RP1 Anger and Apathy: What's Paralyzed Me

Chrystos’ poem told us that “there is no such beast as too angry”. I can accept that. In fact, I find it pretty exciting to see this poet validating and legitimizing anger. However, this concept is in stark contrast to another that, until now, I also identified with very closely. Toni Morrison, was quoted in an interview with CBS radio host Don Swaim saying: “Anger…it’s a paralyzing emotion…you can’t get anything done. People sort of think it’s an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling—I don’t think it’s any of that—it’s helpless…it’s absence of control—and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers…and anger doesn’t provide any of that—I have no use for it whatsoever”.  I used this quote to justify my own neutrality, my collectedness and reserved responses to what upset me. I thought, as this quote allowed me to, that suppressing my own anger would allow me the control and thus the power to respond whatever I was called to respond to in a reasonable way. What I realize happened though, is I stopped finding things to respond to. I turned off anger, and stopped reacting altogether.

So, since encountering the Chrystos text and acknowledging the problem of my well-intentioned apathy, I’ve been in the process of trying to balance those two important but conflicting understandings of anger. On one hand, Chrystos’ notion of anger seems to fill all those criteria that Morrison suggests and I could agree are negative: she’s “angry” “riled” “enraged” “steaming mad” enough to kill but also “so damn angry [she] can’t breath”. She does seem a paralyzed by anger. However, I don’t think it’s really her anger that’s paralyzing her. I would argue that civilization’s rejection of anger, the consistent devaluation of and silencing of outrage that makes it feel impossible to act from within that state of mind.

In school, this society, we’re told not to be so angry. We’re trained in logic and argument so that when we do need to say something, we can be cool and reasonable enough to not upset those we must convince. Anger is stigmatized and marginalized—wholly removed from a place in academia, politics, and most of our ever cordial society and yet we cannot remove it from our own minds. We’re indoctrinated with tools to fight ourselves and our passion. Why is any society attempting to invalidate the common reaction to injustice shared by most people, and why are they getting away with it?

            I, like Chrystos am angry that I’m not allowed to be angry. Toni Morrison may be, too. I know that the few years I spent resigning myself to only irritation, frustration and other cop-out, qualified dilutions of anger were the least productive of my life. I’m learning to see anger as inspiration, again. I’ll react actively to that which upsets me—excuse me: I’ll react actively to what makes me angry. I’ll go back and familiarize myself with the vocabulary of outrage, let it take up equal merit as my cool rhetoric of discontent. I’m working on reminding myself that there is no such beast as too angry; now I can reject the apathy I was persuaded into embracing—and that has proved to be the real paralyzing force.