Anger is a Sacred Thing. I'm Learning To Use Mine Better.
A newsletter on great books and the students who are teaching us all.
“Oh, how right Toni had been that she’d seen him as a prize! Now she began to see him as a scared person. Frightened of being left, of not being in control, of not being good enough. And she realized that, yes, while she was often anxious about falling short in her life, she was not a person who was scared. Not to stand on her own. To leave home, to chase ambitions, to endure solitude in pursuit of a different future. One without a net.” (Anita De Monte Laughs Last, p.319)
Xochitl Gonzalez’s brilliant new novel Anita de Monte Laughs Last is a triumph. It is a novel about the world of galleries, residencies, exhibitions, retrospectives, art catalogs and collectors and what is or isn’t concerned significant art. More than that though, it is a story that thrums with rage at the waste of life cut short and the evil of people who actively destroy others because of their own deficiencies, insecurities and selfishness. The characters in this book fight with their blood, sweat and skin for survival and the thriving of self and familial, artistic, and chosen lineages.
The novel is told from the perspective of two female racialized artists. The first artist is named Anita de Monte. She is Cuban, and has had to fight for space in the art world. She is married to Jack Martin, a heavily celebrated white artist. Across decades, his use of bricks and steel and straight lines is praised for being about “nothingness”, about not being “caught up” in identity politics. The insinuation of course is that that makes his art somehow better, purer, neutral.
When we meet Anita and Jack in the first chapter, we see two people who truly do not like each other. This is a relationship that has soured. With a new skin “thick like coconut shells” for protection, Anita makes herself impervious to her husband’s hurts and focuses on her art. She has already won prizes and residencies, but now major galleries are buying her work and she is at the entryway of being more visible and understood. A few pages later, we find out that Anita has died by either falling or been pushed out of a window, and her husband is under arrest for suspected murder. Her death happens in 1985.
The narrative then skips to 1998 where we meet Raquel, a Latina student at Brown University about to start a prestigious internship in the summer before her final year of university. She is at a university where she is one of few racialized students, where there are class differences between her and her classmates and where others tell her she has achieved what she has because of affirmative action. She is an Art History major and despite being smart and hardworking she believes that she is not enough. On her part, she tries not to antagonize others by doing anything unexpected. She decides to make her senior thesis about Jack Martin for example, because he is a person her supervisor cares about, even though he does not move her personally.
Her trajectory shifts when she falls for a graduating art student who is wealthy, already selling pieces, and who is preparing for a show of his own. She does not like his work, but she does not share her opinions. The more she acquiesces, the more her boyfriend tries to shape her, advising her what to wear, how to do her hair, sulking when she gives time to other things, discouraging her from eating full meals so that she does not gain weight. He is keen for her to be part of his world, but he does not pay attention to her friends, her hobbies, her commitments and her family. It is a relationship that strikingly resembles the relationship between Jack Martin and Anita De Monte.
The novel is interspersed with chapters told from the perspective of these two women and some from the perspective of Jack. In Anita’s chapters, her grief at not being able to create, to participate, to struggle, to try again, is palpable, but more than that, you can feel her rage at the well-resourced efforts to bury her existence and her artistic legacy. It is not enough that Anita is gone, everything connected to her must be stamped out. How these artists find each other and connect to one another is the story of this book.
I read this novel as university students from Texas to Washington, New York to California and Montreal and more peacefully protest the genocide in Gaza and the destruction across Palestine and demand that their schools divest from Israel. Every single university in Gaza has been destroyed by the Israeli Occupation Forces. In response, at great cost to themselves, students have set up peaceful, calm solidarity encampments only to be arrested, kicked out of their housing, suspended from their programs, and subject to extreme force. Faculty members protecting students and participating in protests have been arrested and subject to force too.
I’ve spent more of my professional and student career than not on university campuses. In my last role, I was an experiential educator helping students make meaning of their experiences as they charted their path post graduation. Seeing students sing, pray, dance, share food, celebrate and resist with steadfastness in these last several days has been profoundly moving and healing in a way I cannot fully describe.
Like this novel, these encampments are testimony to the sacredness and dignity of anger. Like generations of young people and students before them, their persistence in standing for justice on their respective campuses is a testimony that every person of the tens of thousands (the last count was over 34,000 but it is impossible to keep accurate records now) who has been killed, tortured, kidnapped, starved in Gaza, Rafah, the West Bank and more in the last two hundred plus days warrants us to stop what we are doing and pay attention. They deserve our rage and our collective building of something new together. The commitment of the young people in these encampments has led to video thank you messages from children in Gaza, others travelling to the encampments to support and citizen-journalists like Bisan sharing this heartfelt reflection that these protests of students in the US are giving hope and life to those in Palestine at a time when every drop of hope is needed.
And as these protests give life, participating in them is changing those who participate in them as well. Speaking at the Free Palestine Encampment at UC Berkeley, journalist Mohammed al-Kurd spoke to the audience about the connected nature of liberation struggles “out there” to liberation struggles and abolition movements right here in North America. He spoke to the importance of noticing how these different struggles are connected.
The steadfastness and critical self reflection he speaks about is “is a core tenet of anti-oppressive practice” 1 and a “way to facilitate critical consciousness” 2
According to Cunliffe, critical reflexivity focuses on three issues:3
Existential: Who am I and what kind of person do I want to be?
Relational: How do I relate to others and to the world around me?
Praxis: The need for self conscious and ethical action based on a critical questioning of past actions and of future possibilities.
In other words, these protests are not simply a moment of time. They are changing students, they are changing campuses, they are changing those who witness them. And we are only able to witness and be open to change to the extent that we have space and acceptance for these emotions within ourselves.
I was at a multi-day somatics/body training in California earlier this month and on one of the final days of the course we did an “emotion lab” in which our head teacher led us through a series of emotions with a partner. When our partner was going through the series of emotions, we practiced “being a riverbank”, a shore by which their emotions could be expressed. Our lesson in our role was to notice how we reacted to the presence of emotions in another and see how we were able to allow space for another person to have their own experience and still be supportive and present for them. We practiced being not overly close energetically so that we end up curtailing their experience, and not aloof and running away from them either, but grounded, rooted, present.
When it was my turn to be the participant rather than the witness, one of the emotions I was asked to let pass through me was anger. In our debrief about the activity, I shared that as I let myself feel into my anger, I found myself modulating how much I let myself experience so that I could still learn and be able to participate in the rest of the day. My anger can take over my entire nervous system, leaving my joints fiery, my thoughts scattered, my stress levels high and I did not want to go there. As the anger attempted to enter the emotion room, I rejected it at the doorway.
There is a difference however between disorganized activation and purposeful rage. The students in the solidarity encampments are focused, intentional, principled, steadfast and determined. Their anger and their love is rooted in their ethical commitments that shape how they move in the face of overwhelming authoritarian opposition. When others attempt to provoke them, because they are centered in their commitments, they ignore the distraction. Seeing them has been a reminder that when I am my best self, my anger is my best guide. And at this training, a skill I practiced was letting things that are noise and distraction “go by”, refusing to take in (white supremacy, Islamophobia, other people’s questions) which take me away from my work. Toni Morrison describes this best when she said:
“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing”.4
Choosing how and when we act and react based on the needs of our commitments is an act of hope, an act of reclamation, and it is ongoing work.
To Read
Statement by University of Southern California Student Asna Tabassum, Class of 2024 Valedictorian
Asna Tabassum, a USC student with a minor in resistance to genocide was cancelled as the valedictorian speaker of 2024 because of fear of what she might say. The university first cancelled her speech, then cancelled the entire commencement ceremony. Here are her reflections.
The Liszts by Kyo Maclear and illustrated by Julia Sarda: This 2016 story about a family that makes lists and does not notice possibilities is utterly delightful and one I highly recommend. A book for all ages!
To Watch
More Feelings by Ramy Youssef (Streaming on Crave). This latest special by Ramy Youssef delves into Palestine, marriage, father-son relationships, the nature of charity and charitable giving, religion and faith and so much more. It is a powerful, incredible show that is well worth the watch.
Aqil et al., p.346 in Aqil AR, Malik M, Jacques KA, et al. (2021). Engaging in anti-oppressive public health teaching: challenges and recommendations. Pedagogy Health Promotion, 7(4), 344,353.
Aqil et al., 347.
Cunliffe, 749 in Cunliffe, Ann.L (2016). Republication of “On becoming a critically reflexive practitioner”. Journal of Management Education. 40(6), 747-768.
Salaams. Such a beautiful reflection. Cannot wait to read the book