Understanding My Origin and the Necessity of Liberatory Rage

Hello from Lit Lib's new Director of Programs

Photo by Jon Karnofsky

Writing has been my personal liberatory practice as long as I can remember, thanks to my mother. I raged as a child. I’m told it was against everything. That’s certainly how the retrospective feels. And it seems justified. Born a brown female in the U.S. South to a father whose African genetics shown through dark enough to garner not just the spitting attention of overall clad neighbors, but the focal aggression of local KKK chapters.

I remember yellow walls or yellow light or a yellow house and a wood floor. My mother with construction paper, taking down my words. Telling me to express myself. She has always encouraged, articulated pride in my work, even when the writing exposes the deep pain of our family dysfunction; the ripping shame of an abusive immigrant father and the chaos of first-generation mixed-kids dealing with the classically American co-morbid hypersexualization and racial aggression at every turn. We were demonized. No wonder my father had his own rage. I was a demon, I thought. Half demon, anyway. Demon means the brown part, right?

That internalization of brownness as evil took time to shake loose. Lots of time, because it was rooted by the white supremacist culture that on one hand told me my darker skin meant I was closer to the earth/closer to the dirt/closer to the below-ground Hell versus light-sky Heaven. The same one that came knocking on our door every Sunday trying to scoop up us kids for Sunday School and Youth Group with the hopes that wresting us free from the hold of our half-Other home might make us fall into the baptismal pool that would wash away the devil. I was saved once under a big tent, but it wasn’t about Jesus. It was about hope. And it didn’t set ease to my unrest. No matter the community we landed in as we poverty-hopped around the Bible Belt, there was no sense of “home” or “safety” because being “half-and-half” meant being Not White, which was fundamentally, irrevocably wrong.

Me at four years old with my younger sister in an 80s, Olan Mills portrait.

Writing, beginning with the rhymes my mother used to rhythmically ease my growing awareness of oppression, became my outlet. While the pieces I composed as a toddler are lost, I still have the work I toiled over from age six forward, recorded in my own careful, evolving print. I periodically look back on these relics and recognize them for what they were: the repeated effort to take control over some aspect of my life, readily apparent in the themes that cry out again and again. I have books of words twisted into spells I thought would banish the Otherness from the perception of my body by demonstrating my humanity. This was as ill-fated as my efforts to make my hair slick and shiny by brushing out my coarse curls every night 100 times, scalp to tip.

What I yearned for was freedom; to be seen and accepted for who I was as I was. My poetry, then fiction, then more conscious works of non-fiction show me grappling with gender, race and class. But my education was deplete of feminist theory. In fact, I never heard the name of any feminist role model other than Maya Angelou. There were no excerpts offered up in History, Social Studies or Language Arts. Angelou was just a note and a quote buried somewhere in a textbook. She existed. That was enough acknowledgment for a small town in Arkansas. Better to discuss the homemaking talents of Betsy Ross, to practice our own stitching and the placing of our hands over our hearts for the pledge to that grand flag she first assembled than to turn our attention to the Little Rock Nine and desegregation, what came before, and the very real life experiences of my family directly resulting from what is still coming after.

Thankfully, I had the opportunity to pursue higher education. I relocated from Southwest to Midwest, learned about Native and African peoples and cultures as an undergrad, then got pulled into grad school at Indiana University. My MFA was spent composing a fictive retelling of several true stories from my early life during as the Lebanese Civil War raged. The stories that fell outside of my thesis grappled with religious trauma, racism and sexual violence. There, I was finally exposed to writing by Black feminist literary writers starting with Lucille Clifton, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Cade Bambara. Toni Morrison, it might surprise you, was a challenge for me. I had a lot of unlearning to do. Internalized racism isn’t soft and doesn’t slide out like butter. It’s a wicked, barbed thing—the real devil. It would take me another decade of wrestling with my identity, especially as a Muslim American post-9/11, to truly comprehend the scope of the societal cancer riddling my bones. It wasn’t until I completely shucked that first life and moved into the life I’m living now that I learned about bell hooks, Angela Davis and Audre Lorde.

When I met my wife, I was newly out and in the process of dismantling my marriage to my ex-husband. There were many opportunities for us to opt out of our connection: she didn’t want to be the elder queer ushering me into the fold; my divorce might (and did) get messy; I had three children and she didn’t want kids; our chemistry was so intense it was obvious to both of us where dating was going so jumping ship early was really the only option; we were both in poverty and there wasn’t much hope of pulling each other out of it. I could go on. But we stayed together, and Marie took one look at my relationship with my “demon” brownness and showed me Janelle Monáe’s “Dirty Computer.” Then she handed me her copy of Women, Race and Class and talked me through it chapter by chapter.

Stack of liberatory reading my wife and I are (re)visiting.

My wife is French. White. Raised in a Muslim neighborhood in the south of France. When I met her, she was teaching literature courses through her PhD program that looked at pop culture through a liberatory framework. Our conversations on Davis and Monáe (and many other relevant and necessary feminist leaders) led to the gradual decolonization of my thinking about myself. It also led to a more conscious application of liberatory practices in my own teaching. I’m grateful for this service on her part—what we jokingly and seriously refer to in our home as reparations—and how it pays forward into my own work. I’ve taught Expressive Writing as a method for release and recovery to survivors of trauma for almost two decades. Understanding the necessity of origin and current application of liberation in personal praxis is a core tenet of this work, and my ongoing education has served to make me a more compassionate and capable educator. But there is always more learning to do, including how to continue raging.

Literary Liberation offers a space where community can come together and take part in that learning. Here, the Global Majority is served through opportunity and praxis. I’m excited to take part in the elevation of liberatory leadership as the new Director of Programs for Lit Lib. I look forward to the change we will continue to create together through practices that deeply examine intention and method, origin and accessibility. Who is our work for and why must it be ourselves in order for the rage to be released, freedom to be more than an idea for those of us who are the majority but are also on the margin?