Rage on the Page
You don’t get angry and settle in to write. You get angry and you protest.
A couple of years ago I got a large tattoo on my forearm. This was before I had given up on tattoos having meaning. I had an artist I love make her own rendition of Elisabetta Sirani’s painting of the beheading of John the Baptist. There are a lot of reasons I love this painting, many too personal to write about in this public newsletter. But one of the things I love about Sirani’s work is the demure pout of the murderess’s lips, the calm on her face, the slight sadness as she holds the head of a man she murdered. Sirani painted dozens of scenes of women committing violence and in all of them they look serene. There is no grimace, no pain in their face, only confidence and (presumably) skill.
It’s hard to depict anger without it coming off as a caricature. What do we do when we’re angry? Sure, there’s the Hollywood depictions of thrown plates and physical violence, of people tortured by their own emotions. But there’s also something smaller and less obvious and more upsetting about anger.
Anger is a movement emotion. I’ve found it hard to write this week. It is as hard to write from a place of anger as much as it is to write from a place of helplessness. Rage is a productive feeling, not a contemplative one. You don’t get angry and settle in to write. You get angry and you protest. You get angry and you strike. You get angry and you mobilize. You flip tables in the name of justice because someone has to do it. You are filled with rage and you need somewhere to put it.
There are so many things to be angry about. 100,000 people have died from a viral disease that we still have no vaccine for. The government has done basically nothing at a federal, state, or local level to help its citizens weather this and remain healthy. 25% of Americans are unemployed and there is no stimulus package being built right now. Rent has not been cancelled. Billionaires have made so much money off of the rest of our suffering. Voter repression is now seemingly considered fine and legal. A man was murdered by a cop who kneeled on his neck in Minneapolis. All these are this week. I wrote this paragraph yesterday but as of this morning there is also: a talented black reporter being arrested while doing his job, the president tweeting that the National Guard should shoot looters, and the realization that all of this is about to get a lot worse before it gets any better at all. Meanwhile, people are more angry about Target losing a few Live Laugh Love signs than they are about human lives.
Right now there isn’t a lot to do with that anger. What am I going to do? Protest in my house? I donated money to the Minnesota Freedom Fund to help bail out protestors (which you should do too!) but that doesn’t feel cathartic. Is catharsis even really the goal right now? It’s hard to know.
In the past year, a spate of women have written about women’s writing about rage. Parul Seghal wrote and excellent piece about the evolution and emergence of women’s rage writing. Lucy Dancyger wrote a whole book. Casey Cep wrote about it for The New Yorker. Rebecca Traister also wrote a whole ass book about women’s anger and it’s “revolutionary power.” Imagine that right here I reminded us of the history of women being called hysterical and their emotions being minimized as hormonal and the fact that pretty much only white women are allowed to get angry in public. Forgive me, but I am too angry to take the time.
One of my problems with anger is that it flashes and burns out. It is easy for me to become ignited, to rant and rave for a little while, but when it has settled into reality for me, that power and that capability is almost impossible for me to access. Said another way, this is me:
But one of the most frustrating things about anger is how unfocused it is. See how distracted I am? See how these sentences barely fit together like puzzle pieces where only one knob fits but the sides reach away from each other? See how I’m spinning in a circle of my own anger? It’s hard to write anger.
I read a book earlier this week that I would have sworn I had already read but it turned out I hadn’t: Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment. In the first sentence of the book Olga’s husband declares that he is leaving her. He no longer wants to be married, he has decided. He wants something else. The book is written in first person which usually I do not like, but here it does something incredible: Ferrante uses the form of her writing to progress the reader through the emotions of the main character. She begins in a state of denial, followed by one of shock. By the end of the book she has reached a state of acceptance, but where the work succeeds the most is the center of the novel in which the narrator is in a state of rage that feels like it will never end and at the same time hampers her from any of the real actions she needs to do to continue her life.
“Something in my senses wasn’t working. An interruption of feeling, of feelings. Sometimes I abandoned myself to it, at times I was frightened…I didn’t know how to find answers to the question marks, every possible answer seemed absurd. I was lost in the where am I, in the what am I doing. I was mute beside the why.”
Let’s read this passage in which Olga physically attacks her separated husband and his young girlfriend
I had no intention of hitting her, she was a stranger, toward her I felt almost calm. I was angry only at Mario, who had given her those earrings, so I hit the air violently, trying to grab them. I wanted to rip them from her lobes, tear the flesh, deny her the role of heir of my husband’s forebears. What did she have to do with it, the dirty whore, what did she have to do with that line of descent. She was flaunting herself like an impudent whore with my things, which would later become the things of my daughter. She opened her thighs, she bathed his prick, and imagined thus that she had baptized him.
There’s a momentum to this rage spiral that is intoxicating. It moves like a train, barreling through her thoughts until when she begins to physically hit her husband you—as the reader— are so close to her that you think yes, sure, this is fine. He deserves it.
I don’t have much of an idea where to go with this. What do we do with an anger we are asked to revisit every single day until it becomes more a part of who we are than a rarity? What can we do when confronted with massive heartbreaking truths about our country and what it is founded on?
I leave you today with this quote from Audre Lorde’s 1981 keynote address at the NWSA convention, “The Uses of Anger”:
Stay angry as long as you can. Donate money. Happy Friday!
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Painting is Timoclea Killing Her Rapist by Elisabetta Sirani (the first woman on record to support her family with her art) from 1659.