A practice of public grief
in which I give my anger a microphone, out of reach of a sword
A few weeks ago I attended a poetry slam in which a woman took the microphone, trembling. “I’d like to publicly grieve tonight,” she said. “For years I’ve been frozen, this story holding me suspended. Please, share my grief with me.”
She told the story of sexual assault and subsequent miscarriage, which left her in a state of nervous system shutdown — living death — for years.
When she spoke, her pain rippled through the audience, and we made the circle bigger for her — let her anger, and pain, and grief come through.
It was the kind of night that makes people squirm. But that is the beautiful thing about poetry — and poets — they make space for this. They practice it.
What if we took these practices into the real world? Pushed against the knee-jerk buttoned up socially acceptable responses? Titrated our tolerance?
I think our future depends on it, to be honest. So I’ll go next.
A few weeks after October 7, a dear and respected friend labeled me, after I voiced my support for Palestinian resistance and against the ongoing genocidal terrorism of Israel, as “woke supporter for terrorism.”
“There are few better ways to signal ‘don’t know myself’ then to have a trauma history you can’t face and a sense of enlightened support for radical political violence against civilians,” he told me.
“Do you realize how it looks?” he asked me, and then answered his own question: Like a crazy person. Like a delusional person. Like a violent person.
Our conversation couldn’t go much further. I had no interest in defending myself, and he had no interest in whether or not his assumptions were accurate. (They weren’t.)
We aren’t friends anymore.
After our “conversation,” I did, in fact, find my anger, which, instead of a “phantasy that a rape and murder spree will liberate people,” was actually a deep, sad anger. A long-loved, holy anger — and since I advocate for practicing what I preach, I’d like to get up to the microphone second, and gave her a voice.
I let my anger speak and here is what she said, black cyclone rising up out of the center of me, and her voice an arrow into the heart of the mushroom clouds billowing soot-black over Gaza. I sat with the fear of her for weeks — another angry woman, they said, echoing in my head, but my friend’s clear, if trembling, voice, showed me a path and I’d like to put my footprints over hers.
The words have someplace to go, they aren’t the only words or the most potent words, but I trust their flowing through me as a part of a process that heals; for when we direct our anger in ways that tell the truth (which hurts, but does not harm), they act as a clearing fever, burning away the imbalances of spirit that poison and plague our world.
An Invocation:
Here is what she spoke, to the plague spirit that we name patriarchy, which is a roaring lion seeking to devour, who only looks safe but is not good.
To the patriarchy, which has its claws in every crevice of the world right now, sunk most deeply into the backs of the Palestinian people, because it is deeply, intersectionally embedded with the powers of colonialism, imperialism, racism, and capitalism:
I recognize your claw marks because they were in me, too — I still have your scars across my back — and here you are again, writ large on the theater of the world. Here you are writ large in the names of four (11, updated) thousand Palestinian children, your remorseless rhetoric, your denial of their very existence, your refusal to say their names:
You are POISON.
You’ve made men who can’t see their own complicity in a culture of domination and dehumanization so thorough that the very world who screams “but what about the babies!!” are the very ones cheering while they die.
You’ve made sociopaths in suits.
You’ve made men who preach and legislate with smug pious faces in pulpits and media about sacrifice, about saviors, and yet when your voice has the power to stop the scapegoat bleeding out at your very feet you sanctioned with your apathy and silenced with your lies — you patently and persistently refuse.
I want to hurl curses at you like Jesus did, I want to spit through hissing teeth, toss tables with a whip: woe, oh woe to you! You have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness!! it would have been better for a millstone to be tied around your neck!
You hide behind your objectivity, which is objective indeed because you have made these souls into things with your favorite weapon: words — which you own, for by your word the world was made, and you can unmake it. And you do.
My anger is poised and aimed, and made of these words, leaving my mouth like arrows aimed and true. Their target is a scream: repent.
Meanwhile your anger is made of your two hands: of apathy, and of bombs.
And we know now that those are two sides of the same coin.
Here is a mirror for you, in your very words turned around for you to see yourself in:
Don’t look away this time when you say, and I echo:
“There are few better ways to signal ‘don’t know myself’ than to have a trauma history you can’t face and a sense of enlightened support for radical political violence against civilians.”
Do you see?
Do you see??
While you sit smug behind your computer screens, wielding arguments and forcing condemnations (just like the Pharisees lined up with stones at the angry, at the mouthy, at the dirty brown Samaritan woman, who was curvy and lascivious and so many men had handled her by that time it made their mouths water at the thought — and they hated her for it. So they picked up stones to erase what forced them to reckon with the truth.
Your self-hatred runs so deep you can’t bear it.
So you make others bare it.
In our time its the black women
it’s the gay men
it’s the trans activists
its the angry women
you sneer at and label “woke” and “Marxist” after stealing those very words FROM THEM and defining them by your terms, you god of yourself and by your own design, but this time I will spit in your face, a small resistance, and I am telling you in no uncertain terms;
You are the ones holding the stones.
You are right about one thing: I AM angry. You told me I was unaware of my own anger without even bothering to ask me what I know and accept about myself — you don’t see your own delusion, you were too busy self-righteously calling me self-righteous, delusionally calling me delusional, blindly calling me blind.
Man does not live by condemnation alone. You should have picked the millstone, you know. Your bread is made of ash. If you claim the sacrificial god, if you are really obsessed with a hero lifted up for the world to see, then eat a taste of your own medicine for once: use your heroic voice to stop the bombs.
In the meantime, I can only turn my heel and shake the dust off my feet as I leave your kingdom to its own ends. As you told me: good luck. I hope your way of risking delusion works out for you.
I don’t worship at your alter anymore.
