Righteous Rage

An intimate musing about rage and anger...

The first time I read radical ancestor June Jordan’s poem, “A Poem About My Rights”, I was in a West Philly apartment on a warm and sunny spring morning in April. It was my last day, I was in town for education rather than pleasure. I was a part of the Black Star Fest’s  Inaugural Audio Description Training Cohort. I wanted to ease into the morning (little did I know that poem would bring the opposite of ease).  I was alone and  preparing to meet a fellow community member that I met in the virtual realm. Instead of exploring the unfamiliar environment, I indulged in poetry from Pat Parker on youtube and finished with the 2021 reprint of Jordan’s book, Passion. Prior to buying this book, I hadn’t engaged in or studied her work, of course as a poet myself, I heard about her. At the Eaton Hotel in downtown D.C. I took a picture of the front cover of an anthology of her essays, poems, and short stories but time evaded me and I forgot to return to it, I watched the documentary “A Place Of Rage”, for the first time in either late 2020 or early 2021 (the pandemic has completely warped my perception of time), I only know that it was in between that period because I was living in a condo in Northeast, D.C. and it was the dead of winter. I found the documentary on Kanopy, that season was the beginning of me coming into political consciousness too! I gravitated to the documentary because of Audre Lorde and Angela Davis but it was June who left a lasting impression on me. 

I’ll never forget June Jordan posing the question of why she’s invited to speak at Black Liberation rallies and Gay Rights rallies separate from one another, why weren’t they conjoined? This question is still prominent unfortunately 20 something odd years later. Her voice reverberated through my ears, traveling to my heart gently plucking its strings one by one. Soon after I attended several workshops about her work, I have my reservations about them now because they didn’t touch on her radicalization, bloodlust for liberation and vengeance against imperialism, or how she was the “People’s Poet”. Nevertheless I sat in the quiet living space, with the sun peeking from the blinds. First I read it slowly..in silence, my finger moved beneath words for my brain to stay on track. When I read the last stanza, tears from the well/wailing of my inner child spilled onto the page, I hastily inhaled and exhaled to clear the mucus in my nose. My brain began to process the similarities that arose within. I interpreted it as a poem about reclamation of oneself, determination, and autonomy from the  various -isms that plague our society. I took a deep breath and began to read aloud slowly, allowing the words and missed meanings to marinate within my subsconscious similar to the process of extracting maple sap from a tree. Before I realized it, the rage that I thought I had parted ways with began engulfing my monotone voice. My throat was coarse, dry, and fiery, worse than the time I contracted strep throat in Junior High. This poem triggered deep and surface level wounds that scarred my inner child/teenager.  They  internalized the covert and overt messaging of being the wrong race/the wrong “gender”/the wrong body-type/the wrong sexual orientation/the wrong “daughter”, and just flat out wrong. June Jordan affirmed me and the aforementioned versions of myself that I/we were not and are not wrong! When I think about who ingrained and projected these false perceptions and ideologies onto me and onto my peers who ingrained them me and my parents and who ingrained it into them and their parents and so on. The culprit is white supremacy, fascism, colonialism, patriarchy, whiteness, ableism, racism, anti-blackness/afrophobia and imperialism. The systems, structures, and people who perpetuate, immolate, and uphold them are my enemies. I wasn’t taught how to properly nurture and tend to the “cosmic anger” as Aimé Cesaire put it, within me. In my upbringing anger and rage were prohibited..even if they were justified. My birth name and the definition of it came with its own baggage, how could I bear this name and be enraged or angry? No, no I’m supposed to be kind, docile, a protector of others..but who protected me against injustice, abuse, and harm? Who told me it’s okay for my anger to manifest through blood curdling screams from the depth of my soul?  Who told me to release my rage in the form of a poem or abstract painting? No one warned me that suppressing my anger would lead to a hypertension diagnosis at 26! No one warned me that suffering in silence and people-pleasing would cost me the relationships and communities that benefited from that version of me, resulting in a tower moment when I realized it wasn’t healthy or honest of me to exist in those manners (that tower taught me the real meaning of grief, chile). No one advised me to take up some type of physical activity in order to co-exist with my rage rather than shaming myself into a deep depression just for having it! Why are people so afraid of a New Afrikan/Ashanti person being enraged? Do they fear I’ll release it in the form of violence similar to the colonizer’s fear of an uprising by colonized Afrikans featured in the experimental documentary, “Concerning Violence” ?

In all honesty  I’m still cultivating a healthy relationship to my rage and anger, I’ve accepted that both are natural emotions. I can’t envision myself inflicting violence onto others as a way to cope with or manage my rage. I’ll follow the lead of writers, musicians, poets, griots, cultural and creative practitioners who came before me and my contemporaries by transmuting those urges of lashing out or raging into my work. Rage and anger get bad raps that aren’t necessary in my opinion. Allowing myself to f e e l them rather than intellectualizing or repressing them, has deepened my intrapersonal connection and intimacy. There’s not enough discourse in my opinion about the sensuality that occurs when rage and anger are acknowledged and felt. The process of honoring them requires me to be grounded and silent, in order to slow my heart rate, I engage in 6-3-6 count breathing exercise: inhale for six seconds 1, 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 then I hold my breath for 3 seconds 1 , 2 , 3 and I exhale for six seconds 1 , 2 , 3, 4 ,5 , 6. This helps to calm the urge of punching a wall or throwing books off my bookshelf. I allow my ori to and sunsum (sunsum means one’s spirit in Twi and ori means one’s higher self in Yoruba)  to guide me through processing my feelings and what triggered them to begin with, I usually sprawl out what comes out in the form of  nonlinear stream of consciousness in my journal and ultra fine point sharpie marker. Another coping mechanism is listening to upbeat punk music while lifting dumbbells in the mirror, screaming in my car or pillow, and listening to free jazz on a walk in my neighborhood. If the emotions are too overbearing I just cry and take a nap! My journals are filled with “poems” that were birthed from rage and anger, I’m still uncertain if I’ll ever share them with the masses though. I’m learning to respect my rage and anger because 9 times out of 10 they’re rooted in my thirst for righteous venegence and divine justice. Since embarking on the process of decolonization, a revelation that I’ve received from comrades to my dead folk is we/they don’t want revenge but instead vengeance for what we were/are subjected to and endure in colonial, fascist, racial capitalist and police states. Perhaps justice is vengeance, once again we’ve (specifically people of the global majority) have been brainwashed by our oppressors that we must extend grace and forgiveness to them for the atrocities committed by their ancestors against ours and for the ones committed by them onto us...We’re told that “justice will prevail'', but what they fail to mention is the scales rarely tip in our favor. There’s an immense imbalance in the material and spiritual worlds and I believe the struggle for liberation and dismantling the state and system as we know it will  initiate the balancing of those scales. Reform isn’t justice. The carceral state isn’t justice. Assimilation isn’t justice. Conformity isn’t justice. Forgiveness isn’t justice. It’s integral to our survival and existence that we get comfy with the roots of our anger and rage and utilize them to receive righteous vengeance or divine justice! It is normal and erotic for us to cultivate internal and external spaces for our anger and rage. I attended an Afrikan Poets Masterclass workshop a few days ago that was live streamed from the U.K. The facilitator discussed anger being a repeated theme in the work of Afrikan poets living through colonialism and liberation struggles. I became intoxicated while reading and listening to how the poems rooted in their anger and the structure and words were able to capture their lived experiences that are intentionally excluded from North American literature/history textbooks and curriculums. With the rise of A.I. I fear that our past, present, and futures will be revised to cater to the narrative of our oppressors, imperialists, and colonizers. History is a continuous string of patterns, the tactics of the aforementioned become more sophisticated. First they murdered, destroyed, stole, and buried the Indigenous peoples culture/history/artifacts from Afrika to Turtle Island. They killed many languages and forced them to learn English, Spanish, Portuguese and French, then convinced the descendants that our ancestors were docile and even in cahoots with colonizers and slave masters! In the words of Chairman Fred Hampton “You can kill a revolutionary but you can never kill the revolution”, I bring this quote up because the colonizers weren’t successful in revising every aspect of history. What they failed to realize is Afrikans are innate trickers, many were victorious in preserving their culture, land, and ways of being. Nana Yaa Asantewaa led an army of Ashanti men against British colonizers and although they were defeated, they were able to protect their most sacred possession, The Golden Stool! High John The Conquer helped many enslaved Afrikans in the U.S. escape bondage in the physical, spiritual, and dream realms. Griots such as June Jordan and Amiri Baraka used their creative practices and propaganda to preserve our culture and provide us with the truth that is usually hidden from us. 

For me, honoring my dead folk and past versions of myself extends beyond sacrifices and offerings of gratitude. Both acts are indeed vital to My connection with them, but honoring mine and their rage and anger are just as vital to my existence in the material and spiritual realms. I’m enraged for the ones who chose the afterlife in the Atlantic Ocean instead of enduring a life in captivity. I'm enraged for the ones who were captured psychically, psychologically, and spiritually. I’m enraged for those that died prematurely because of colonialism.. I’m angry that I can’t vent In Twi and other ancestral languages that are FOREIGN to me. I’m angry that my inner child, teenager, and early 20's selves were conditioned to suffer in silence and carry burdens so heavy THAT they misaligned my posture. I’m enraged and angry at the state of the world because of IMPERIALIST stateS. As much as my sacred anger and rage are my collaborators in this journey called life, they are also signifiers..signals to my subconscious, sunsum, body, and ori that I am A L I V E and present! Disassociation inhabited my body and mind..perhaps as protection because my brain figured I no longer had the capacity to store more trauma and grief. It experienced how it, my body, and sunsum had been weakened and distraught. I am grateful to those who taught me to grasp the roots of rage and anger, rather than perpetuate cycles of abuse and harm. I am grateful to those who taught me to transmute my anger and rage, rather than igniting intrapersonal and interpersonal reactionary fires. Rage and anger are sacred and I am devoted to tending to them as such!