“To be angry at the right person, at the right time, about the right thing—that is the key.”
“Behind every mad is a sad.”
—an undergrad conflict management professor (almost quoting Aristotle)
I recently had the privilege to take an online seminar, “Sand into Castles,” with a group of Generation X women writers via the HerStories Writing Summit. One of the sessions considered “anger as method.” We discussed authors such as Julia Cameron, who suggests anger is a friend, and Soroya Chemaly, who in her book Rage Becomes Her suggests women are conditioned to minimize our anger. We were directed to take ten minutes and free-write about what makes us angry. And I got to wondering where else are the safe places for women to express anger? Where do I feel safe expressing anger? Who gets to be angry? It’s like this question: who is an author? It’s not a matter of who is but of who gets to be. I’m angry at all the things that I don’t get to be angry about. I mean, I spend a great deal of time trying not to be angry. I mean, I spend a great deal of time walking.
Somewhere I learned that it wasn’t safe to be angry. My father had a terrible temper. Destructive to him and my family. So, in my dating life, I gravitated towards the familiar, men with bad tempers. One reason I’m the Single Never Married Female that I am. About my temper when I’ve pushed back, I’ve been called a “psychobitch” and other derogatory terms. One man said about not wishing to see me again, “You seem like you’re angry at the world.”
Still, seems like everyone has license to get angry but me. I’m expected to be the “nice girl.” Blame it on Iowa Nice, blame it on my conservative rural upbringing, blame it on my generation or my education. But I can only play nice for so long, and then once I’ve reached my limit, that’s it. I unleash.
My brother once told me, “You hold your cards so close to your chest.” Then when I did unleash my frustration at family dynamics, after having approached him repeatedly and more gently about my frustrations at being the scapegoat black sheep, he held my anger against me. “I am not your toxic waste dump,” I retorted back.
But my temper once unleashed looks and sounds ugly.
In terms of gender justice, however, I believe in the mantra “I’ve been helped as much by men as by women; I’ve been hurt as much by women as by men.” Here are some things some women have said about my anger:
- In high school, when I would protest inequities: You know, Laura, you attract more flies with honey than with vinegar.
- My boss at the tax office, when I would protest micromanagement, warned my coworkers: Don’t get on Laura’s bad side.
- My VocRehab counselor, when I would protest my unemployment/underemployment status: You need to be more aware of how contorted your face gets when you are upset.
- A professor, when I would protest my frustrations with departmental politics and my not leveling up: It’s about equity, and by the way, faculty are more exhausted than you.
My mother, who also doesn’t allow me to get angry though she justifies her tantrums, noticed I do have a saving grace. Since my youth, I’ve been affected and effected by films like Gandhi. This radar has carried me through the years. A gay Mennonite minister observed that my social justice feisty streak has served me well, and it will serve me well for the calamities and turbulent times ahead. But lately I wonder, is that pit in my stomach in the middle of the night anger? About the injustices the people of this country are experiencing?
After reading about how other artists use anger as method to fuel their instrument, whether that be vocals or trumpet, as in the book How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind, by La Marr Jurelle Bruce, I’ve been thinking more about the practice of “anger as method.” What if I let my wild poet’s hair down a bit? If I could get up on my soapbox and shout to the world my rant, what might I say?
Well, back to reading bell hooks and Roxanne Gay and Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich and Claudia Rankine as inspiration. Back to walking therapy. And writing.
Bibliography
Bruce, La Marr Jurelle. How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity. Duke University Press, 2021.
Cameron, Julia, and Mark Bryan. The Artist’s Way. Sounds True Recordings, 1993.
Chemaly, Soraya. Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger. Simon and Schuster, 2018.
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Laura Sweeney, MS/MPA/MFA, facilitates Writers for Life in Iowa and Illinois. She represented the Iowa Arts Council at the First International Teaching Artist’s Conference in Oslo, Norway. Her poems and prose appear in seventy-plus journals and twenty-five anthologies in the States, Canada, Britain, Indonesia, and China. Recent awards include a scholarship to the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. She is a PhD candidate and Instructor of Record, English Studies/Creative Writing, at Illinois State University.