Waiting to Rage

Printed in upcoming Revolution She Wrote anthology

By Walidah Imarisha

I recently had the disturbing revelation: I have lost my ability to yell.

I don't mean I lost my voice, or that that my vocal cords are strained. Psychologically, mentally, inside my head, I couldn't yell, couldn't allow myself to yell.

It happened when I was working with Ricanstruction, a Puerto Rican political punk band. I had written a poem that we were going to set to some punk music/noise. They asked me to yell: "We were envisioning something really loud and angry here, borderline screaming." "No problem," I said, "of course I can do that." But when I went to practice the poem, no scream, no warcry, not even a yelp emerged.

I know I used to be able to be loud. I know this because my mother was always telling me to "check my volume control." From playground yards to classrooms to social gatherings, I have been shushed throughout my life. I would terrorize entire neighborhoods with my bellows; my mother would get calls from three blocks away asking her to quiet me down.

As a spoken word artist, I've learned to revel in my voice, to make the words I create and speak take up space. Volume is not only an asset for my art, but a political statement as a black woman: You may not like me, but shit, there is no way you're going to ignore me. I have always had a problem with poets, especially female poets, who fall into the "love jones" laid-back chill vibe poetry voice that lulls you to sleep. Poetry should soothe, yes, but in the spirit of Nikki Giovanni, Miguel Pinero and the Last Poets, it should rage, demand, challenge and explode as well.

And it's not that I don't have the ability to get loud when absolutely necessary. I have performed to a hundred people and no amplification, simply reaching deep into my abdomen and pulling my verses out, flinging them at the crowd. When I'm at events or rallies, people always ask me to make announcements because even without a bullhorn, I can make my voice penetrate a full-blown din.

I thought.as a radical black feminist poet writer rebel and rabble rouser, I had conquered the thinking that good girls don't get loud, don't take up too much space, either with their bodies or their voices. I have always prided myself on the fact that I don't want to mother anyone with my writings, I want to sear truth out of them, and if folks didn't leave one of my performances feeling uncomfortable, then I sure didn't do my job that night. Implicit in that, I thought, was my reclamation of my voice, a process I was sure I had successfully completed. Done, check that off the list, move on to the next item of decolonization of my mind.

But, as I tried to practice this poem, I realized that being loud was not necessarily the same as screaming, as raging. There is a release in yelling, a loss of control and a vulnerability in that anger that I thought I could not afford, and moreover that black women have been told we can not afford for centuries.

To live in this society as any oppressed person is to live on a razor's edge. To live as a black woman is to live on that edge balancing a stack of bricks. Historically, black women have hoped that if we accept the image of womanhood fed to us, if we silence our anger at the thousand daily insults hurled at us, ball it up and stuff it down until it begins to eat away at us, that perhaps we will be, if not welcomed, at least tolerated. There is no place in that for loudness, which would shatter the illusion of access to the amerikan dream.

Regardless of any attempts, things have not gotten better, and arguably have gotten worse. To deal with racism without, sexism within, beauty standards, the poverty industry, prison industrial complex, militarization of police forces, drugs in our community, the criminalization of a generation, and Halle Berry nekked in Monster's Ball... how can we not want to cry out? And conversely, how can we not bite our tongues until blood fills our mouth, rather than show any outward sign of agony?

So often have we been forced to cry out in pain, to scream from anguish, to yell in futile thwarted fury by forces beyond our control, our loudness has not come from inside ourselves, but has been pressed and squeezed by societal forces and daily oppressions until it is so foreign and alien, we feel we can not claim it for our own.

And when we do cry out, who hears us? Those who are inflicting the agony in the first place? I see laughing white faces, pointing at a lynched and burning body hanging from southern trees, and I see the NYPD's modern version of strange fruit in housing project hallways. I see the faces of fathers, brothers, lovers and strangers defiling our existence and desecrating the bonds of family. I see Clarence Thomas and Mike Tyson and Ike Turner and Tupac Shakur molded and shaped by a society that has no use for black women who are not on their backs or on their knees. When faced with this conspiracy of oppression, why would we give this world the satisfaction of vocalizing our woundedness?

And how do you scream for a hundred million sistas over the bloody pages of history with only one throat?

All women in this society are taught that anger is not acceptable, that if we have wrath and venom at our lot in life, we are to blame for that, in this land of milk and honey, this land of plenty. We must turn it inward, always inward, let it consume our minds and then our flesh.

I realized I had been screaming for years, only in my head, only where I could hear it, only where it would keep me up nights, buried so that it would not shock, disturb or disgust others.

Men get to have machismo as a release: they can get drunk, yell at each other during a barroom fight and allow some of their desperation and fear to be beaten out of them, or into someone else. This outlet offers an immediate outlet for this hostility, but it is not a healthy one. Instead, it leaves a heavy sticky residue that clots, in time blocking everything but that burning anger. They too, in essence, are turning their rage inward: to themselves, the community, the faces that reflect their own rage back at them, and our already battered bodies.

Too few of us have been taught how to deal with our anger, how to turn it into a productive emotion, how to use it to create rather than destroy. Those who are allowed that space often do not look like me. I have been a fan of punk and hardcore music for years, but as I started panicking about the loss of my scream, I started searching through my tapes and cds for female voices that grate and clamor some semblance of my pain and my experience. I found some pitifully small pickings. Add onto that women of color, and I begin to understand why I immediately think male when I think loud and punk. It is the domain of white men, some brown men, and scattered women who have picked up a mic to howl, "I am tired of bleeding for you... I want you to bleed through your ears for me!" We need more.

Fuck knows if I can be one of banshee bandito subversive siren soldiers, but I will tell you I ran out one night to the park near my house, and screamed my voice raw, shouting to the trees and the dark clouds and the grass that I will not be overlooked or ignored. And I know this is only the beginning.

We must reclaim our voice. All of it. Just when we think the work is done, we find there is more to do. A voice whispers to me, "Our voices have always been political, always been powerful. Why do you think this culture has worked so hard to steal them from us?" First, the struggle was just to keep a space for ourselves, to survive the press of foreign lands and slave hands. Then we raised our head, next our fist. This is the time we raise our voices, not in song, not in prayer, not in supplication, but it will be a harmonious sound. Rebellion is a beautiful sound.

In issuing our war cries, we must also learn how to live with our rage. We must not hide it from view, like self-inflicted scars and unnamed addictions. We must also not use it as a weapon, either on ourselves or others. It is not to be cherished and romanticized. Our anger is real, tangible and utterly human, something we must carry tucked close to our bodies for warmth. We must be ever ready to lay it down, when the time comes. Until that time comes, we hold it as a pen to write our realities in clear resounding voices, voices that bounce off pages and echo in performance spaces and fly around lecture halls and growl from cd grooves.

Ricanstruction does a lot of work around the issue of Vieques and stopping the u.s. military bombing occurring on that Puerto Rican island, and they have a disclaimer before they perform: “If you think our music is too loud, it is as loud as the bombs they are dropping on our people.” We have to be louder than the bombs we face every day, so that we and our children will not hear constant shelling outside our door, but the simple soothing noise of their mothers, aunts, mentors and sistas taking up space.

We must learn to yell through our rage, write through our rage, cry through our rage, love through our rage, but mostly we have to learn to live through our rage.