Lounge
Let women reclaim the right to rage
Summary
Rage is your primal energy. Turn it outward and change the thing that infuriates you
Would you like to write about women’s rage?" My first thought is an embarrassed, “Has she really noticed how angry I get?" Embarrassed for the very reason this article is being commissioned—good girls don’t get angry. “Behave yourself!" hissed through a parent’s gritted teeth. “Don’t be vehement." “Don’t lose your temper." And when all that good behaviour causes an explosion, “Don’t slam doors." I have been angry all my life and extraordinarily well-behaved about it—mostly, as visible to strangers’ eyes. So yes, thank you, I would like to write about women’s rage. Like foot-binding, once practised on little Chinese girls, emotion-binding is practised on little girls everywhere.
As we grow up, everything we hear about anger makes it sound like the symptom of something broken or diseased. We start to menstruate and our anger is described as moodiness—a hormonal disorder rather than a natural response to an unfair world or even, our physical discomfort. If we express ourselves loudly or sharply, or even just clearly, we are hysterical—a word associated with our anatomy. As we grow up, we are advised not to indulge our anger because we must learn to “adjust" to what lies ahead in our lives as girls and women. Obediently (and we obey for various reasons), we tidy up our messy feelings and tuck away our rage.
Some angry women are heroes and others are not. Reading Silappatikaram, we adore Kannagi’s anger because it avenged her husband. True to our ideals of femininity, she let go of the resentment and betrayal she must have surely felt when he went to live with another woman. Finally, she emerged a passionate, powerful and yes, angry, advocate when her husband was wrongly accused and killed. We celebrate the anger that brought him justice even though it destroyed a city (of course, sparing women, children, the elderly and sick, because it was righteous).
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In the Mahabharat, Draupadi too is angry and she has much to be angry about—arbitrarily being entered into a polyandrous marriage, being gambled away as chattel, being dragged into a public arena and disrobed while her husbands, among the best warriors of the land, watched, and then forced to wander with them in exile. Draupadi’s anger—largely because of her husbands—must have been compounded as she watched her husbands’ children die one by one in a battle none of them initiated. But we do not judge her because her thirst for vengeance fuels her husbands’ quest to win back their inheritance.
Anger at the service of patriarchy is good anger. This is why women organise effectively as mothers in order to campaign for peace or for news of missing family members. Women who get angry and deploy the resources of men for their ends are clearly villains. Think of the Ramayan’s Soorpanakha, whose fury too was justified. Valmiki had her nose and ears cut off and Kamban her breasts, and all for the sin of being attracted to and propositioning their protagonists. She responded politically, calling on her powerful brothers, including Ravana, to avenge her humiliation by killing her assailants. We do not approve of her anger at all. Women who get angry in public spaces—think actor-politician Jaya Bachchan—are mocked, reviled and criticised. This includes politicians, activists and journalists. They dare to forget that their access to public spaces is contingent upon their being seen and not heard.
Women who get angry in private spaces disrupt the fragile equilibrium of the patriarchal household, especially the silences about violence that undergird family life. Angry women provoke a backlash, such as the one we are seeing now around the world. It’s a chicken-egg reading—are we angry because we have too many rights or do we have the rights we have because of our anger? The question is simply resolved by taking our rights away, one by one. And still, our rage is uncouth.
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I have now tamed my anger about the big things into a very quiet fury that works like an always-on work motor. I tell myself that every small act counts towards dismantling this infuriating world and I immerse myself in an endless series of tasks. However, I do feel that white-hot, ice-cold, furiously-wild-blade-chopping and yelling anger everyday about one thing—housework. I write livid, vivid paragraphs in my head while muttering incoherently about housework being patriarchy’s sneakiest jail for women.
A disapproving chorus chants, “Tut-tut, she didn’t get the memo!" Angrier, I remember every single thing any woman ever said to me about the nobility of housework or how meditative it is and spin into further fury. I cannot wait to leave this realm and return to my desk where I can write essays about rage and other important topics. Except that after being so angry, I can barely breathe, leave alone think or write. This is the one thing about rage that no one tells you: it swallows you whole. When that embodiment of long-suffering patience, Seeta, could finally bear no more, she (decorously) called on the earth to swallow her whole and free her from patriarchy’s endless expectations. We forgive her rage because our heart has bled for her and because she considerately turns her anger on herself.
Maybe this is actually a metaphor. Rage splinters you and scatters your energies. It debilitates you. It weakens your core. You are left broken, holding your rage—rage that no one cares about, rage that achieves nothing—too spent to do anything. The line between rage that, rising within, consumes you and multiple sorrows you never cried over is blurred. You are but the charred remains of your own rage—good for nothing. In the same epic, there was Kaikeyi—a woman immortalised for throwing a royal tantrum. Did you know that in the Valmiki Ramayan, she does not throw that tantrum in her bedroom or sitting room, but in a special place called the “anger chamber" (“krodhaagaaram," Ayodhyakandam, Sarga 10: Verse 20)?
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The idea of a special room where you can go when you are angry captivates me. You could go there without having to announce how you felt. You could go there and be left alone for a while. Someone might come and console you or apologise or sit quietly with you. How wonderful to recognise that women might be angry and need space for it. We demonise Kaikeyi for her willingness to advocate for her son—but how wonderful she had a space just for her anger. Centuries of stigma and censure have not changed how angry we can get. Feminist author Soraya Chemaly wrote some years ago about women’s anger: “A society that does not respect women’s anger is one that does not respect women; not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens."
Be furious, then, this unjust world deserves that and more. Rage is your primal energy—to create, to conserve and to destroy. Nurture it carefully and deploy it strategically— away from yourself. Turn it outward and change the thing that infuriates you in whatever way you can. To begin with, let us reclaim the right to rage.
Swarna Rajagopalan is a public educator on gender equality issues, teaches politics and writes on this and that.
