Orchestrate Your Furies

Reminders from Audre Lorde’s The Uses of Anger

In these times of a 24 hour-bad-news-cycle, every so often, sometimes with only mere days or moments in between, I am overcome with a seething rage. It feels like my head might begin to spin in its very spot between my shoulders like a scene in a campy horror flick. More often than not, these potentially explosive and cinematic expressions of rage are fleeting. I well with anger like a flash flood more-so than a steadily rising tide. My pulse racing, cheeks heating, and eyes narrowing might not be noticeable to anyone else, but the sensations move through me like a power surge. 

Any of the growing numbers of horrors can incite a flash, a news clip, a headline, an image of unmitigated violence or human-made catastrophe. In the past, I have learned to process the rage and leverage it into some kind of action (Calls! Rallies! Policy change!). But recently, I find myself increasingly debilitated by it. It has been overwhelming, and stifling over these pandemic months, perhaps my ability to harness it was diminished by the constant fury incited by the policies of the Trump Administration. Or the incessant fear of climate catastrophe in my home along the Gulf Coast. Or the relentless uptick in death from a deadly virus.

 When I saw the images of men on horses, fury on their faces as they forged into the Rio Grande with whips, leaning out to corral human beings I felt a flash. I shouted, in my small room, where I sat alone, “SEEKING ASYLUM IS LEGAL YOU MONSTERS!” As though my voice might carry the 360 miles from where I sit to the river at Del Rio, Texas. The rage swelled and swelled but I couldn’t grasp it quickly enough. I spent that night sleepless, with the images of Haitians running through the river being chased by white men on horseback wielding the power of empire floating through my mind each time I closed my eyes. 

Just days before, I had to stand up from my desk propelled by anger, when I heard the Governor of my state say that his brutal and regressive abortion ban wouldn’t really impact women who wanted an abortion because they had been raped, claiming they’d have plenty of time to sort that out, and they shouldn’t worry about it anyway, because he’s created a task-force in the Governor’s office to end all rapes in Texas. I couldn’t focus on my work for hours that afternoon, because each time I sat down again, I thought of every survivor of sexual assault I’ve ever known. Knowing that 6 weeks pregnant is just about 2 weeks late with your period, I felt my anger bubble at the willful ignorance and cruelty that would make someone care so little about others. I thought those I’ve spoken to, or driven to a clinic after a sexual assault and think, “if I did that today, in Texas, I could be charged with a crime by anyone who saw me.” Worse than that even, the survivor would probably be unable to get an abortion because it would be too late. 

Increasingly, I find it difficult to regroup from these flashes of rage, and its power is wearing thin. Wearing me down. It turns rapidly rancid — souring into despair too quickly for me to use to help me fight back. 

And so, in order to regroup and remember how to metabolize and channel this anger-turned-despair, I turned back to one of my most dearly held political and spiritual texts, Audre Lorde’s The Uses of Anger. In this speech, given in 1981 at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Lorde told us that  “my response to racism is anger. That anger has eaten clefts into my living only when it remained unspoken, useless to anyone.” 

The harrowing, constant violence at the hands of the state has indeed been eating clefts into my living. How can we respond? How can I snatch back my sense of purpose and control from the claws of rage-turned-despair? Audre offers us a practice:

“Women of Color in America have grown up within a symphony of anger at being silenced at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive, it is in spite of a world that takes for granted our lack of humanness, and which hates our very existence outside of its service. And I say symphony rather than cacophony because we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us apart.”

I look back time and again to my beloved CF Brittney’s essay “In Defense of Black Rage,” where she makes it acutely how Black rage functions in the face of historical dishonesty about what America is and how it was forged. She writes, “Black people have every right to be angry as hell about being mistaken for predators when really we are prey. The idea that we would show no rage as we accrete body upon body – Eric Garner, John Crawford, Mike Brown (and those are just our summer season casualties) — is the height of delusion. It betrays a stunning lack of empathy, a stunning refusal of people to grant the fact of black humanity, and in granting our humanity, granting us the right to the full range of emotions that come with being human. Rage must be expressed. If not it will tear you up from the inside out or make you tear other people up.”

Understanding rage as valid and valuable is only the first step, as Lorde reminds us, saying,“My anger has meant pain to me, but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I’m going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity.” Lorde has moved us from dialectic to movement. Perhaps our rage can serve as an instrument of cartography — toward mapping and orchestrating our furies.

Philosopher Maria Lugones, in her book "Peregrinajes/Pilgrimages," pushes us to map different kinds of anger, the kind of anger that vies for respect from an oppressor, or the kind that blames others for wrongdoing, or the anger of a person trying to resist oppression. She writes, “A beginning but significant step in the work of training our angers is understanding ourselves and each other in anger.” In The Uses of Anger, Lorde makes such maps: 

“And while we scrutinize the often painful face of each other’s anger, please remember that it is not our anger which makes me caution you to lock your doors at night and not to wander the streets of Hartford alone. It is the hatred which lurks in those streets, that urge to destroy us all if we truly work for change rather than merely indulge in academic rhetoric. 

This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change. But our time is getting shorter.”

She is reminding us to work with, and not against, the tide of horrors-turned-anger  — to make the vital distinction between anger and hatred, and to seek comrades that see what we see, that rage alongside us, and refuse an existence of mere service.

For any and all of you struggling to harness your own anger, suffering from anger fatigue or overload, I wish you rest. And when you have rested well, may you honor your rage in the most beautiful of symphonies and create the sounds that will tremble empires.