When I was in college, I held a part-time job as a civic engagement organizer covering Michigan’s Washtenaw County, encompassing cities Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, for Detroit-based nonprofit APIAVote Michigan.
The job was grueling and thankless, and I watched my eighteen-year-old belief in the electoral system curdle like milk in the hot sun. However, I did take away two important physical gifts — an introduction to the works of Audre Lorde, and this image:
If you have ever been an organizer, you probably have seen this image more than you have seen your own family. They showed these fuck ass fishes everywhere. When I went out to Anaheim to organize Disney workers, or to Miami to register voters, or down to Atlanta to canvass for Jon Ossoff’s 2017 special run-off election (we flyered GA-06 through a flash flood, and I did not wear the right shoes for it). Every single convention, meeting, canvassing trip. You had to take a good long look at these fishes first, reminding you of why you are here and what your goal is.
The message of this image, of course, is in the power of the people. If we as individual fishes turn around and confront the things chasing us down, exhausting us, threatening our lives, as a collective, you can create a movement far greater than the threat making us think we are smaller and less powerful than it.
Several things have happened this past week that have made me think of this image. Aaron Bushnell died after his act of self-immolation outside the Israel embassy, calling for a free Palestine. Michigan voters swarmed to the polls and voted “uncommitted” on the Democratic presidential primary for the same reason. The Alabama Senate is now trying to legislatively pussyfoot their way back after the Supreme Court ruled that a frozen embryo is a child, which not even the most extremist among them agreed with.
Debate has floundered about the extent of impact, peppered with lots of what-abouts — Biden still won the primary by far, certain Democrats cry out, what about that? Aaron Bushnell’s sacrifice has been twisted into some unrelated narrative of mental health. What about his family relationships or his Reddit posts? What does this middling injustice of women’s autonomy signify within the weeds of the current Republican politic? At a certain point, I lose the plot of how these individual discussions are helpful. From where I stand, all of this has been part of the simple principle of little fishes turning around. Systemic oppression, grassroots action.
In Audre Lorde’s 1981 speech The Uses of Anger, she speaks on the paralysis that many women face in confronting how angry they are with the world. It can be a terrifying thing, to experience unrelenting violence from the world, bear unspeakable trauma, and realize that if you give into your rage, it could open up an endless well within you that exhausts every ounce of your soul. Many women are taught, by every outlet from their families to mass media to strangers on the street, to repress their anger. Anger is not for polite society. Anger has no place in the office, against your lying ex-boyfriends, in expressing yourself to others when you have been violated by systemic oppression. It’s why women now are pushing the emergency escape chute into tradwife culture, so afraid of sitting in their anger that now they insisting they are too dumb and girly to do anything beyond buy iced coffees and wear bows in their hair. It’s why those engineering majors making six figures who treat cruelty as rhetorical exercise, or the city transplants spending all their money on Zara and mimosas, have learned to appropriate the phrase “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism,” while failing to use their free time to absorb and learn the context and gravity of this phrase — or more importantly, try to envision and live for a world where ethical consumption is possible. Fear feeds ignorance, and the combination breeds stagnation. Perhaps in the moment, it feels better to close your eyes. Perhaps with time, you close your eyes for so long that you think you can navigate the world this way.
“I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life,” Lorde says. “Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.”
To be clear, the nihilism is understandable — the 2016 election proved that the people’s vote for a candidate of supposed “lesser evil” was a sham, and it’s a neoliberalism bordering on idiocy to place the onus of solving climate change or racism on the individual rather than those of the most powerful. But if you say you believe in something, and do absolutely nothing about it with every given opportunity to, you believe in and stand for nothing. Your moral code is about as flexible and adherent as Cheez Whiz.
In order to make this conversation less focused on the what-abouts of individual guilt, I would like to offer Lorde’s thoughts on construction:
“Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies,” she says.
I think of Nhat Chi Mai, a 33-year-old Buddhist woman who burned herself outside a nunnery in protest against the Vietnam War. Before her death, she wrote a letter to the U.S. government, saying:
I offer my body as a torch
to dissipate the dark
to awaken love among men
to give peace to Vietnam
the one who burns herself for peace.
The events of these week are not meant for quibbling hand-wringing debate any more than they are mutually exclusive. They are interconnected, instructive courses of action made by people who have the moral clarity to unpack and focus their anger towards reconstruction, at great personal cost. A flame lit by one to inspire others. A flame lit in a reality that does not exist in a vacuum. Even in the discourse after, the events of this week have shown that allowing and acting on collective anger has been more effective in challenging bigger fish than anything else.
There is as much use for your anger as there is validity behind your fears. But the events of late are not asking lone individuals to overthrow a system. They are entirely about reminding you that the people still hold power. It’s about refusing to extinguish your anger, asking you to live by your own values in some way every day, not letting the fear swallow you whole. To allow your rage to fuel your excitement and imagination for a better world, and drive you towards community.
“It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth,” Lorde says. “Unless we meet it with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices.”
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