There is something about living in a city like Brooklyn in spring. You will witness and smell the bursting of trees and all the pink/blue/purple/white flowers everywhere and also at the same time be confronted by all of humanity exploding out of their homes onto the streets in all our imperfect beautiful glory.
Some of that human condition looks like rage. And it sometimes feels at odd with all the visual and sensory condition of our natural world. Maybe. Maybe not.
I’m currently immersed in an ongoing project exploring how we make sense, beauty even, of our rage. Both the individual sort and the collective kind. How our rage can perhaps direct us towards our future transitions.
So in the midst of this
what can we say about rage?
Well we can say that we experience rage, and not be hideous, for one. That’s a big one. Sometimes, that’s hard to access when everything around you is bursting color, and perhaps you are still reeling. Still grieving. Still raging.
I’m hesitant to even write to you about rage right now lest you think I’m trying to diminish all the beauty around us. Lest I become difficult, always trying to remind you of some unhappy emotion. That’s why I think it’s worthwhile to explore all that we do not allow around rage. Because of how even I limit my own understanding of this feeling by minimizing its presence or importance.
I’ve been finding a lot of inspiration on my rage research in much of the books I’ve been reading. And perhaps because I’m interested in this research I’m also finding it wherever I look.
I recently finished Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, a piece of fiction that did what only fiction could do. Yoder describes a kind of transitional femme rage, the transition being turning into a mother. The story in one sense shows us one mother’s journey reacquainting herself with her animal self, as we often forget we still are. Re-imagining motherhood through the lens of a dog, that howling, scraping, destroying, attacking, tearing flesh kind of dog. The running as fast as you can, just because you can dog. It’s a fascinating look at how far modern motherhood has come from our most primal senses. How we can catch glimpses of our earthly power and wisdom through the lens of creation and birth, if we only allow ourselves to lean in to the rage-filled, bloody, meaty mess of it all.
“Though much of her fur was now gone, the tail lying somewhere in the underbrush, her claws receded back into her fingers, she still felt very much the pulse and pant of the animal she had become. Her sense of smell had distracted her that morning, causing her to clean more and more obscure corners of the kitchen in an effort to get rid of every last trace of mold and onion and meat. She longed to tend to her son the way she felt she should, licking him and biting at his feet lovingly, yowling as they played, and feeding him raw meat. And though the animalness of her being remained, she was also inside her full human-mother being, back to the usual worries and insecurities, the thoughts of career success, the burden of failure, the marital resentments, feminist rage, and so on and so forth. All of this was back, yet somehow transformed. She felt she could abide it as long as she still had Nightbitch. As long as she had that.”
Another important function of Nightbitch, is to provide a model for the male husband character. A husband character who is mostly away (out of town) for the mother character to be able to transform, he unbelievably adjusts instead of questioning. Even though he could have no way of understanding, he trusts in something bigger than him. He is firmly in service, devotion, and protection of the story’s femme alpha, and most importantly provides cover so she can create a larger body of work that ultimately shows all the mothers who are ready, what they are truly capable of.
I can’t stress enough how important in the struggle to survive all things patriarchal hellfire (anti-trans legislation, gun violence, violence against homeless folks in NYC, defunding of schools and libraries while police budgets bloat, Israeli occupation of Palestine, etc, etc), that men perform in solidarity of women fighting to destroy the patriarchy. Sometimes that solidarity looks like cover so women can plot, rage, witch and burn together.
I’m also reading SCUM Maniefesto1 by Valerie Solanas, which many people have described as alternately silly, too radical, satire, a valid criticism of patriarchy, and polarizing. In other words a highly compelling read. Published in 1967, it argues that men have ruined the world, and that it is up to women to fix it. To achieve this goal, it suggests the formation of SCUM, an organization dedicated to overthrowing society and eliminating the male sex.
Valerie Solanas is likely best known for an attempt to murder Andy Warhol in 1968. Valerie Jean Solanas was born on April 9, 1936, in Ventnor City, N.J., just off the Atlantic City boardwalk, one of two girls to Louis Solanas, a bartender, and Dorothy Biondo, a dental assistant. Her parents separated when Valerie was 4 and divorced in 1947; both remarried. Her father, she would later say, had sexually abused her from a young age. By 15 she had given birth to two children: Linda, who was raised as her sister, and David, whom she placed for adoption.2
The work of Solanas and SCUM can partially be understood as a reflection of the times in which she lived. Michelle Tea writes in the Foreward:
“Valeria did her work in the ‘60s, when it was legal for men to rape their wives, when girls who bled to death from back-alley abortions “deserved it.” In 1969, a year after Valerie’s famed shooting of the artist Andy Warhol, feminists who rose to speak at the New Left’s Counter-Inaugural to the Nixon inauguration in Washington were greeted by audience cheers of “Take her off the stage and fuck her!” and “Fuck her down a dark alley!” And these were the liberal-thinking men.”
SCUM can be understood in countless ways. I read it as an uncensored stream of rage accented with a good dose of humor. So rarely do we read rage like this anymore. So much of published literature seeks to appease us, to explain away what we know in our bodies, wants us to look away from the direction of oppressors oppressing.
Tea writes:
“I’ve realized that going totally fucking insane is a completely rational outcome for an intelligent woman in this society, and I think this idea becomes only more solid the farther back in history you go.
SCUM Manifesto, Solanas and a taste of rage-writing:
“The conflict, therefore, is not between females and males, but between SCUM—dominant, secure, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant females, who consider themselves fit to rules the universe, who have free-wheeled to the limits of this ‘society’ and are ready to wheel on to something far beyond what it has to offer—and nice, passive, accepting ‘cultivated,’ polite, dignified, subdued, dependent, scared, mindless, insecure, approval-seeking Daddy’s Girls, who can’t cope with the unknown, who want to stand back with the apes, who feel secure only with Big Daddy standing by, with a big strong man to lean on and with a fat, hairy face in the White House, who are too cowardly to face up to the hideous reality of what a man is, what Daddy is,…”
I don’t know what to make of it, but in a contemplation on rage, I can’t quite leave Solanas out. There are countless reasons to read, and sometimes I read to bear witness to someone’s rage.
Rage is not usually a desired state of being, but isn’t it a completely natural response to many of our current conditions?
From undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs:
“Some sea lions only fight for fifteen seconds but some suffering from disease outbreaks have begun to eat their own young. Looking at the responses of sea lions to species scale difficulties, I use this section to prompt us to learn from and be intentional about how the harms closest to home are both forcing and teaching us to evolve. How would we spend our time if we realized that the conflicts we are experiencing now urgently demand that we create a more loving world as soon as possible?”
“Sea lions stake their claims on strips of beach and flight each other over them. They vocalize to keep each other from getting too close.”
“The Maori have a taonga or treasured relationship with the rãpoka (sea lions) recognized in the Ngãi Tahu claims Settlement Act of 1998 (the same year of the disease outbreak in fact), but which of course is part of a much older practice of ancestral listening and acknowledgement of spiritual communion beyond the human.”
What if we listened to what rage told us? What if I listened to your rage? What would I learn about how much space you need right now?
I think of Tanaïs as another writer of rage, both legitimizing all the ordinary and unordinary ways a brown queer Bangladeshi-American femme might rage while also calling readers to contend with their Bangla rage-foremothers.
From their book, In Sensorium:
“REBELS
In this society where injustice and a law of the jungle prevail, rise like the tormented serpents in the image of the Destroyer. Respond to the call of your sister, by roaring like thunder, my sisters, as you flash like a streak of lightning!”
—Masuda Rahman, in Dhumketu, 1922, a magazine started by the poet and musician Nazrul Islam
“In Nazrul’s magazine Dhumketu, The Comet, he amplified the work of fiery Bangla Muslim women writers, like Masuda Rahman. His poem ‘Bidrohi’, or ‘The Rebel,’ catapulted him to literary and political renown, and caught the attention of British colonial authorities. Alarmed by his incendiary calls for freedom in Dhumketu, they arrested him. In jail, Nazrul wrote hundreds of poems, and in court, he defiantly recited a poem in verse as his defense. He opposed Bengal’s Partition and married a Hindu woman from East Bengal, Pramila Devi.”
This is only one example of the power of rage to awaken a knowing in others. To overthrow systems of oppression. We see how dangerous it can be to show our rage to others and the power of it in building movements. Authoritarian and colonizer governments will do their best to squash our rage. We can find our own rage foremothers and learn from them, all the infinite ways to transmit rage. We can learn our histories and share fully what our ancestors suffered expressing. Again we see how to be in solidarity with our fiery sisters.
If we look around us we see earthly examples of rage as well, through the lens of planetary warming and an increase in extreme weather conditions. If we think of climate change and the corresponding droughts, fires, and extreme rainfall as a kind of planetary rage, we understand the necessity to listen to her and change course. There are signs all around us, how do we sit with them? Comprehend them? What is there for us to explore in rage around transitioning? What can all the communities that have gone on to create worlds they had never before seen show us about our natural abilities to dream? In the fire of rage what can we see that was not visible otherwise?
“Human-caused climate change is an extreme disruption of the Earth system." 3
I leave you with this image of Kali from the work of artist Manjari Sharma, showing a 2013 chromogenic print “Maa Kali”, portrayed by Payal Bhattacharya and a final thought. A thought about how rage is a billion different things. And ultimately maybe it can be seen as a tool for transition between the end or destruction of one world into the dreaming up of the next. That’s how I like to think of my rage anyway.
Kali, is the fierce manifestation of the Hindu mother goddess, or Great Goddess Devi (also known as Durga). She is a complicated symbol, simultaneously feared and adored. As she is associated with the opposing forces of destruction and death, as well as creation and salvation, she has been characterized as both vicious and nurturing. She serves as a reminder of death’s inevitability, which encourages acceptance and dispels fear. She is also a goddess of fertility and time, and is the protector often called upon during disasters and epidemics. As a symbol of productivity, she represents the cycles of nature, and can also be interpreted as a constant creator, taking life to give new life. As destroyer, Kali kills that which stands in the way of human purity and peace in both life and death, such as evil, ignorance, and egoism. Kali’s name comes from the Sanskrit word for “time,” signifying her presence throughout the course of human life.4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCUM_Manifesto
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/obituaries/valerie-solanas-overlooked.html
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/09/climate-crisis-extreme-weather-heat-rainfall-drought
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/place_settings/kali