The use of anger and rage as transformative for Black women is not a new concept. In 1981, Black feminist Audre Lorde gave a keynote address called “Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” at the National Women’s Studies Association conference. She said that any discussion among women about racism must include the recognition and use of anger as a tool, because our anger is an appropriate response to hatred. Unlike hatred, which intends to harm or disenfranchise marginalized people, the anger of Black women and women of colour is grief—an accumulation of injustice. Knowledge and power is within our anger, and it can be used as a collective, creative tool to change the world—and help each of us heal:
Women of Color in America have grown up within a symphony of anguish at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive, it is in spite of a whole world out there that takes for granted our lack of humanness, that hates our very existence, outside of its service. And I say “symphony” rather than “cacophony” because we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us apart. We have had to learn to move through them and use them for strength and force and insight within our daily lives.
There are so few outlets for Black women to express this rage, making friendship and sisterhood essential. In these groups, we can be angry without judgement, without shame. We can talk about the shit that beats us down today and know that thanks to our friends, we can get through tomorrow. In our collective anger, we learn about each other and ourselves; we find the tools to fight oppression, to start healing from the inside and then start healing the world. Anger and rage are indeed our superpowers—but so are vulnerability and love.
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In my fourth year, I was performing in Eve Ensler’s most successful play, The Vagina Monologues, spending my evenings rehearsing and hanging out with other people who were also involved.
I loved that group, as well as V-Day, but I was the only Black woman. And while Ensler’s plays and campaigns have garnered global attention, Ensler has been accused of a reductionist version of feminism that doesn’t understand or include the experiences of women of colour and trans women. I sought something more for the people who didn’t see themselves represented in the plays on campus.
Inspired by the conversations we were having in my Black women’s history class, I set out to include a new performance in our lineup, outside of the usual Ensler plays—something written by a Black woman that spoke to the power of sisterhood: for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, by the late Ntozake Shange.
for colored girls, arguably Shange’s most acclaimed work, is a choreopoem that was first performed in 1976. It follows the interconnected coming-of-age stories of seven Black women, named after different colours of the rainbow, who are navigating various aspects of life and love in an oppressive, racist, and sexist society, and how sisterhood uplifts and supports them.
I was drawn in by the relevance of the play—how nearly forty years later it was just as applicable to the conversations we were having in and outside the classroom. It felt symbolic to put the play on at Western: the last time it was performed at the school was in the early 1990s, and a professor who had been around then told me the roles were played by white women.
I placed call-outs for auditions across campus, and women of various faiths, gender identities, and ethnicities auditioned for roles. Some came from other schools. In the end, I cast a group of talented young women—women I knew, and others who had been looking for a play on campus for Black women.
for colored girls was challenging to choreograph. We were often stumped as to how to put each piece together. The play is a mix of poetry, spoken word, and song. We had difficulty with the rhythm and we struggled with the lyricism. We faltered when it required dancing. We stumbled over the punctuation and spelling. We spent nearly every evening rehearsing for hours on end, stopping only to eat and study. Some nights, we got little done, instead trading war stories about our time at Western. As opening night approached, we were nowhere near ready.
Each woman brought her own experiences to her character, and it was so poignant and heavy that we were often overcome with emotion. When the pieces started coming together, we ebbed and flowed alongside each other, as if each of us were made for our character, as if we were meant to find each other. School, as always, was rough. We were tired, stressed, and moody, but the one constant source of light was inside our rehearsal room in the dark basement of the Student Centre.
We had taken on the play to provide a space for women of colour to see themselves represented on campus, hoping they would feel relief from the alienation of being a woman and student of colour at Western. We’d had no idea just how bad we needed it ourselves.
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Not long after Zadie’s confession, Jasmine told me she was also considering transferring to another school. I cast her as the Lady in Yellow in our play, and over rehearsals I learned that her reasons were similar to Zadie’s: as an artist, the racism and microaggressions she experienced on campus and in the city had zapped her creativity. She had stopped going out to bars with her girlfriends—she was tired of being pointed out, laughed at, and harassed. Her friends thought she was exaggerating, and she was done trying to explain herself to dismissive ears. She was mentally and physically exhausted.
Then came Angela, only in her second year and ready to pack up. London—and Western—had broken her spirit.
Towards the end of my time at Western, more and more of my Black girlfriends were transferring out of the school, or at least considering it. Their stories became increasingly horrific—dummies lynched in trees, professors and students making racist comments in class, verbal attacks in the city—as did the physical and emotional toll. The symptoms of sadness, depression, anxiety, fear, and hopelessness were endemic in this environment. My friends were afraid for their safety, paralyzed by the thought that this was their reality for the next few years.
I would be graduating soon, and starting my Master’s in the fall. One of the reasons I decided to go back home for grad school was that I wanted to be back in a diverse city. But, somehow, leaving Western for grad school felt like a betrayal. London had been my home for the past four years. I’d experienced a genuine kindness in strangers that I had never felt back home. It was both a protective cocoon while I blossomed into adulthood and a place that had been detrimental to my identity, to my health, and to the people around me.
I had the time of my life in London—I had more fun than I could’ve imagined. It may have not been how I expected it to go, but it was damn close. Coming here wasn’t just about fun, textbooks, and passing grades—it was a test to see if I could handle life’s unpredictability, if I could bend but not break, if I could be hardened but still soft.
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The deafening roar from the crowd was too loud to be true.
I nervously peered out from backstage and was left speechless. Nearly one hundred seats were filled, and there were dozens of students and locals chatting and grabbing a drink at the bar, waiting for the show to start. It was the most Black women and women of colour I had ever seen in a space at Western.
Our second and final performance of for colored girls was taking place at The Spoke, an on-campus bar that doubles as an event space on the top floor of the Student Centre. Opening night, at a different venue, had been a flop. Only twenty people showed up and most were white; our nerves had gotten the best of us, and we forgot our lines. Moments we thought would be well received by the audience were met with deafening silence. We were all disappointed, and I considered cancelling our other performance. We had put so much of ourselves into this play. We had created a sisterhood. Wouldn’t the audience see that?
For many of us, this play—the words in the book—were defining moments of our lives at Western. It was a refuge for the rest
of our time here, and an extension of who we had become. And, like the characters in the book, we were connected to each other now; our colours formed a rainbow. Even in exhaustion and hopelessness, sisterhood does not give up on each other. We decided to move forward and do our last show.
Seeing all those women in the crowd—friends, strangers, elderly women, faculty, other students—we knew they also needed this play. We went on stage that evening and gave our last performance everything we had. We weren’t just unnamed characters; we were nurtured by snaps and affirming hums and nods and laughter and applause. We gave back by being our truest selves, our most vulnerable, our bodies radiating love and grief and emotion.
The last four years had been lonely and hard, but also rewarding. Some days were so dull and grey it seemed like all the colour in the world had gone away forever. Some days, the sun escaped from the clouds and danced on our skin, and the beads of sweat that trickled down our temples reminded us that we were alive. We had carried on, through all of it, for ourselves and each other, under the darkened sky.
Towards the end of Shange’s play, the women all come together onstage to recite a series of monologues called “no more love poems.” The Lady in Yellow talks about feeling vulnerable as a black woman and the belief that they are immune to emotional pain:
but bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical
dilemma/ i havent conquered yet/ do you see the point
my spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of soul &
gender/ my love is too delicate to have thrown back on my face
At eighteen, I made the decision to come to Western, and I had experienced things I only thought were possible in movies. But it wasn’t all about having a good time. I had enjoyed the tenderness of strangers as well as their rejection. I had felt the devastation of violence and loss and the healing of love and friendship. I had learned the power of my body—female, brown-skinned—to inspire both desire and hatred, to determine how I moved through the world. The experience was painful and healing, ugly and beautiful. And like the Lady in Yellow, I am still trying to understand the charged nature of my existence in this world—one that is highly politicized and racialized.
As Jasmine moved to the front of the stage to deliver the last line, the thickness of anticipation swelled between us. “And this is for colored girls who have considered suicide,” her voice broke, “but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows.” A sob ripped from her body, relief and pain at once. One by one, each of us onstage started to weep, a collective surge of emotion and exhaustion. In the audience, women wiped their own eyes and nodded in unison.
As we took our final bow to a standing ovation of teary-eyed audience members, I felt a lightness I hadn’t known in years, a reassurance that everything was going to be okay.
Hand in hand, our full lips quivering and tears sparkling as they rolled down our melanin cheeks, we looked up as the grey sky burst open, showering us in warm, colourful light. The rainbow had been there all along.
epilogue
Less than two months after I graduated from Western, another Black teenager was shot and killed.
During a hot August day in Ferguson, Missouri, Darren Wilson, a white police officer, shot eighteen-year-old Michael Brown.
The case galvanized racial tensions in North America. Following a grand jury trial, Wilson was not indicted in the shooting of Brown.
Many people disagreed with Wilson’s excessive use of force against the teen. Others believed Brown deserved to die. Social media was filled with racist posts, turning a video clip released by police into memes mocking Brown’s life and death.
By now I was extremely familiar with the danger of such stereotypes, a consequence of living in a predominately white city: that Black bodies are seen as less receptive to pain, unrapeable, unbreakable, inherently criminal, violent, unruly in their shapes and colours, resistant to authority. That bodies like mine must be suppressed and silenced for being loud, for talking back, for knowing our rights, for not being respectable enough, for not being grateful enough, for not fitting in, for walking late at night, for driving, for breathing.
In the Western bubble—in London’s bubble—I had been so focused on navigating my own life as a student that I didn’t realize that the world around me was quickly changing. And this was, in part, a deliberate act of self-preservation. I couldn’t be invested in making sense of the oppression surrounding me when I needed to find ways to protect myself from it. But as I dealt with my own world, we were already entering a highly polarized culture—made even more apparent by Brown’s death—where people brazenly justified attacks on Black bodies for refusing to give in to the systems that oppress them, then tarnished their memories by reducing them to racial stereotypes.
Brown’s death launched Black Lives Matter on a global scale. Protests burst from North America’s seams—a collective anger over police practices that have for so long been excessive against bodies of colour. Tear gas, fire, and chants of “Hands up, don’t shoot” and “No justice, no peace” defined the summer. The simmering pot of racial tensions had finally spilled over, bringing with it a rage and resistance so fierce that it blazed a path for a new era of civil rights in the twenty-first century.
I had once believed that what I’d experienced was a London problem, a Western University problem, a Southwestern Ontario problem. I naively believed that I could file away the last four years of my life and return to my ignorantly blissful self: a teen with no sense of the world, an overprotected child, a body untouched by violence and hate. But I returned home to a different place than I’d left, and it had only gotten worse. Diversity and multiculturalism were suddenly a hindrance to “Canadian values.” Anti-Islam rhetoric saw more attacks on innocent Muslim people. Police violence was also reaching a boiling point, after the fatal shootings of two Black men, Jermaine Carby and Andrew Loku, and many other cases of excessive force against Black, brown, and Indigenous bodies.
White supremacists were holding rallies, crashed by antiracists protesters; white pride flyers were strung across campuses; alt-right media personalities were renting public space for events. And while there have been victories for those who fight for the humanity of everyone, the battle is still ongoing.
It’s easy to conclude that hate has trickled in from Europe’s wave of right-wing populism. Or, more directly, from south of the border, following the election of Donald Trump—a man who has admitted to sexually assaulting women, is trying to erase trans people from history, and throws immigrants and children in inhumane detention. However, Canada has its own long history to contend with. Under the guise of multiculturalism, we’ve conveniently forgotten Canada’s own contributions to racism: colonialism and genocide against Indigenous communities; two hundred years of slavery; police and state violence against marginalized people; the removal of Black and Indigenous children from homes; the endless and continual cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two Spirit people; a historic rise in hate crimes; the 2017 Quebec City mosque shooting and the 2018 Toronto van attack; far- and alt-right politicians in government; alt-right and white nationalist rallies that happen in cities around the country. In April 2019, the Globe and Mail revealed the thriving right-wing extremism in Canada after obtaining more than 150,000 private chat-room messages.
The Canadian Anti-Hate Network has long been tracking hate incidents, as have researchers like Dr. Barbara Perry, Dr. Ryan Scrivens, and Dr. David Hoffman, who have warned about the rise of far-right extremism in Canada for decades. Only now is our society, and our government, starting to pay attention.
At the same time, the resistance has never been stronger. Women are coming forward with their stories of sexual assault. LGBTQ2S+ people are still fighting for human rights and legal protections. Indigenous folks are demanding truth and reconciliation from our governments. Black people are holding law enforcement and the
justice system accountable, and won’t settle for less. The media is taking a greater interest in stories about racism and sexual assault, and digital spaces give underrepresented voices places to share their own stories. Perpetrators are sometimes being held accountable. The message is clear: the time to act is now.
This resistance is not just about marching down the street or staging a physical protest. It’s in the health researchers collecting race-based data, the writers covering underreported stories, the lawyers representing clients against state violence, the experts documenting violence against women, the teachers pushing for more inclusive curriculums, the journalists and advocates risking their lives for the truth. It’s in the tools we use in this fight against hate: social media to share our stories and engage with others; video to capture unlawful acts; retweets and shares that expose injustices and counter false information. In this new era, born out of past hard-won freedoms and causes, fuelled by rage and unity, we all can play a role in dismantling systems that have benefitted from keeping us silent.
When we look at our institutional spaces, few have been as revolutionary as universities and colleges. From the formation of historic Black colleges in the U.S. to Black student activism in the civil rights era to centuries of scientific breakthroughs, institutions of higher education have always been much more than a place to study (they also have an inescapable history: the slave economy built many colleges in the U.S.). While historically a site encouraging polarizing ideas, the battle between hate speech and free speech has become one of the cornerstones of university discussions.
Student life has also changed. It’s no longer about juggling school, part-time jobs, and relationships; instead, students are fighting to feel safe and included on campus—tearing down alt-right flyers and counter-protesting far-right events, demanding schools remove statues of racist figures, fighting ineffective school policies on sexual assault, and hosting Black-only graduations to celebrate convocating in an education system that disproportionately expels and suspends Black students. Our young generation—the group so often misjudged and infantilized—is leading one of the greatest movements in the country against far-right extremism, racism, and sexual misconduct.
They Said This Would Be Fun Page 22
