Burn It Down Page 7

  Though Serena Williams is muscular, not fat, she has been penalized and criticized throughout her career for publicly expressing her righteous rage. In her 2018 US Open finals match against Naomi Osaka, umpire Carlos Ramos repeatedly targeted Williams, accused her of illegally receiving coaching from Patrick Mouratoglou, taxed her with a point penalty for breaking her racket, and eventually cost her a game that was crucial to her beating Osaka. Williams’ anger was, in every way, justified, especially in light of the years of mistreatment she’s faced in the sport of tennis, including being drug tested more than any other woman in the sport, being accused of purposefully building her body to overpower her opponents, and being taunted with racial and sexist slurs. Even when she’s right, she’s wrong, simply because of the body she inhabits.

  It was only in graduate school that anger became more understandable to me, as I delved into the work of Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Robin Boylorn, and other Black women who’d decided they had a right to access anger and were intent on both theorizing its importance and deconstructing how rage had become something to be shunned, never to be expressed for fear of being misinterpreted or caricatured. I immersed myself for the first time in hooks’ Killing Rage, in which she expresses her understanding that rage is a “necessary aspect of resistance struggle” and “can act as a catalyst inspiring courageous action.” I first encountered Audre Lorde’s 1981 keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in which she declares that her response to racism is anger, and that no one is served by being afraid of the weight of anger. Lorde was specifically addressing white women scholars who attempted to tone police her when she wanted to foster conversations about racism, but her call to action can’t be separated from rage as a Black feminist political project that can and will dismantle oppressive forces.

  In the pages of these books and articles and speeches written by Black feminists, I located my own anger, recognized its legitimacy, and began harnessing it in a way that allowed me to show up fully as myself without fear of confrontation. I realized that I’d developed a different relationship with anger during a class discussion of the role Black men play in perpetuating sexism in Black communities. As I began speaking, specifically referencing an interaction I’d had with a Black man online, one of my Black male classmates attempted to interject. “You can’t blame all Black men for one Black man’s fuck-up,” he began, and I felt that familiar tingling in my fingers. In that moment, I knew I had two choices: swallow the anger and keep the peace, or express exactly how I felt.

  After reading Lorde and hooks and Boylorn and Griffin and Dr. Brittney Cooper, I knew there was only one true choice. Before he could continue, I cut him off, feeling the anger rising in my voice. “Don’t interrupt me,” I said, voice shaky, but certain that I was right. I can’t remember all I said, but I know when I was finished, the room was quieter than I’d ever heard it, and I could feel the anger radiating off the walls. I then excused myself, walked to the bathroom, wetted a paper towel, and put it on my face and neck to cool down. It was the first time I’d allowed anger to guide me in an educational setting—and it was one of the most freeing moments of my life. I knew then, as I didn’t know in fifth grade, that I could respond angrily, and not apologize for it, because my anger was justified. After I calmed down, I returned to class, and finished the lecture quietly, avoiding the gaze of the man I had rebuked and reflecting on our interaction. At the end of class, as we were leaving the room, he stopped me and told me he didn’t agree with me but he respected my perspective. That was all I needed to stay angry in service to my Black feminist ethos.

  I’ve not participated in many physical altercations since that one in elementary school, but I have stopped making myself smaller and allowing people to step over me. Nowhere am I able to do this better than on social media. Whether it’s discussing feminism or fatness or politics, I use my voice online to disrupt oppressive narratives about people from marginalized communities. I do this in my work as an editor and as a writer. Anger fuels my fingers and allows me to correct folks who willfully misunderstand the work of social justice.

  Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress and the first to run for president, used “unbought and unbossed” as her political slogan to represent her approach to politics as a community endeavor rather than an individual one. This is best exemplified in her 1972 announcement speech when she said, “I am not the candidate of Black America, although I am Black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman and I am equally proud of that. I am the candidate of the people of America, and my presence before you now symbolizes a new era in American political history.”

  She understood, better than anybody, that being unbought and unbossed meant harnessing her anger and unleashing it strategically and in service to a bigger vision. It’s representative of the approach that Black women take to politics, to pop culture, to life. When we understand, as Chisholm did, as hooks and Lorde and Hill Collins and so many others theorized, that our anger is our best gift, it allows us to blaze a new path.

  It has taken me years to get this, years to accept it, and years to implement it, but being in touch with my anger as a fat Black woman has made me sure of myself. I’m no longer slow to anger. I quickly pivot to it and then use it to fuel my pen. My anger is a salve. Reclaiming anger as a legitimate response to both interpersonal and systemic transgressions is a Black feminist project that I proudly participate in—finally.

  Guilty

  ERIN KHAR

  Along the dark wood walls hung framed diplomas and a large oil painting—an impressionist landscape of blurry purples and blues that made sense if you squinted. I could hear the hum of LA rush hour outside, beyond the parking lot, on a cool October evening in the Valley. The dark brown chesterfield sofa stuck to the back of my thigh. I pulled down the hem of my gray wool uniform skirt. The light blue boxers I wore underneath—as all the girls at my school did—were peeking out. I looked up and saw that Dr. Geoffrey was waiting for me to say something. What did he ask me? I felt the hair band tight around my left wrist and removed it, putting my long brown hair up in a top knot.

  “I don’t really know how to answer that,” I said in that fourteen-year-old way as I exhaled. It was at least partially true.

  I resumed running my fingers along the edge of my skirt, opening and closing the pleats. I looked up. Dr. Geoffrey had one arm crossed, the other resting on his elbow, his chin in his hand, like he was studying me, like he didn’t believe me.

  “You mention that you feel guilty a lot,” Dr. Geoffrey said.

  “I do?” I asked.

  “Do you know what all the guilt is really about?” he asked.

  “That I’ve done things I feel guilty about?”

  “All that guilt—it’s unexpressed anger,” he said.

  I couldn’t respond. His words hung in the air and multiplied and swarmed around me. My face flushed.

  “I don’t think I’m angry,” I said in a whisper.

  “You have a right to be angry, Erin. You have that right.”

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.

  I quickly got up and walked out the door, across the hall, carrying the bathroom key attached to a large blue disc. I shut the door behind me and closed the latch at the top with my clammy hands. I put my back against the door and slid down, landing cross-legged on my purple Doc Martens. The bathroom spun and swelled. I turned my head and let my cheek rest against the door—telling myself it was a less-gross alternative to the floor—and concentrated on breathing. I shut my eyes and counted.

  When I was four, my maternal grandfather died and took my mother with him, leaving me with a ghost. When I missed her—the before mom—I would sneak into her room, open her bottle of Opium perfume, and carefully put some on the back of my hand so I could smell it through the day.

  When I was four, the son of a family friend began to touch me,
spreading his angry fingers into all parts of me, leaving his anger inside me. I told no one; instead, I let his anger circulate, and I began to hate myself.

  When I was four, I fell climbing on a fence at my preschool, and landed on it, right between my legs. I remember the overalls I was wearing, and the red T-shirt. And the air was perfect that day. I bled; I had to pee in a bathtub for a week.

  I’d be lying if I said I knew the exact order of these events, but when I was four years old, I was afraid to fall asleep and I’d sit in the corner of my bedroom, in the dark. I’d sit on my hands because I wanted to break things; I wanted to scream. Anger rose up in my chest, an anger that would materialize inside me from some unknown source. I’d collect its heat in fiery gumballs that I’d swallow whole and lock away.

  Then the panic attacks came, and anxiety—the type of anxiety that wraps slender arms around you, squeezing tighter and tighter. To make it stop, I’d hold my breath and count. And I’d smell the back of my hand, searching for some trace of my mother’s Opium perfume.

  I started keeping secrets. I told them to Sai-ee-doe, my imaginary friend who lived in the antique icebox in the corner of our dining room. I’d climb right in there with Sai-ee-doe and tell my secrets and swallow all the bitter until it burned a hole inside of me.

  When I was eight, my parents separated, and the remnants of my mother felt weightless, like they’d blow away if I spoke too loudly. Her gray-green eyes looked elsewhere—past me. I felt guilty—guilty that she was left alone with me in that big Spanish house, left alone to take care of me. I didn’t want to need her.

  I felt heat rise to the surface, just beneath my skin, living in the spaces between the veins and capillaries that pumped all the blood through my body. The heat took my breath, and one day my breath felt like it was never coming back. Around the heat was something I couldn’t identify—a feeling that choked me, a shame rising up in my throat, thick and cloying.

  On a Saturday afternoon, I sat in my room on my brass twin bed and picked at a scab on my knee. I heard my mother on the phone—upset, muffled, hollow, far away, even though she was just down the hall. Heat rose under my skin, up the back of my neck. My ears burned. I looked at the Laura Ashley wallpaper on my bedroom walls—white with tiny blue flowers that matched my quilt. I felt trapped, stranded on my bed, an island in the center of a room whose walls with tiny blue flowers pressed in.

  I locked myself in our upstairs bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet, unsure of what I was looking for. Inside the cabinet, next to the tiny scissors and Betadine and Band-Aids and dental floss was a golden-brown pill bottle. Darvocet. My grandmother’s name was on it. It was expired. I didn’t know what the pills were, but there was an orange label on the bottle with the profile of a man who looked dazed, tiny bubbles and a squiggly line floating in front of his closed eyes. It read, “May cause drowsiness or dizziness.” An exit—an exit from the madness and fury and the mercurial breath that wouldn’t just settle in my lungs—in a large red pill that made me gag when I swallowed it with water from the bathroom sink in a toothbrush cup.

  I returned to my room, returned to the island of my brass bed, and took out the book beneath my pillow—The World According to Garp. I had stolen the book from the wall of books in our den. Reading was what I used to turn to when I was anxious, when I couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t working so well anymore. I flipped through the book, finding the sentences I’d underlined, rereading random passages. After some time had passed, my head began to feel light and heavy at the same time—too heavy to hold up, but containing thousands of tiny bubbles, like the ones on the warning label—that glided and bounced around inside. I shut my eyes, and the heat of anger hovering beneath my skin and the lump of shame caught in my throat lifted, drifting away like lost balloons.

  After that day, I started searching the medicine cabinets of family members and friends’ parents. Any bottle with a label of a droopy eye or a head swimming with tiny bubbles or a caution against operating heavy machinery would be opened, its contents winnowed.

  At thirteen, I was offered heroin for the first time, by my sixteen-year-old boyfriend whom I’d asked for pills. It was an easy decision to make. There was no decision. It was madness and fury transmuted to guilt and unconsciousness.

  At fourteen, I stopped using drugs, and my anger radiated from the ends of my fingers and in hot, furious tears and in words that cut through the air like javelins, and I couldn’t control where they landed. The anger was a knife I pulled and a chair I threw at my mother and blood on my arms from fingernails dug so deep in an attempt to harness all that rage.

  My parents had no choice; they had to notice. I don’t remember talking to them about it, but they sent me to therapy with Dr. Geoffrey. I told him I used to dabble with drugs. I told him I’d lied about having a boyfriend, about where I’d been spending my time. I told him that I felt guilty that my mom was stuck with me. I told him how guilty I felt about all of it. But still, I couldn’t tell him I was angry; I couldn’t let that door open because if I did, the heat below my skin would burn me into nothing.

  I sat on the floor of the bathroom, across the hall from Dr. Geoffrey’s office, with my eyes closed, my cheek pressed against the disgusting door, counting and breathing. And I felt angry. Angry at him. Angry for suggesting that I had unexpressed anger.

  I stood up and walked to the sink, turned the faucet on and let the cool water run on my hands before dabbing water behind my ears and on my neck. I stared back at my reflection in the dull mirror and slapped my cheek hard. I splashed more water on my face, grabbed the key attached to the big blue disc, and returned to Dr. Geoffrey’s office, where I told him everything was just fine.

  And I bounced, for more than a decade, between anger and heroin. I went from high to unyielding, unwieldy rage and back again, and I couldn’t figure out how to stop one without the other.

  Lyssa, the Greek goddess of fury and madness, is the daughter of Nyx—Night. She is madness personified. She inflicts insanity on heroes and rabies on dogs. Lyssa makes Heracles crazy, and he murders his wife and children. Lyssa’s sisters, also daughters of Night, are the Maniae—they embody crazed frenzy.

  Anger in a woman is akin to madness; it felt like madness inside of me, it looked like madness to others.

  Maybe if they let us be angry, we wouldn’t go mad.

  A partial list of things people have called me when I let myself be angry:

  irrational

  unstable

  toxic

  scary

  in need of help

  in need of therapy

  in need of a mental hospital

  in need of medication

  a lunatic

  idiotic

  paranoid

  psychotic

  hysterical

  nuts

  deranged

  schizophrenic

  demented

  crazy

  insane

  a psycho

  a broken dog

  a bitch

  a cunt

  As a girl, I learned to fear my anger. My anger scared my mother. My anger could land me in a mental hospital, they said. My anger became so many iterations of “What is wrong with you?” that the only solution was to push it down deep into that burning hole and let it come out in any other way but anger.

  As a young woman, I ran from my anger. I ran from it because I thought it would eat me up. I ran from it because I didn’t deserve to be angry. I was a bitch and a slut and a liar and a fraud. My anger left shoe prints on a bedroom ceiling when I kicked off an ankle boot in a fit of rage over what I was wearing. My anger left a trail of spiteful words I couldn’t take back lashed out at boyfriends and friends. But only when I was sober.

  As a junkie, I was a walking apology. I’m so sorry I’ve disappointed you. I am so sorry I relapsed. Again. I am so sorry that I lied, that I stole, that I did all the things I said I would never do. I am sorry that I exist to disappoint you, to bring you s
hame.

  I took my anger and shot it in my arm. I took my anger and snorted it right up my nose. I took my anger and smoked it off a piece of tin foil, and in a crack pipe. I took my anger and carved up my leg with a box cutter. If I just kept shooting, snorting, smoking, I could kill it all away. The hole in me grew, and Lyssa, the Greek goddess of fury and madness, burrowed herself into its borders.

  I’d like to tell you that I figured it all out on my own, that when I hit bottom and went to rehab for the second time it all clicked for me. But it didn’t. I kept going, kept running, and then I got pregnant, and I decided to have the baby, despite all common sense.

  As a pregnant woman, I wasn’t glowing and happy and peaceful and beautiful. I was scared and newly sober and unsure and most of all, enraged. I doubted my decision to have that baby every day of my pregnancy and my parents and the father of my child doubted it too.

  I’d like to tell you that when I had my son, Atticus, it all went away, that it all fell into place, that I became the mother I never thought I could be, that the anger just sloughed away like dead skin collecting at my feet. That wouldn’t be the whole truth. Things did change when I had Atticus. I loved him more than I hated myself. And that love pushed me forward, pushed me toward getting real help. But it didn’t happen overnight, and that baby became a boy, and he saw my anger spin off of me at times and look like madness.