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 My People (2022)

  The Tent City Rangers, a group of older men formed as security officers, broke up the fight, but some of the boys whose adrenaline had risen headed for a white man wearing Bermuda shorts and taking pictures. With dispatch, they relieved him of his camera and disappeared. The man wanted his camera back, he said, because it was expensive. But he added, “I think I understand. I come down here in my Bermuda shorts taking pictures. And I guess I understand how this would make them angry.” Laurice Barksdale, a twenty-four-year-old veteran from Atlanta, was angry, too. But he vented his frustrations in another way. From early in the morning to late in the afternoon, the sweet smell of baking bread joined the other scents in the air. In a small A-frame decorated with the motto “Unhung-up Bread,” Barksdale spent every day baking bread for residents and visitors as well. The supplies had come from a white New Yorker who travels from community to community teaching people how to make bread. At RC he discovered Barksdale, who had learned to cook in his high school home economics class, and set him up in business. After four years in the Marines, Barksdale had come home to Atlanta and had not been able to find a job. His mother, who worked for SCLC, suggested that he go along on the Poor People’s Campaign to see if he could help out. Barksdale says he’s not really interested in making money. “I got a cause,” he says. “And a lot of brothers and sisters around me.” The one SCLC higher-up always on the case was Hosea Williams, who early in the campaign became the city manager. One of Hosea’s major assets was the gift of rap. One Sunday morning he was stopped by three well-dressed white men, one of whom said he was running for Congress from Florida and had come to RC because he felt he and his people ought to know about it. Soon after the conversation began, the man asked Hosea about his background, and if he was a communist. Hosea was not offended by the question, but moved into it slowly. He denied being a communist. “What is Resurrection City all about?” Hosea asked rhetorically. “This is what you have to know. We are asking for jobs. Not welfare. Check the cat on the welfare rolls and you’ll find his mother and daddy were on welfare. “What we’ve got to have is a redefinition of work. As Lillian Smith indicated in her book, I think Killers of the Dream , what we have is a conflicting ideology in our value system. The reason I loved Dr. King was that he made six hundred thousand dollars in one year and died a pauper. We have got to let scientists go to work and create jobs. I know it can be done. I was working as a research chemist for fourteen years trying to rid this country of insects.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  While it could have nothing to do with the spiritual realm, the state must have unqualified and absolute authority in temporal affairs. Even if the state were cruel, tyrannical, and forbade the teaching of God’s word, Christians must not resist its power. 37 For its part, the true church, the Kingdom of God, must hold aloof from the inherently corrupt and depraved policies of the Kingdom of the World, dealing only with spiritual affairs. Protestants believed that the Roman Church had failed in its true mission because it had dallied with the sinful Kingdom of the World. Where premodern faith had emphasized the sacredness of community—the Sangha, the ummah, and the Body of Christ—for Luther “religion” was a wholly personal and private matter. Where previous sages, prophets, and reformers had felt impelled to take a stand against the systemic violence of the state, Luther’s Christian was supposed to retreat into his own interior world of righteousness and let society, quite literally, go to hell. And in his emphasis on the limited and inferior nature of earthly politics, Luther had given a potentially dangerous endorsement of unqualified state power. 38 Luther’s response to the Peasants’ War in Germany showed that a secularized political theory would not necessarily lead to a reduction of state violence. Between March and May 1525, peasant communities in southern and central Germany had resisted the centralizing policies of the princes that deprived them of traditional rights, and by hardheaded bargaining, many villages had managed to wrest concessions from them without resorting to violence. But in Thuringia, in central Germany, lawless peasant bands roamed the countryside, looting and burning convents, churches, and monasteries. 39 In his first pamphlet on the Peasants’ War, Luther had tried to be even-handed and had castigated the “cheating” and “robbing” of the aristocracy. But in his view the peasants had committed the unpardonable sin of mixing religion and politics. Suffering, he maintained, was their lot; they must obey the gospel, turn the other cheek, and accept the loss of their lives and property. They had had the temerity to argue that Christ had made all men free—an opinion that clearly chimed with New Testament teachings but cut no ice with Luther. He insisted that “a worldly kingdom cannot exist without an inequality of persons, some being free, some imprisoned, some lords, some subjects.” 40 Luther encouraged the princes to use every possible means to suppress the peasant agitators: Let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisoned, hurtful or devilish than a rebel.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  75 But in a landmark 1973 article, Natalie Zemon Davis examined the popular rituals in which both Catholics and Protestants drew on the Bible, the liturgy, and folk traditions to dehumanize their enemies and concluded that the French civil wars were “essentially religious.” 76 Since then, scholars have reemphasized the role of religion, pointing out, however, that it is still anachronistic to separate the “political” from the “religious” at this date. 77 On October 25, 1534, Calvinists had pasted vitriolic and satirical posters attacking the Catholic Mass on public landmarks all over Paris, Blois, Orléans, and Tours. One even appeared on the door of Francis I’s bedchamber. As Catholics made their way to morning Mass, they were confronted by a headline printed in capital letters: “TRUE ARTICLES ON THE HORRIBLE, GROSS AND INSUFFERABLE ABUSE OF THE PAPAL MASS.” The French pamphleteer Antoine Marcourt listed four arguments against the Eucharist, “by which the whole world ... will be completely ruined, cast down, lost and desolated”: it was blasphemous for the Mass to claim that it repeated Christ’s perfect sacrifice on Calvary; Jesus’s body was with God in Heaven so could not be present in the bread and wine; transubstantiation had no scriptural warrant; and communion was simply an act of remembrance. The diatribe concluded with a vicious attack on the clergy: By this [Mass] they have seized, destroyed and swallowed up everything imaginable, dead or alive. Because of it they live without any duties or responsibility to anyone or anything even to the need to study.... They kill, burn, destroy and murder as brigands all those who contradict them, for now all they have left is force. 78 The polemic was so extreme that even Theodore Beza, Calvin’s future deputy in Geneva, condemned it in his history of the French Protestant Church. Yet it was this disreputable attack that sparked the French Wars of Religion. As soon as the king saw the placards, he initiated a nationwide persecution of the Huguenots that forced many, including Calvin himself, to flee the country. King Francis was not a theological bigot; he was open to new ideas and had entertained Erasmus and other humanists at his court. But he rightly saw the placards not simply as a theological denunciation but also as an assault on the entire political system. The Eucharist was the supreme expression of social bonding, experienced not principally as a private communion with Christ but as a rite that bound the community together, 79 a ritual of “greeting, sharing, giving, receiving, and making peace.” 80 Before receiving the sacrament, Catholics had to beg their neighbors’ pardon for outstanding grievances; king, priests, aristocrats, and the common folk all ate the same consecrated bread and in so doing were integrated as one in the Body of Christ.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Like all agrarian ruling classes, both aristocracies employed an order of dependent retainers, who in return for extending their masters’ influence among the common people enjoyed higher social status and a share in the surplus.12 They included the publicans, or tax farmers, who in the Roman Empire were obliged to pass on a fixed sum to the colonial government but were allowed to retain the difference between that and what they managed to extort from the peasants. As a result, they gained a certain independence, but as is apparent in the gospels, they were hated by the common people.13 The “scribes and Pharisees” of the gospels were another group of retainers who interpreted the Torah, Jewish custumal law, in a way that supported the regime.14 Not all Pharisees assumed this role, however. Most concentrated on the stringent observance of the Torah and the development of what would become rabbinic exegesis, and did not ally themselves too closely with the nobility. Had they done so, they would not have retained their popularity with the people. Indeed, so great was the esteem in which they were held that any Jew who hoped for a political career had to study civil law with the Pharisees. Josephus, the first-century-CE Jewish historian, for example, probably became a disciple of the Pharisees to acquire the legal education that qualified him for public life, although he may never have become a full member of the sect.15 Once colonized, a people often depends heavily on their religious practices, over which they still have some control and which recall a time when they had the dignity of freedom. In the Jewish case, hostility toward their rulers tended to reach new heights during the important temple festivals, which spoke explosively to the Jews’ political subjugation: Passover commemorated Israel’s liberation from Egypt’s imperial control; Pentecost celebrated the revelation of the Torah, a divine law that superseded all imperial edicts; and the harvest festival of Weeks was a reminder that the land and its produce belonged to Yahweh and not the Romans. This simmering discontent erupted in 4 BCE, when Herod was on his deathbed. He had recently installed in the temple a large golden eagle, symbol of imperial Rome, and Judas and Matthias, two of the most respected Torah teachers, denounced it as an offensive challenge to Yahweh’s kingship.16 In a well-planned protest, forty of their students climbed onto the temple roof, hacked the eagle to pieces, and then courageously awaited the attack of Herod’s soldiers.17 Galvanized by fury, Herod rose from his bed and sentenced the students and their teachers to death, before dying in agony himself two days later.18

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  As the barbarians crept ever closer to the walls of Constantinople, Justinian became even more zealous to restore the divine unity by vigorously enforcing the supremacy of “the emperor’s church.” His attempts to suppress the Monophysite party permanently alienated the people of Palestine, Syria, and Egypt. He declared that Judaism was no longer religio licita: Jews were now debarred from public office, and the use of Hebrew was prohibited in the synagogue. In 528 Justinian gave all pagans three months to be baptized, and the following year he closed the Academy in Athens that had been founded by Plato. In every province from Morocco to the Euphrates, he commissioned churches, built after the style of Constantinople, to symbolize the unity of the empire. Instead of providing a challenging alternative to imperial violence, the tradition that had begun in part as a protest against the systemic oppression of empire had become the tool of Rome’s aggressive coercion. [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] In 540 Khosrow I of Persia began to transform his ailing kingdom into the economic giant of the region in a reform based on a classic definition of the agrarian state: The monarchy depends on the army, the army on money; money comes from the land tax; the land tax comes from agriculture. Agriculture depends on justice; justice on the integrity of officials, and integrity and reliability on the ever-watchfulness of the king.106 Khosrow devised a more efficient method of tax collection and invested heavily in the irrigation of Mesopotamia, which previous Persian kings had neglected. With the proceeds he was able to create a professional army to replace the traditional aristocratic levies. War with Christian Rome was now inevitable, since both powers aspired to dominate the region. Khosrow employed Arab tribesmen to police his southern border, and the Byzantines reciprocated by hiring the Banu Ghassan, even though they had converted to Monophysite Christianity, to patrol the frontier from their winter camp near Damascus.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Then Mother drags across the grass the biggest, deepest box of all, an old refrigerator box we had been planning to cut up for a puppet theatre. Out of it she draws our clothes—culottes and sunsuits with shoulder ties and old pajamas with beading on the feet that make a clicking noise on the bathroom tiles and keep you from sliding around. A white shirt with a Peter Pan collar flies out of her hand and arcs across the black sky, and behind it comes a huge red crinoline petticoat I wore to can-can in. It always reminded Mother of Degas’s dancers. Now it swirls from her hand in a circle and settles in the fire almost gently where it’s eaten in a quick gulp. From Mother’s arms tumble dozens of tennis shoes. They smother in a lump till the canvas of them catches, and after that, black smoke comes up with the wicked stink of scorched rubber. After the shoes catch, she fishes out the dresses. She slips each one off its hanger the better to see it before she commends it to the fire. At her feet, a big thicket of hangers is piling up. Each hanger drops from her white hand into the pile with a faint ringing. That ringing sends her into heavy motion again. She holds every dress briefly by its shoulders like it’s a schoolkid she’s checking out for smudges before church. Then one by one they get flung away from her and into the fire. There sails my white eyelet-lace Easter dress, and the pinafore Grandma smocked and embroidered with French-knot flowers in pink. There’s the pink peasant skirt Lecia got at the Mexico store in Houston. There’s the green plaid jumper with yellow cowgirl ropes stitched around the pockets that we’ve both worn. Those dresses look like nothing so much as the bodies of little girls whose ghosts have gone out of them. (Epictetus has a great line about the division between body and soul—“Thou art a little spirit bearing up a corpse.” When I read that line years later, I automatically pictured those dresses emptied of their occupants and sailing into the fire in graceful arcs.) At some point the fire fades to orange background, and I stare only at Mother’s face. It’s all streaked up with lipstick and soot, so she looks like a bona fide maniac. Her lips move in a muttery way, but I can’t make out the words. Nipper growls and yaps. He occupies that large circle of dark by the house that barely exists for me anymore. I can hear him lunge to the end of his chain, then get his bark choked off by the collar before he slinks back under the house. Mother’s voice rises, so I can make out what she’s saying over the fire and the whimpering dog: Rotten cocksucking motherfucking hausfrau.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In order to curb Jewish aggression that could endanger the nation’s survival, the Talmudic rabbis had insisted that the Temple could be rebuilt only by the Messiah, and over the centuries this had acquired the force of a taboo. But Jewish extremists were intensely disturbed by the Dome of the Rock, the third-holiest place in the Muslim world, which was said to stand on the site of Solomon’s temple. This magnificent shrine, which dominates the skyline of East Jerusalem and is so perfectly attuned to the natural environment, was a permanent reminder of the centuries of Islamic domination of the Holy Land. For the Gush, this symbol of the Muslim minority had become demonic. Livni and Etzion described it as an “abomination” and the “root cause of all the spiritual errors of our generation.” For Yeshua ben Shoshan, the underground’s spiritual adviser, the Dome was the haunt of the evil forces that inspired the Camp David negotiations. 53 All three were convinced that, according to Kabbalistic perennial philosophy, their actions here on earth would activate events in heaven, forcing God, as it were, to effect the Messianic redemption. 54 As an explosives expert in the IDF, Livni manufactured twenty-eight precision bombs that would have destroyed the Dome but not its surroundings. 55 Their only reason for not going ahead was that they could not find a rabbi to bless their operation. The plot was another demonstration of the modern death wish. The destruction of the iconic Dome would almost certainly have caused a war in which, for the first time, the entire Muslim world would have united to fight Israel. Strategists in Washington believed that during the Cold War, when the Soviets supported the Arabs and the United States Israel, this might even have sparked a Third World War. 56 So crucial was the survival and territorial integrity of the State of Israel to the militants that it justified risking the destruction of the human race. Yet far from being inspired by their religious tradition, the militants’ conviction violated core teachings of Rabbinic Judaism. The rabbis had repeatedly insisted that violence toward other human beings was tantamount to a denial of God, who had made men and women in his image; murder, therefore, was a sacrilege. God had created adam, a single man, to teach us that whoever destroyed a single human life would be punished as though he had destroyed the whole world.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  That’s supposed to be funny because our society thinks that women having unwanted sex is just one of the “inconveniences of marriage.” For centuries, the marriage vow has functioned as an irrevocable, blanket sexual consent—by women, for men. So why aren’t we talking about how one in ten women will be raped by their husbands? Another 13 percent of women say they’ve had sex because they were “bullied or humiliated” into it by their current husbands. About a third of married women have complied with their husbands’ demands for sex because it was expected after he spent money on her, even though the sexual act was unwanted. The majority of married women report that they experience coercion to have sex from their current husband. Marriage remains the site of the most widespread rape and sexual exploitation in our society.44 Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Whore? In a sense, women and femmes are all forced to be sexual laborers—to please men and masculine people with our bodies. But we are never allowed to admit that this giving of pleasure is real work and that sometimes it is forced work. We are certainly never allowed to take control of this work and negotiate to receive something in exchange for it. Because asking for money makes a woman or femme a whore. And—surprise!—our culture tells us this is the very worst thing we can be. Whores are degraded! Unlovable! Rape-able! Better off dead! We use the term “whore” to refer to the feminine sin of demanding too much. “Attention whore,” “fame whore,” “money whore”: a whore commits the sin of wanting—whether it’s money, sex, or attention. Instead, women and femmes are supposed to treat sexual pleasure like good wives doing the housework: do it for straight men, mostly at home, invisibly, with a smile and, of course, for free. Make him happy. Don’t ask for too much. Wouldn’t want to see women and femmes actually get something in return, would we? Much of our culture’s fear about selling sex is exaggerated and misunderstood. This is because the imaginary sex industry is used as a mirror of our larger problems with sex and with work. Tell me what you fear about sex work, and I’ll tell you what makes you anxious about your own sex life—and your own working life. The stories we tell about sex work are about our culture’s hidden realities—that, even in the “safety” of love and marriage, sex can be a lot of work; sometimes we don’t have much choice about it; nonconsensual domination and violence are common (including among queers); sex is still tied to economic survival and class mobility for many people (especially women); and under capitalism, all of us “sell our bodies” in one way or another.45 Selling Our Bodies

• From My People (2022)

  This March, in a video message shown at a meeting of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for an end to laws criminalizing homosexuality, citing seventy-six countries that have such laws. Leaning on a report presented by Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who is South African, he stated that the constant violence against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people was “a monumental tragedy for those affected and a stain on our collective conscience.” Pakistan, in response, and on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, led a walkout of Muslim states, arguing that the resolution would promote “licentious behavior” and lead to the “legitimatization of many deplorable acts, including pedophilia and incest.” South Africa took a stand and prevented a walkout of African states during the debate. South Africa’s decisive move in the UN was praised by liberals as a moral and diplomatic victory, but it did not correspond seamlessly to the country’s recent politics. In early May, the National House of Traditional Leaders—formed after the end of apartheid to advise the government on the interests and customs of various ethnic groups—asked Parliament to repeal the clause protecting citizens from discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation. The leaders were responding to the annual invitation of the constitutional review committee—a multiparty parliamentary group—to submit suggestions for amendments, and they insisted that the “great majority of South Africans do not want to give promotion and protection to these things.” Patekile Holomisa, a traditional leader and an ANC member of Parliament, who also chairs the constitutional review committee, said that homosexuality was “a condition that occurred when certain cultural rituals have not been performed,” and that gays should be taken to spiritual healers so that they could start to behave like other people in society. He warned that the ANC could lose votes if it continued to ignore the values of its base by protecting gays. The ANC caucus pushed back against Holomisa the following day. A statement issued by the chief whip, Mathole Motshekga, emphasized that the ANC “at no stage has considered debating this issue before Parliament.” For a historically conservative country like South Africa, regardless of its progressive laws, the shock of so many gays coming out of the closet at once was profound. Places like Kwa Thema and Cape Town developed a reputation for being friendly to gay men and women, with relatively little discrimination and lively nightlife. Still, gays who patronized the small bars known as shebeens often faced insults from straight men. Dipika Nath is a former member of the Task Team on Sexual Offences and Gender-Based Violence, a group that the Department of Justice established after the murder of Eudy Simelane and several other gay women. Last December, Nath wrote an extensive study for Human Rights Watch, “We’ll Show You You’re a Woman,” about violence and discrimination against black lesbians and transgendered men in South Africa.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  the people who cross our physical or virtual paths, spark the flame of our interest, earn our devotion and respect and protection our own family, because blood people we are committed to but don’t like anymore How have we been loving? defining love by obligation celebrating love on externally marked holidays keeping the realities of love behind closed doors framing love as a fairy tale on social media framing love as a product we give each other framing love as a limited resource that gets swallowed and used up, tied in plastic when we’re done and piled up out of sight prioritizing romantic love over self, comrade, and friend love This kind of love is not sufficient, even if it is the greatest love of our lives. The kind of love that we will be forced to celebrate or escape on Valentine’s Day is too small. We’re all going to die if we keep loving this way, die from isolation, loneliness, depression, abandoning each other to oppression, from lack of touch, from forgetting we are precious. We can no longer love as a secret or a presentation, as something we prioritize, hoard for the people we know. Prioritizing ourselves in love is political strategy, is survival. From religious spaces to school to television shows to courts of law, we are socialized to seek and perpetuate private, even corporate, love. Your love is for one person, forever. You celebrate it with dying flowers and diamonds. The largest celebration of your life is committing to that person. Your family and friends celebrate you with dishes and a juicer. You need an income to love. If something doesn’t work out with your love, you pay a lot of money to divide your lives, generally not telling people much unless it’s a soap opera dramatic ending. This way of approaching love strangles all the good out of it. What we need right now is a radical, global love that grows from deep within us to encompass all life. No big deal. To help make this a true day of love, here is brief radical love manifesto. Radical Honesty We begin learning to lie in intimate relationships at a very early age. Lie about the food your mother made, to avoid punishment, as you swallow your tears, about loving this Valentine’s Day gift, about the love you want and how you feel. Most of this is taught as heteropatriarchy 101: men love one way, women another, and we have to lie to impress and catch each other. Women are still taught too often to be submissive, diminutive, obedient, and later nagging and caregiving—not to be peers, emotionally complex powerhouses, loving other women and trans bodies. These mistruths in gender norms are self-perpetuating, affirmed by magazines and movies, girded at family dinner tables.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  So do sex workers feel pleasure at work? Yeah. Because you know what feels amazing? Surviving capitalism. Reclaiming the Gold Digger Is that wrong? For wanting more for myself? Wanting people to treat me with respect? But you know what? Next time they know better. —Nicki Minaj, “Pickle Juice,” 2010 A good girl stays grateful with crumbs. She may be broke, but damn she’s a good girl! Fuck that. Gold-digging whores hack the system and ask for too much—all the money, pleasure, and attention they damn well want. They recognize the value of their body and beauty, but also maybe more than anything else, the value of their time and attention. They know these are gold. Whores ask: Is this worth it? What’s in this for me? It isn’t always about money. Respecting and protecting our work and our bodies doesn’t always mean getting paid. But consider that women and femmes will always be under pressure to give up their sexuality and care for free. Under capitalism, putting a price on something is the best way to make work visible. Things change when we recognize our own worth, even just for ourselves. Women and femmes—all of us—deserve enough money to buy delicious food, a comfortable roof over our heads, and health care when we need it. We deserve enough money to take care of our families and friends. We deserve the money for ease, leisure, and luxuries in our lives. We deserve the pleasure of having enough. And we have the right to use our sexuality to get it. Thank you to M’Kali Hashiki, Pluma Sumaq, Clare Bayard, Karen Pittelman, Isaac Lev Szmonko, and the members of the Lambda Literary Retreat Non-Fiction “ho-hort” of 2017 for their invaluable feedback on this essay. 40 For the purposes of this essay, I will be using this definition of “femme” from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: Femme: A person who has one of a million kinds of queer femme or feminine genders. Part of a multiverse of femme gendered people who have histories and communities in every culture since the dawn of time. A queer gender that often breaks away from white, able bodied, upper middle class, cis ideas of femininity, remixing it to harken to fat or working class or Black or brown or trans or non-binary or disabled or sex worker or other genders of femme to grant strength, vulnerability and power to the person embodying them. A revolutionary gender universe. See Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, “A Modest Proposal for a Fair Trade Emotional Labour Economy,” Bitch, July 13, 2017, https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/modest-proposal-fair-trade-emotional-labor-economy/centered-disabled-femme-color-working.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  It was a rich country, and it was a disgrace that people were sleeping in the streets. For decades foreigners had been plundering their oil, so that it was of no benefit to the Iranian people. “I am deeply concerned about the conditions of the poor next winter, as I expect many to die, God forbid, from cold and starvation,” he concluded. “The ulema should think of the poor and take action now to prevent the atrocities of last winter.” 79 After this speech Khomeini was deported and went into exile in Iraq. Overnight, he had become a hero in Iran, a symbol of resolute Shii opposition to oppression. Marxist or liberal ideology could have appealed to only a few Iranians, but everybody, especially the urban poor, understood the imagery of Karbala. In the West we are accustomed to extrovert and crowd-pleasing politicians, so it was hard for us to understand Khomeini’s appeal, but Iranians recognized his withdrawn demeanor, inward- seeming gaze, and monotonous delivery as the sign of a “sober” mystic who had achieved full control of the senses. 80 In exile in Najaf too, near the tomb of Imam Ali, Khomeini became closely associated with the Twelve Imams in the minds of the people, and thanks to modern communications, he would continue to direct events from afar—not unlike the Hidden Imam. In the West, Khomeini would be widely regarded as a fanatic and his success seen as a triumph of superstition over rationality. Yet his principled opposition to systemic violence and demand for global justice was deeply in tune with contemporaneous religious developments in the West. His message was not dissimilar to that of Pope John XXIII (r. 1958–63), whose encyclical letter Mater et Magistra (1961) insisted that unfettered capitalism was immoral and unsustainable; instead, “all forms of economic enterprise must be governed by the principles of social justice and charity.” The pope also called for global equity. National prosperity was not enough: “Man’s aim must be to achieve in social justice a national and international juridical order ... in which all economic activity can be conducted not merely for private gain but also in the interests of the common good.” 81 In Pacem in Terris (1963), the pope insisted that human rights rather than economic profit must be the basis of international relations—a plea clearly critical of the exploitative Western policies in undeveloped countries. At about the same time as Khomeini was inveighing against the injustice of the shah, the Catholic Church in Latin America was evolving its Liberation Theology. Priests and nuns encouraged small communities of the poor to study the Bible in order to redress the systemic violence of Brazilian society.

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

  At last Theodosius the Great, the first emperor who was baptized in the Nicene faith, put an end to the Arian interregnum, proclaimed the exclusive authority of the Nicene creed, and at the same time enacted the first rigid penalties not only against the pagan idolatry, the practice of which was thenceforth a capital crime in the empire, but also against all Christian heresies and sects. The ruling principle of his public life was the unity of the empire and of the orthodox church. Soon after his baptism, in 380, he issued, in connection with his weak coëmperors, Gratian and Valentinian II., to the inhabitants of Constantinople, then the chief seat of Arianism, the following edict: "We, the three emperors, will, that all our subjects steadfastly adhere to the religion which was taught by St. Peter to the Romans, which has been faithfully preserved by tradition, and which is now professed by the pontiff Damasus, of Rome, and Peter, bishop of Alexandria, a man of apostolic holiness. According to the institution of the apostles and the doctrine of the gospel, let us believe in the one Godhead of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, of equal majesty in the holy Trinity. We order that the adherents of this faith be called Catholic Christians; we brand all the senseless followers of other religions with the infamous name of heretics, and forbid their conventicles assuming the name of churches. Besides the condemnation of divine justice, they must expect the heavy penalties which our authority, guided by heavenly wisdom, shall think proper to inflict."244 In the course of fifteen years this emperor issued at least fifteen penal laws against heretics,245 by which he gradually deprived them of all right to the exercise of their religion, excluded them from all civil offices, and threatened them with fines, confiscation, banishment, and in some cases, as the Manichaeans, the Audians, and even the Quartodecimanians, with death. From Theodosius therefore dates the state-church theory of the persecution of heretics, and the embodiment of it in legislation. His primary design, it is true, was rather to terrify and convert, than to punish, the refractory subjects.246 From the theory, however, to the practice was a single step; and this step his rival and colleague, Maximus, took, when, at the instigation of the unworthy bishop Ithacius, he caused the Spanish bishop, Priscillian, with six respectable adherents of his Manichaean-like sect (two presbyters, two deacons, the poet Latronian, and Euchrocia, a noble matron of Bordeaux), to be tortured and beheaded with the sword at Treves in 385. This was the first shedding of the blood of heretics by a Christian prince for religious opinions. The bishops assembled at Treves, with the exception of Theognistus, approved this act.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I mistook this for kinship, believing that somehow all the boys without feet found one another by holding up their hurts and pairing their pains. But my mother told me it was because gangs would buy children and injure them the same way, assembling them in teams to go out and earn pity with their new bodies. They knocked on the windows of taxis until the drivers cursed them away. My mother gave them nothing. She shut the door on one of the boys’ fingers, his hand purpling in the hinge. His fingernail fell off and landed in her lap and my mother flicked it away. I plucked it from the seat crack and tossed it out the window like a coin I could wish with. My mother slapped my hand and said not to touch those boys’ fingernails because they were dirty and we didn’t know what they’d been touching. I reminded her that she touched feet for a living; toenails were her terrain. She gripped my pinky and yanked the nail clean off its bed of skin, so fast I didn’t bleed, the pain a bright bead, rolling back and forth on my tongue until I couldn’t taste anything else. Don’t compare us to them, she said. When another of the boys wedged his wrist through the window slit and offered his palm, my mother spat in it. _ We found my father in a top-floor apartment, where my mother knocked on the door so long her knuckles split one by one. He answered. It was blue-hot in the apartment, and my father was bare-legged: I’d never before seen his kneecaps, the hair on his thighs. When he saw my mother, he stepped back. In his right hand, an apple lit up without its skin. My mother gripped our shoulders, herding our bodies in front of hers, shifting us into the light that swung from the ceiling bulb. This was why she’d brought us along: to say Look what you’ve left me with. My father ate his apple, saying he’d get a new job soon. Said, The mainland’s where the gods are still giving. America has retired on us. My mother said he was cursed: Every country was another one he couldn’t afford. She told him to come home. He told us we shouldn’t have come. The apple brightened his teeth. Sweat sequined his upper lip. He told my mother to come into the bedroom and locked her in it, then took turns whipping my brother and me as we balled on the sofa. He used a spoon, the cord of a lamp, his sweat-stiffened shirt. It was as much my mother’s punishment as it was ours. My brother’s head knocked against mine as we rolled toward and away from each other. His skull sounded hollow, mine full of water. To distract myself, I churned my tongue in my mouth, tasting my blood in real time.

• From The Art of Memoir

  What rankles me lately, though, is a sweeping tendency to deny even the possibility of truth. During a campus sexual harassment investigation, my department chair said, “There’s her version and his version—there is no truth.” Which infuriated me: someone either assaulted the woman in question, or not. It was binary. Sure, there are major mistakes of interpretation. Two cops beating a black man claim he was reaching for a weapon in his pants. A video shows the victim groping, but it’s for an asthma inhaler. In an off-kilter paradox, our strange cynicism about truth as a possibility has permitted us to accept all manner of bullshit on the page. Or maybe our appetite for the fantastic—fed by Ironman and Gravity and a phalanx of vampire- and zombie-based blockbusters— has eroded all public standards of plausibility, even among perfectly smart people. (Okay, there are some dumb bunnies. Walking out of The Last Temptation of Christ, a friend overheard someone say, “I didn’t know Jesus was so short.”) Our desire for spectacle has led many story-concocting “memoirists” into jacking up their tales, believing that the story with the most gunshots will win the biggest audience. But it’s the busted liars who talk most volubly about the fuzzy line between nonfiction and fiction. Their anything-goes message has come to dominate the airwaves around memoir. Reading that scammer James Frey got on a plane with a bullet hole through his cheek, I deduced that—even pre-9/11—airport security frowned on boarding the gunshot-wounded. And when he alleged that his rehab made him suffer a root canal without a non- consciousness-altering numbing agent, sober people the world over knew the torture session was fake. The bullet hole and unnumbed tooth were absolute tip-offs. Surely other readers, had they paused even for a second to consider the unlikelihood of those reports, would have dubbed the guy a bullshitter. What I’m guessing: many just shrugged past it, because we’ve all chosen to accept that the line between fiction and nonfiction is too subtle for us to discern. That’s what Frey argued on TV, vigorously. He had no reluctance to speak for all memoirists, claiming self-

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Milosevic depicted Serbia as “a fortress, defending European culture and religion” from the Islamic world, and Serbian clerics and academics similarly described their nation as a bulwark against the Asiatic hordes. Another radical Serbian nationalist, Radovan Karadzic, had warned the Bosnian Assembly that if it declared independence, it would lead their nation “into hell” and “make the Muslim people disappear.” But this latent hatred of Islam dated only to the nineteenth century, when Serbian nationalists had created a myth that blended Christianity with a national sentiment based on ethnicity: it cast Prince Lazlo, defeated by the Ottomans in 1389, as a Christ figure; the Turkish sultan as a Christ slayer; and the Slavs who converted to Islam as “Turkified” (isturciti). By adopting a non-Christian religion, they had renounced their Slavic ethnicity and become Orientals; the Serbian nation would not rise again until these aliens were exterminated. Yet so deep-rooted were the habits of coexistence that it took Milosevic three years of relentless propaganda to persuade the Serbs to revive this lethal blend of secular nationalism, religion, and racism. Significantly, the war began with a frantic attempt to expunge the documentary evidence that for centuries Jews, Christians, and Muslims had enjoyed a rich coexistence. A month after the Bosnian declaration of independence, Serbian militias destroyed the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo, which housed the largest collection of Islamic and Jewish manuscripts in the Balkans, burned down the National Library and National Museum, and targeted all such manuscript collections for destruction. Between them, Serbian and Croat nationalists also destroyed some fourteen hundred mosques, turning the sites into parks and parking lots to erase all memory of the inconvenient past.23 While they were burning the museums, Serbian militias and the heavily armed Yugoslav National Army overran Bosnia, and in the autumn of 1992 the process that Karadzic called “ethnic cleansing” began.24 Milosevic had opened the prisons and recruited petty gangsters into the militias, letting them pillage, rape, burn, and kill with impunity.25 No Muslim was to be spared, and any Bosnian Serb who refused to cooperate must also die. Muslims were herded into concentration camps, and without toilets or other sanitation, filthy, emaciated, and traumatized, they seemed scarcely human either to themselves or to their tormentors. Militia leaders dulled the inhibitions of their troops with alcohol, forcing them to gang-rape, murder, and torture. When Srebrenica, a UN “safe area,” was turned over to the Serb army in the summer of 1995, at least eight thousand men and boys were massacred, and by the autumn the last Muslims were either killed or expelled from the Banja Luka region.26

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Religious extremism often develops in a symbiotic relationship with a virulently aggressive secularism. One of the Brothers detained in 1954 was Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), the Society’s chief propagandist.56 As a young man, Qutb had felt no conflict between his faith and secular politics, but he had been alienated by the ruthless policies of the British and shocked by the racial prejudice he experienced during a visit to the United States. Still, his views had remained moderate and tentative; what radicalized him was the violence of Nasser’s prison. Qutb was himself tortured and was horrified to see twenty prisoners slaughtered in a single incident. Dozens more were tortured and executed—and not by foreigners but by their own people. Secularism no longer seemed benign but cruel, aggressive, and immoral. In prison, Qutb took Maududi’s ideas a step further. When he heard Nasser vowing to privatize Islam on the Western model and observed the unfolding horror of his prison life, Qutb came to believe that even a so-called Muslim ruler could be as violently jahili as any Western power. Like so many others terrorized by violence and injustice, Qutb had developed a dualistic ideology that divided the world starkly into two camps: one accepted God’s sovereignty, and the other did not. In the career of Muhammad, God had revealed a practical program for the creation of a properly ordered society. First, acting under God’s orders, he had created a jamaat, a “party” committed to justice and equity that held aloof from the pagan establishment. Second, at the hijrah, he had effected a complete severance between the Godly and the Godless. Third, Muhammad had established an Islamic state in Medina; and fourth, he began his jihad against jahili Mecca, which eventually bowed to God’s sovereignty.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  SEX ENHANCEMENTIf you like, you can read almost any female sexual fantasy as a cry of frustration. We are all prepared to think of women, any woman, as potentially frustrated simply because it is our historic sexual role. Traditionally, we are the frustrated sex—less experienced, less mobile, and less accepted sexually. We have spent less time at it, and been less informed by art, literature, and commerce (to say nothing of our parents and husbands) as to just what our sexual role is—except usually that of desireless virgin or prisoner. Even the most daring sexual adventuress I’ve talked to admits that her role in her fantasies may still lag behind her real sexual activity: somewhere, even in her wildest, most sexual fantasy, she still plays the inhibited role her mother taught her. In her life she may feel perfectly free to initiate sex, to play the active seducer’s role, to take on a man for a guiltless, one-night stand just for the fun of it, but her fantasy will often still be of the “it is not my fault, he made me do it” type: She was doped, or raped, or subjected to cruel and overwhelming domination. Ideas like these, so deeply rooted in the mind no matter what the relatively free body does, will take another generation to outgrow. But it would be too simple to say that anyone whose sexual imagery conflicts with her sexual reality isn’t getting what she wants, that all sexual fantasy is dominated by real frustration. Some of the happiest, most sexually satisfied women I’ve talked to fantasize, and are all the more sexually satisfying partners because of it. What I am saying is simple: that we women are traditionally prone to and expert at fantasy; that even when we are being fully fucked our minds can imagine the sexual exploration and variables that our bodies are accustomed to do without; that sex itself—and not only lack of it—can inspire fantasy; and that for some women there is almost a chain reaction between sexual fact and fantasy, that the one feeds and stimulates the other. PatriciaPatricia is a tall, blond American beauty who lives in Rome. For the past year she has been separated from her husband and living with Antonio, an Italian. Patricia and her wealthy English husband have an agreement that when they’re tired of their individual adventuring they will leave Rome, that nothing either of them has done there will have counted, and that they will return to New York or London together. Because, as Patricia says, “We really love one another. We simply want to explore now, without guilt.”

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  But if not Women’s Lib, then liberation itself was in the air. With the increasing liberation of women’s bodies, our minds were being set free, too. The idea that women had sexual fantasies, the enigma of just what they might be, the prospect that the age-old question of men to women, “What are you thinking about?” might at last be answered, now suddenly fascinated editors. No longer was it a matter of the sales-minded editor deciding what a commercial gimmick it would be to publish a series of sexy novels by sexy ladies, novels that would give an odd new sales tickle to the age-old fucking scenes that had always been written by men. Now it was suddenly out of the editors’ hands: Women were writing about sex, but it was from their point of view (women seen only as male sex fantasies no more), and it was a whole new bedroom. The realization was suddenly obvious, that with the liberation of women, men would be liberated too from all the stereotypes that made them think of women as burdens, prudes, and necessary evils, even at best something less than a man. Imagine! Talking to a woman might be more fun than a night out with the boys! With all this in the air, it’s no surprise that at first my idea fascinated everyone. “I’m thinking of doing a book about female sexual fantasies,” I’d say for openers to a group of highly intelligent and articulate friends. That’s all it took. All conversation would stop. Men and women both would turn to me with half-smiles of excitement. They were willing to countenance the thought, but only in generalities, I discovered. “Oh, you mean the old rape dream?” “You don’t mean something like King Kong, do you?” But when I would speak about fantasies with the kind of detail which in any narrative carries the feel of life and makes the verbal experience emotionally real, the ease around the restaurant table would abruptly stop. Men would become truculent and nervous (ah! my old lover—how universal you are) and their women, far from contributing fantasies of their own—an idea that might have intrigued them in the beginning—would close up like clams. If anyone spoke, it was the men: “Why don’t you collect men’s fantasies?” “Women don’t need fantasies, they have us.” “Women don’t have sexual fantasies.” “I can understand some old, dried-up prune that no man would want having fantasies. Some frustrated neurotic. But the ordinary, sexually satisfied woman doesn’t need them.” “Who needs fantasies? What’s the matter with good old-fashioned sex?”

• From Bestiary (2020)

  This is all of them: When Ba calls me by my Jie’s name, or my mother’s name, even though Ma is right beside him, waiting for him to misspeak so she can whip him with the phone cord. When I was still a girlsapling, Ba made whips for the oxen he steered through the fields in summer, drying the cowhide on our laundry line. The whips were made of the same skin they scarred. That’s when I learned: The best thing for breaking skin is skin. Ma says she’s started taking Ba to some doctor. The kind that asks you to swallow a bead and measures how long it takes for it to come out the other end, diagnosing you based on the speed of your shit. I’m a better doctor, I tell Ma. I tell her to send him to me, or I’ll drive down myself and take him home—you’re not the only one who has thought of this. Ma says no, she won’t let him go, and I say, That’s exactly how you’re killing him. Ma says, Killing him? and you wouldn’t know, you aren’t listening, but that question is what tethers us. It’s not that she’s ashamed of having tried to kill us. It’s that she failed, changed her mind, which means she wanted us despite what we made her: a mother. You’ve moved on from jungles. Now you’re all about domesticated animals. Dog-grooming shows, cats caught on home video, rodents that require complex surgery on their raisin brains. You think I don’t know about your tail, but from the day it was born I watched it outgrow you. I saw it that first day when you walked into the kitchen and there was a shadow on the floor, a shadow too slim to match any of your limbs. Even when the tail’s hidden, I can see where the light bends its head to groom it. I tell you the moon is a rabbit. That’s a myth from the mainlander side of you, my ba’s side. Your father’s side, too. I thought I’d married someone the opposite of Ba, a man who drives himself like a plow, a man I could steer anywhere. Now I wake in my bed alone and the sun hits my body like a fist. What do you feel with Ben? Is she someone so literate in need, she makes your body a language for it? You don’t remember, but he cried sometimes, cried when he belted the breath out of us, and later I found him asleep with his head in the toilet bowl. Be Papakwaka, I told him. Be harder.