fight; emotionally and physically.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  “No, Senna. Have you looked at the horses—I mean really looked at them?” I spin around to face him. “I’m looking at them right now!” Why am I shouting? Isaac jumps up and rounds on me. When I won’t look at him he grabs my shoulders and spins me ‘til I’m facing the black horse again. He holds me firmly. “Hush and look at it, Senna.” I flinch. I look just so he won’t say my name like that again. I see the black horse, but with new eyes: non-stubborn, just plain old Senna eyes. I see it all. I feel it all. The rain, the music, the horse whose pole had a crack in it. I can smell dirt and sardines … something else, too … cardamom and clove. I pull out of it, pull out of the memory so fast my breath stops. Isaac’s hands loosen on my shoulders. I’m disappointed; he was warm. I am free to run, but I curl my toes until I can feel them gripping carpet, and I stay. I came here to solve one of our problems. One of our many problems. These are the same horses. The very same. I trace the crack with my eyes. Yul says something about me repressing my memories. I laugh at him. Repressing my memories. That’s a Saphira Elgin thing to say. But he’s right, isn’t he? I’m in a fog and half the time I don’t even realize it. “The date that it happened,” I say softly. “That’s what will open the door.” The air prickles, then he runs. I hear him taking the stairs two at a time. I didn’t even have to remind him of the date. It’s cut into the fleshy part of our memories. I wait with my eyes closed; praying it works, praying it doesn’t. He comes back a minute later. Much slower this time. Plunk, plunk, plunk up the stairs. I feel him standing in the doorway looking at me. I can smell him too. I used to bury my head in his neck and breath in his smell. Oh God, I’m so cold. “Senna,” he says, “want to come outside?” Yes. Sure. Why not? Part Two Pain & Guilt [image file=image12.jpg] It was December twenty-fifth. Consequently, that day came every year, and I wished to hell it wouldn’t. You couldn’t get rid of Christmas. And even if you could, all of the hopeful people in the world would find a new day to celebrate, with their cheap tinsel and stuffed turkeys and lawn ornament bullshit. And I’d be forced to hate that day, too. Turkey was disgusting anyway. Anyone with taste buds could tell you that. It tasted like sweat and had the texture of wet paper. The entire holiday was a joke; Jesus had to share it with Santa. The only thing worse was that Jesus had to share Easter with a bunny. That was just creepy. But at least Easter had ham.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  To Rome the case must go. Abaelard no doubt felt that he had nothing to hope for from the prelates.1369 From Innocent II., whose side he had espoused against the antipope, Anacletus, he might expect some favor and he had friends in the curia. The synod called upon the supreme pontiff to brand Abaelard’s heresies with perpetual condemnation—perpetua damnatione — and to punish their defenders. The charges, fourteen in number, concerned the Trinity, the nature of faith, the power and work of Christ, and the nature of sin.1370 Bernard followed up the synodal letter with a communication to the pope, filling forty columns in Migne, and letters to cardinals, which are full of vehement charges against the accused man. Abaelard and Arnold of Brescia were in collusion. Abaelard had joined himself with Arius in ascribing degrees within the Trinity, with Pelagius in putting free will before grace, and with Nestorius in separating the person of Christ. In name and exterior a monk, he was at heart a heretic. He had emerged from Brittany as a tortuous snake from its hole and, as in the case of the hydra, seven heads appeared where before there had been but one.1371 In his letter to the pope, he declared the only thing Abaelard did not know was the word nescio, "I do not know." The judgment was swift in coming and crushing when it came. Ten days were sufficient. The fourteen articles were burned by the pope’s own hand in front of St. Peter’s in the presence of the cardinals. Abaelard himself was declared to be a heretic and the penalty of perpetual silence and confinement was imposed upon him. The unfortunate man had set out for Rome and was hardly well started on his journey, when the sentence reached him. He stopped at Cluny, where he met the most useful friend of his life, Peter the Venerable. At Peter’s intercession, Innocent allowed the homeless scholar to remain in Cluny whence the pope himself had gone forth. Following Peter’s counsel, Abaelard again met Bernard face to face. In a defence of his orthodoxy, addressed to Heloise, he affirmed his acceptance of all the articles of the Church from the article on the Trinity to the resurrection of the dead. As it was with Jerome, so no one could write much without being misunderstood.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  condemned Berengar (p. 128 and 215). The Count calls here, with surprising boldness and confidence, on the mighty Cardinal to protect Berengar at the approaching Synod of Rome, under the impression that he thoroughly agreed with him, and had concealed his real opinion at Tours. He begins thus: "To the venerable son of the church of the Romans, H.[ildebrand]. Count Gauf. Bear thyself not unworthy of so great a mother. B.[erengar] has gone to Rome according to thy wishes and letters of invitation. Now is the time for thee to act with Christian magnanimity (nunc magnanimitate christiana tibi agendum est), lest Berengar have the same experience with thee as at Tours [1054], when thou camest to us as delegate of apostolic authority. He expected thy advent as that of an angel. Thou wast there to give life to souls that were dead, and to kill souls that should live .... Thou didst behave thyself like that person of whom it is written [John 19:38]: ’He was himself a disciple of Jesus, but secretly from fear of the Jews.’ Thou resemblest him who said [Luke 23:22]: ’I find no cause of death in him,’ but did not set him free because he feared Caesar. Thou hast even done less than Pilate, who called Jesus to him and was not ashamed to bear witness: I find no guilt in him .. . To thee applies the sentence of the gospel [Luke 9:26]: ’Whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of him shall I be ashamed before my heavenly Father.’ To thee applies the word of the Lord [Luke 11:52]: ’Woe unto you, for ye took away the key of knowledge; ye entered not in yourselves, and hindered those that were entering.’... Now the opportune time has come. Thou hast Berengar present with the pope. If thou again keepest silence on the error of those fools, it is clear that thou formerly didst not from good reasons wait for the proper time, but from weakness and fear didst not dare to defend the cause of the innocent. Should it come to this, which God forbid, we would be wholly disappointed in our great hope placed on thee; but thou wouldst commit a monstrous injustice to thyself, yea even to God. By thee the Orient with all its perverseness would be introduced into the Occident; instead of illuminating our darkness, thou wouldest turn our light into darkness according to the best of thy ability. All those who excel in erudition and judge the case according to the Scriptures, bore testimony that Berengar has the right view according to the Scriptures .... That popular delusion [of transubstantiation] leads to pernicious heresy. The resurrection of the body, of which Paul says that the corruptible must put on the incorruptible, cannot stand, if we contend that the body of Christ is in a sensuous manner broken by the priest and torn with the teeth (sensualiter sacerdotum manibus frangi, dentibus atteri).

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Why were two phone calls to me considered a consultation? Am I the only possible source of names of Black feminists? And although the Black panelist’s paper ends on an important and powerful connection of love between women, what about interracial cooperation between feminists who don’t love each other? In academic feminist circles, the answer to these questions is often, “We did not know who to ask.” But that is the same evasion of responsibility, the same cop-out, that keeps Black women’s art out of women’s exhibitions, Black women’s work out of most feminist publications except for the occasional “Special Third World Women’s Issue,” and Black women’s texts off your reading lists. But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, white feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past ten years, how come you haven’t also educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us — white and Black — when it is key to our survival as a movement? Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. 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. Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference * MUCH OF WESTERN EUROPEAN history conditions us to see human differences in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/inferior.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  At that, she rises and moves toward me. “Yes,” she says, with no inflection at all, her eyes carefully elsewhere. I’ve never seen this young woman before in my life. I think to myself, “now that’s what you call an attitude,” recognizing the rising tension inside of me. The art, beyond insolence, of the Black girl’s face as she cuts her elegant sidelong glance at me. What makes her eyes slide off of mine? What does she see that angers her so, or infuriates her, or disgusts her? Why do I want to break her face off when her eyes do not meet mine? Why does she wear my sister’s face? My daughter’s mouth turned down about to suck itself in? The eyes of a furious and rejected lover? Why do I dream I cradle you at night? Divide your limbs between the food bowls of my least favorite animals? Keep vigil for you night after terrible night, wondering? Oh sister, where is that dark rich land we wanted to wander through together? Hate said the voice wired in 3/4 time printed in dirty type all the views fit to kill, me and you, me or you. And whose future image have we destroyed — your face or mine — without either how shall I look again at both — lacking either is lacking myself . And if I trust you what pale dragon will you feed our brown flesh to from fear, self-preservation, or to what brothered altar all innocent of loving that has no place to go and so becomes another face of terror or of hate ? 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.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth. It is not the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices. We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt. * Keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Connecticut, June 1981. * One poem from this series is included in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1978), pp. 105–108.* This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, New York, 1984), first published in 1981.* From “For Each of You,” first published in From A Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Press, Detroit, 1973), and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1982), p. 42.Learning from the 60s*MALCOLM X IS a distinct shape in a very pivotal period of my life. I stand here now — Black, Lesbian, Feminist — an inheritor of Malcolm and in his tradition, doing my work, and the ghost of his voice through my mouth asks each one of you here tonight: Are you doing yours? There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our own living. I’m not going to pretend that the moment I first saw or heard Malcolm X he became my shining prince, because it wouldn’t be true. In February 1965 I was raising two children and a husband in a three-room flat on 149th Street in Harlem. I had read about Malcolm X and the Black Muslims. I became more interested in Malcolm X after he left the Nation of Islam, when he was silenced by Elijah Muhammad for his comment, after Kennedy’s assassination, to the effect that the chickens had come home to roost. Before this I had not given much thought to the Nation of Islam because of their attitude toward women as well as because of their nonactivist stance. I’d read Malcolm’s autobiography, and I liked his style, and I thought he looked a lot like my father’s people, but I was one of the ones who didn’t really hear Malcolm’s voice until it was amplified by death.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  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.” Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests. The tactic of encouraging horizontal hostility to becloud more pressing issues of oppression is by no means new, nor limited to relations between women. The same tactic is used to encourage separation between Black women and Black men.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Classism . It is a lifetime pursuit for each one of us to extract these distortions from our living at the same time as we recognize, reclaim, and define those differences upon which they are imposed. For we have all been raised in a society where those distortions were endemic within our living. Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all. This results in a voluntary isolation, or false and treacherous connections. Either way, we do not develop tools for using human difference as a springboard for creative change within our lives. We speak not of human difference, but of human deviance . Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm , which each one of us within our hearts knows “that is not me.” In america, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially secure. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society. Those of us who stand outside that power often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be practising. By and large within the women’s movement today, white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age. There is a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist. Unacknowledged class differences rob women of each others’ energy and creative insight. Recently a women’s magazine collective made the decision for one issue to print only prose, saying poetry was a less “rigorous” or “serious” art form. Yet even the form our creativity takes is often a class issue. Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one’s own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time. The actual requirements to produce the visual arts also help determine, along class lines, whose art is whose. In this day of inflated prices for material, who are our sculptors, our painters, our photographers? When we speak of a broadly based women’s culture, we need to be aware of the effect of class and economic differences on the supplies available for producing art.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  But, now that they were going to be taken, I felt protective. I nodded. “I’d like you to keep seeing her … after…” His voice dropped off, and I looked away. “All right.” But I didn’t mean it. He tapped the granite with his fingertip. “All right,” he repeated. “I’ll see you later, Senna.” I started unpacking the groceries. At first I felt nothing. Just boxes of pasta and bags of fruit being shelved … put away. Then I felt something. An itch. It nagged at me, tugging and pulling until I was so frustrated I threw a box of soup crackers across the room. They hit the wall and I stared at the spot where they’d landed, trying to find the sound of my emotion. Sound. I ran to the living room and hit play on Florence Welch. She’d been singing this song to me nonstop for days. Her real voice would be tired by now, but her recorded voice called out to me, unfailing. Strong. How had he known this song, these words, this tormented voice would speak to me? I hated him. I hated him. I hated him. I didn’t see Isaac until a few days before the surgery. I saw plenty of Dr. Elgin. I saw her three times a week upon my surgeon’s demand. It was like trying to fit a lifetime’s worth of therapy into six sessions. She commanded me to speak with her eyes and her tinkling bracelets: tell me more, tell me more. Each time I sank into her couch, I sank a little lower in esteem. This was not me. I was spilling my guts, as some people called it; divulging. It was word vomit and Saphira Elgin had her fingers down my throat. I discovered that private things were mostly sour. They sat spoiling in the corners of your heart for so long that by the time you acknowledged them you were dealing with something rancid. And that’s what I did; I threw every rotting thing at her, and she absorbed each one. It seemed that the more Saphira Elgin absorbed of me, the less of me there was. Sometimes I tried to be funny, just so I could hear the dusty way she laughed. She laughed at the inappropriate, sometimes the crass. I liked her so much on some days, and on others I hated her. At the end of every session the dragon would purr the same thing: “Read Nick’s book. It will give you purrrrspective. Closurrrrre.” I would drive home determined, but then I would get to the title page and see For MV, and quickly close the cover. The dedication page was beginning to look worn and touched, rivets of fingerprints on the page. I waited until our last session to tell her about the rape. I didn’t know why except that other than the cancer, the rape was the last thing that happened to me.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support. Poor women and women of Color know there is a difference between the daily manifestations of marital slavery and prostitution because it is our daughters who line 42nd Street. If white american feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color? What is the theory behind racist feminism? In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action. The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower. Why weren’t other women of Color found to participate in this conference? Why were two phone calls to me considered a consultation? Am I the only possible source of names of Black feminists? And although the Black panelist’s paper ends on an important and powerful connection of love between women, what about interracial cooperation between feminists who don’t love each other? In academic feminist circles, the answer to these questions is often, “We did not know who to ask.” But that is the same evasion of responsibility, the same cop-out, that keeps Black women’s art out of women’s exhibitions, Black women’s work out of most feminist publications except for the occasional “Special Third World Women’s Issue,” and Black women’s texts off your reading lists. But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, white feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past ten years, how come you haven’t also educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us — white and Black — when it is key to our survival as a movement?

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  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?