Notes from the New World: Recent Episodes
Oriana Koren
Self portrait at 32, 2019.
Nine weeks ago, I started a storytelling workshop class through my once Chicago fairy godmother, Saya Hillman, who runs Mac and Cheese Productions. Saya, since I’ve known her, as been creating these sorts of experiences that help to propel folks towards their highest selves. I jumped at the chance to snag a scholarship spot for a storytelling workshop for Black writers she launched during the height of the uprising for Black lives.
In all of my years of writing, I’ve always been one of a scant handful or the only Black writer in my workshop classes. This was a rare opportunity to change my experience and to learn and grow with my community members.
I would not have been able to tap into this rich vein of rage had it not been for the space — and deep, first hand understanding — my cohort provided me. I’ve been sitting on a ball of rage I’ve been attempting to untangle and rid myself of my whole life. In nine weeks, I began to see my approach was all wrong: the rage didn’t need disappear, instead it just needed to be given a purpose. I needed to do something with it, so I did over the course of nine weeks, then finally read the piece to my cohort and our guests during our workshop showcase yesterday.
I was so angry, my voice shook and trembled the entire time I read my piece. The primarily white audience wasn’t quite ready but there was no way for them to escape my righteous, focused rage for eight minutes of their day.
Reclaimation is a form of power: I am claiming my rage, now and forevermore.
Enjoy audio of one of my dress rehersal takes and the final performed, written piece below.
I once read somewhere that family violence is a collection of behaviors that aim to control a person through fear. Marie taught me this when I was just three years old. Sitting in our living room on my knees in front of the coffee table, before I could avert my gaze away from my coloring book, I heard the sharp sting of hanger wire hit my back tack tack tack. Marie’s conception of discipline was downright antebellum.
Fear has a smell — it’s vinegar, made from the Mother.
Of all the indecencies my body has been subjected to over a lifetime of captivity, being broken down by my mother before the world got it’s hands on me is the one violence I cannot abide.
Years of my life were stolen from me by my own mother. It was her way of surviving what had been stolen from her by the hunters and the looters. I think about the looters and the hunters who think they know something about rage—they don’t know s**t. They don’t know what it’s like to have all this Black fear, shackling my ankles and wrists with cast iron.
What’s an American Dream when the Dream is actually just sleep paralysis? What’s a Declaration of Independence when you have enslaved human beings for generations? What’s the f*g Constitution to me, a nigger held in captivity?
I once read somewhere that spiritual abuse includes using belief to manipulate people. America dangled her promise of a Dream in front of my eager face the same way my mother dangled the promise of her maternal love and those swinging carrots trapped me, every time. How can I admire and love a woman who has been the source of all my pain and dysfunction? America believes herself to be a good mother because she likes to believe she hasn’t practiced the same cruelties against me that she perfected on my ancestors, but I want you to know, America has been cruel to me:
She denied me a childhood, then she stole from me my right to privacy, my right to life and a natural death. She has manipulated me with her vain talk about “liberty” and “freedom” and “justice for all”. I can’t erase the awful things that she’s allowed to happened to me: how the looters and hunters look upon me in disgust, violence turning their eyes red; or how I am made to feel as if my body is a prison I’m cursed to carry around.
Audre Lorde once asked of me, “what are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you sicken and die of them, still in silence?”
I have survived more dictators than is healthy for the average human being because I live in a world where just about any White person who I come into contact with can assert their “sovereignty” or “dominion” over me in any manner of interaction: mispronouncing my name on purpose; running their shopping carts into me at Target, only to tell me upon collision they didn’t ‘see me there’; telling me I can’t have the money I worked hard for, as if employing me to labor is doing me some sort of favor, or threatening my life for loving one of their children, as if my love isn’t human enough.
The looters and hunters wanna see me angry, they want to see me bare my teeth, but I won’t give them the pleasure. White people tell me to be reasonable, to be polite, or there will be consequences. They might be forced to side with a fascist if I don’t “know my place”. The hunters and looters will pillage our towns and neighborhoods, they will hunt our men, women and children, in an effort to put us all in ‘our places’ — hanging from the branch of a tree on government property or dragged behind the back bumper of a pickup truck, trails of blood and ligament embedded in asphalt.
My belly is engorged with tyrannies, so from this point forward, I’m choosing rage in all it’s incendiary glory.
If my life is going to be taken from me by a hunter or looter, I intend to go out like a dying star: I will destroy all evidence of intelligence life. I will speak the ancestral language of truth and all those who hear my voice will perish from the sound of my celestial trumpet. If I am angry, then I can be honest, and honesty is the most potent currency Black people have as survivors of generational terror.
I will reach deep inside my gut— deep deep like scooping out the sticky, waterlogged seeds of a gourd—so I can become a living vessel of Black ancestral power. I choose my Black rage because I want to choose the truth: I have lived in a world where I was made to accept as fact that I am simply prey for White people to hunt and to kill with impunity, to steal from without consequence, to displace and to devour until none of us is left.
To that I say, enough.
I am human, not Big Game and this is real life, not a f*g safari.
I am human, that is not a conspiracy nor a hoax.
We do not live in a simulation and my life isn’t a f*g video game.
I am human, and this is no longer up for debate.
Rage is a power I’ve inherited over four centuries and it’s a skill I’m beginning to cultivate as armament against my enemies. White people wanna see me angry, but I know I have be twice as a good at that anger. To that challenge I say, bet. I want all the f*g smoke.
The hunters and looters don’t know what rage is because they’ve never seen it from people like me. The few glimpses they think they’ve seen: burning cop cars, strip malls ablaze, a Black clutched fist held high in the sky — that’s not rage, that is mourning. The sight of righteous rage would blind them for life, they cannot look into the burning bush without withering into pillars of salt.
Rage is the Mother who shaped and molded me.
Audre Lorde finally asked of me, “if we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language, ask yourself: what is the worst that could happen to me if I tell the truth?”
The truth is America will still kill me, even if I am silent about how she intends to do it, so I must tell you the unvarnished truth: I am Black and I am full of Black rage, and yes, please believe, I am coming for you.
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A prayer collected in the 1920s by anthropologist and writer, Zora Neale Hurston, from the Alice Walker essay Only Justice Can Stop a Curse
To the Man God: 0 Great One, I have been sorely tried by my enemies and have been blasphemed and lied against. My good thoughts and my honest actions have been turned to bad actions and dishonest ideas. My home has been ill-treated. My dear ones have been backbitten and their virtue questioned.
0 Man God, I beg that this that I ask for my enemies shall come to pass:
That the South wind shall scorch their bodies and make them wither and shall not be tempered to them. That the North wind shall freeze their blood and numb their muscles and that it shall not be tempered to them. That the West wind shall blow away their life's breath and will not leave their hair grow, and that their fingernails shall fall off and their bones shall crumble. That the East wind shall make their minds grow dark, their sight shall fall and their seed dry up so that they shall not multiply.
I ask that their fathers and mothers from their furthest generation will not intercede for them before the great throne, and that the wombs of their women shall not bear fruit except for strangers, and that they shall become extinct. I pray that the children who may come shall be weak of mind and paralyzed of limb and that they themselves shall curse them in their turn for ever turning the breath of life into their bodies.
I pray that disease and death shall be forever with them and that their worldly goods shall not prosper, and that their crops shall not multiply and that their cows, their sheep, and their hogs and all the living beasts shall die of starvation and thirst. I pray that their house shall be unroofed and that the rain, the thunder and lightening shall find the innermost recesses of their home and that the foundation shall crumble and the floods tear it asunder. I pray that the sun shall not shed its rays on them in benevolence, but instead it shall beat down on them and bum them and destroy them.
I pray that the moon shall not give them peace, but instead shall deride them and decry them and cause their minds to shrivel. I pray that their friends shall betray them and cause them loss of power, of gold and of silver, and that their enemies shall smite them until they beg for mercy which shall not be given them. I pray that their tongues shall forget how to speak in sweet words, and that it shall be paralyzed and that all about them shall be desolation, pestilence and death.
0 Man God, I ask you for all these things because they have dragged me in the dust and destroyed my good name; broken my heart and caused me to curse the day that I was born.
So be it.
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How Can Black People Write About Flowers At A Time Like This by Hanif Abdurraqib from the collection ‘A Fortune for Your Disaster’.
You can purchase a copy of this collection of poetry here.
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