Women of a Certain Rage by Liz Byrski

Author:Liz Byrski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Write-ful Fury — Claire G. Coleman

When I am writing, I embrace every emotion, I use everything – even the feelings that hurt: those I package as gifts to others, so that I don’t have them any more. For me, the act of writing is mostly an examination of my self – about the emotion I feel when the words are falling from my fingers, about how I can leverage my feelings to fuel my creativity, how I can express my emotions and expose them to others.

I have found that often the way to make the best art is to live with my emotions, embrace them, feel them, love them even when they hurt, even when they seem to have no positive side: emotions like anger, fear and rage. Art can be sometimes nothing more than excoriating the self for the edification of the audience; pulling out my guts dripping with blood and holding out my gore for anyone to take.

Fury. It can flow hot and fast like fire dancing along a trail of petrol; it can flow cold, slow and relentless like a glacier; or as cold and breathtakingly fast as an avalanche, leaving me breathless and dying. Either way, when fury passes it’s hard to imagine anything in its path surviving. The only thing that can survive the passage of intense fury is the elemental force itself. Unless I clear a path for it, unless I help it flow and choose its direction, it will destroy me.

All I can do with true anger is flow with it, turn its energy into fuel, aim it and sharpen it and try to use it to change the world.

It is sometimes difficult to admit to myself that I have been angry for many years; it simmers, it festers, it burns out through me if I don’t open the doors to the outside world and set it free. Many things have fuelled my fury: the state of the burning Earth; our parliament of scoundrels (a government in name only); the hate-fuelled media, spreading bile, lies and misinformation. People who destroy the Earth for greed, who manipulate others to get what they want, drive me to distraction.

When I discovered the proof of my Aboriginality, back in the early 2000s, I uncovered new, fertile fields of injustice and pain, more things than I have ever imagined to be pissed off about. My anger became righteous, a justified fury: the spirit of the Erinyes, called in English the ‘Furies’, who slay the breakers of vows, who kill the unfaithful, the traitors.

My anger is different to what you might imagine it is. I do not feel or express anger towards individuals, towards people. I am never violent or aggressive, I am not abusive and I don’t display hate towards others. My ire is never personal or interpersonal; rather I cast it into the world like ashes, there to be taken by winds and dispersed. I find hate pointless and toxic; the only thing I hate is hate itself.

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