Feed/Anger
on A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, and Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (Third Edition) by Gloria Steinem.
These past weeks, I have been reading the words of the women before me. These are women I worship, really, though before this I know only of their name and what they stand for. Each time I turn a cover, I expect passion and wisdom beyond my reach. Be assured that I received nothing less. But inside these pages I discovered a common tune; a fire smouldering in each paperback. It felt all too familiar. I have seen it behind my mother’s eyes; in the tightened knuckles and hurried paces of my sisters: Anger.
The kind of progress the West have seen often delude me into thinking we have little cause left for anger (or that we’ve no justifiable reasons to be angry anymore). I recognise this very delusion as I study the words of Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own as she paints a fictitious author, Mary Carmichael, who “...had certain advantages which women of far greater gift lacked even half a century ago. Men were no longer to her the opposing faction; she need not waste her time railing against them; she need not climb on to the roof and ruin her peace of mind longing for travel, experience and a knowledge of the world and character that were denied her. Fear and hatred were almost gone, or traces of them showed only in a slight exaggeration of the joy of freedom…”
Today, almost 100 years since its publication, Woolf’s portrait of such a woman remains quixotic at best. Anger persists. Change is slow to come, though we have conquered mountains that Woolf and her contemporaries could only dream of.
“This is just how things are,” is a sentiment I have heard one too many times. Resignation is a pandemic that has silenced our anger and bound our fists for generations without fail. Our convictions mocked, our insistence scorned and our rights denied, we and our sisters before us have all wondered if this is all there is; if this is as far as we could go. Resignation is alluring. I learn this in the words of Alice Walker: In every blow Celie suffers; in each slur and disrespect; in every jug of water she must fetch - resignation offers itself as an oasis in the dry heat of a desert. And dear Celie all but strides towards the water. But let me let you in on a secret: She understands that it is only a mirage. She must stop, if only to observe, but we are promised - in every word she writes to Nettie, every kiss from Shug and every stitch on her divine pants - that she will not stay.
“I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts,” Audre Lorde writes in her groundbreaking essay. I feel her words echo. “When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar.” While Woolf envisions an end to anger, an age where it will no longer be necessary, Lorde understands there is no end to this dark tunnel: “For anger between peers birth change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth.”
I started my reflection on anger with a long-held belief that anger need not manifest in destruction. War, terrorism, trafficking and hate crime; Endless, frightening accounts of violence and sexual assault - all vivid reminders of hypermasculinity normalised and superimposed on anger; Brazen displays of violence that obfuscate the ends to justify the means and vice versa. Like Lorde, I have immense faith that anger can and should only manifest in reform. But I realise now that reform, too, requires destruction: The destruction of heteronormative ideals and exclusionary language is imperative to achieve inclusion; just as the destruction of traditional gender roles, racist stereotypes and sexist media are imperative to equality. The list goes on, but let us understand that there is destruction that imagines emancipation and justice in place of domination and superiority.
And so our anger must not see an end. Though I must say that the idea that there is an end to this dark tunnel - that somewhere a green pasture and blue skies await us; that there exists a sanctuary where our anger is obsolete - is enticing. Comforting, even. Yet this tunnel branches as I walk its path.
“Sometimes we have to wait for our friends to be born,” the great Gloria Steinem told Emma Watson in the summer of 2018. Steinem has seen the many faces of anger: through the Playboy club in her bunny costume; on the battlefield in arms with the first congresswomen; and on the payroll of sexist editors and on the road with Flo Kennedy. She has walked thousands of miles in this tunnel, and she has grown fond of the contours of its darkness. She has seen the many faces of anger, across time and space and generations. Each time, it renews her own.
I carry a torch in this darkness to see the many faces of my sisters: the dark beneath our eyes and the lines of our frowns and the pull of our cheeks at every triumph. I can see your anger as clearly as I see my own. With every step in this darkness my sight broadens, and I become mindful that there is much I have yet to see. Far in the dark I feel the faces I’ve yet to meet, stories I’ve yet to hear and anger simmering and waiting to be discovered; anger I will hear many times over. Steinem writes: “This seems to be where we are, after the first full decade of the second wave of Feminism: raised hopes, a hunger for change, and years of hard work are running head-on into a frustrating realisation that each battle must be fought over and over again.” Her words echo.
When asked if she will be passing her torch, Steinem is adamant to keep it: “I’m using it to light the torches of others…together, we create so much light.”
This fire can burn us or ignite us, there is no guarantee. But the flame is eternal. And there are bastions that must be burned.
