Dear Souseh: Incandescent with Rage

Dear Souseh,

I am a Lebanese woman of a certain age and I am so angry it feels like my body is stuffed with explosives. My entire life has been lived in the shadow of war and violence. I came into language with the understanding of western hypocrisy. My consciousness was forged by seeing their moral posturing on the world stage while they fund and excuse and arm and enact the worst atrocities against the rest of the planet.

None of this is new to me, and yet. The last three years, since October 2023, have turned me into a bed of coal. Blackened and charred but still somehow smoldering with rage. I am filled with so much rage and hatred, I don’t know what to do with it. I watch Palestinian babies crying for lost parents and amputated limbs, and I want to blow up the whole world. Then I watch Israeli soldiers celebrating these depravities on social media with their shit-eating grins; I watch US lawmakers voting to send them more weapons, watch Europe sending reconnaissance planes while both lecture us haughtily about human rights; I see the media shred every norm of grammar and use its rags to obscure the criminals from view and see chants being condemned while genocide goes unpunished and and I want to rip out eyes and claw out hair and set everything ablaze.

And now? With Iran? With Lebanon? With the bombs literally falling all around me? With the razing of entire villages, the bombing of schools and hospitals and universities, the “quadruple tap” of rescue workers all become totally, thoroughly normalized? I saw a photo this morning of Israeli soldiers laughing and preparing themselves a feast in a Lebanese kitchen in the south, the south they’ve “cleansed” of its inhabitants, the south they’ve razed and sown with phosphorus, and I thought my heart would detonate.

I am fucking incandescent with rage. The entire western order needs to be burned down. Instead, it is burning me down. Every last possible good feeling I have has turned to ash. What do I do? I don’t know what to do.

Signed,
The Inferno

I am so angry it feels like my body is stuffed with explosives. How do I deal with all this rage?

Dear Inferno,

I happen to know for a fact that you woke up this morning determined not to look at the news, to begin your day with a clean mind, but then succumbed not one hour in. Yes, I understand the drone’s reemergence in the sky was very destabilizing. And you needed to check whether something big had happened or whether it was just the rote sadism of the world’s vilest neighbors. Still, after ascertaining that it was in fact the latter, you could have put away your phone. You didn’t need to click on that rotting bog of an app and steep in its fetid waters. What did you learn from that foray that you didn’t already know? I’ve told you a thousand times: the X is a warning to stay away, not the mark of a destination. You should delete it from your phone, from your life, again. The news in itself is enraging enough. But the way you do it, scrolling the news, scrolling what people are saying about the news, and then what other people are saying about what those people said about the news, and then what yet more people said, and… it’s exhausting just to write this, my god. 

The truth is, there’s a perverse pleasure you get from indulging that anger on social media. You’ve said as much to other people. I love to read people hating on them, finally recognizing their cruelty. I love to see the tide turning against them. Inject it into my veins. And that’s exactly what you’re doing. Taking it straight into your body. A poison, a drug. You feel it there for hours; it alters your chemistry. When it wears off, you begin to fiend for it again. 

I know, social media is neither the beginning or end of it. Just now, when you sent a voice message to your brother in Canada, telling him about the demolition of entire villages in the south, how the enemy’s contractors are paid per building that they blow up, so the incentive is to blow up as many buildings as possible, you shook with helpless rage.

Yes, it is normal to be angry. It would be an aberration if you weren’t. You listen to your friends and loved ones describe how they cope. “Don’t spend so much time on the internet,” they tell you. “Immerse yourself in something useful. Get busy with work.” You know they’re right, but it feels impossible to follow this advice. (You’re not even sure they’re able to follow it themselves.) This advice is meant to give you something else to concentrate on besides your anger, but your anger makes it impossible to concentrate on anything. Hence, you’re stuck, affording yourself no space to move. And that’s the dilemma: not so much the anger but the paralyzing nature of it. The way you spoke of it in your letter makes it clear. It is an energy you imbibe, but never expel. 

What is it you wrote at the beginning of this war? In the short-lived journal you’ve since abandoned to that paralysis (though you know it was making you feel better)?

“I can’t remember a time in my life when I haven’t been consumed by some form of rage or aching for the mass, senseless death of people I consider my own. The periods of respite between these bouts of despair have in fact been very few; they were periods of time in which I imagined my life could unfold at its own pace and in accordance with my own will, but every time I was thrust back into that very unique wartime despair, the entirety of my being was shattered anew with the revelation that this was not and could never be so.”

And yet here you are, having managed to make a life, a good life, from all of this. You’ve written a number of pieces that felt real to you, though it seems there have been very few in recent years. Very few that transcended mere witness, or that weren’t direct documentations of grief or anger. And that, too, makes you angry. Since your attention is always commanded by the urgency of the event, you feel perpetually compelled to document rather than dream. But remember, some of your favorite writers were documentarians. And remember also: this is a choice you’re making, and you’re making it for a reason.

The problem is not what you’re writing, it’s that you no longer truly believe that writing matters. It feels almost obscene, in the face of so much death, that you accord such importance to writing. More, it feels self-indulgent to expound on it. You hear people use words like vital, urgent, necessary about a piece of writing, and you roll your eyes. These are words that apply to the material emergency of war, not to words on a page.

But is that even honest to say? It certainly hasn’t been true of your own experience. Throughout your entire life, which you say has been lived in the shadow of war and violence, what saved you? It is not an exaggeration to say that writing saved you. Since those Longman’s abridged classics you read as a child by the pallor and squeal of battery-powered neon lights. What gave you the ability to explore the outdoors, to not only imagine but indeed live in a bigger world while you spent most of your childhood shut inside against the fall of bullets and shells? And then, later, when you became more interested in different kinds of writing, in more abstract ideas, what gave you the entire philosophy by which to make meaning of your life, and thus embrace your life when cutting it off seemed a realistic option? What brought you to the  idea that we are nodes in a network, connected and thus affected—bodily, viscerally, practically — by one another, and so whatever violence you did would resonate down that network? Not just reading Woolf and Levi and Bolaño and Baldwin, but the act of reading itself. The transformation you experienced when you felt lifted into company, into communion with another mind, beyond the constraints of time and space and geography — of material conditions even. You chose, again and again, to remain in the world, not just out of love for your kin, but for the sake of people you’ve never met and yet have known as intimately as family. 

You no longer really believe that writing matters because you’re no longer reading the way you once did. You say you can’t concentrate when your body cannot relax into safety, or when your mind is unable to reach toward the possibility of a future. But how are you supposed to reach for a future from this constrained place without the expansiveness of imagination afforded by reading? Reading books, reading long form, not just shorter pieces on the internet. When you let the world come to you piecemeal, through the frenzied jumpiness of the internet, a form of reading that mirrors the very experience of anxiety, of inattention, you too become piecemeal and scattered. Unable to maintain the steadiness of mind required to get through this.

No, words will not stave off death. Nothing staves off death. But that is true of death in any form. Not just the death to be had beneath the enemy’s bombs. That makes the so-called small things, the idle, unhurried things, more important, not less.

Do you remember that night after the pager attacks? From the safety of a North American city, you read about thousands of small bombs going off across your country, you saw the appalling videos, you read about the hospitals overwhelmed, the burst eyes and blown-off hands, and then you had to listen to analysts breathless with praise for the enemy’s sadistic “ingenuity.” You took off to be with other Lebanese friends, and the three of you spent the day watching the news, raging, looking at the phone, raging, looking at the phone while watching the news, the livestream from Lebanon, raging. You’d gone there so you could all be together, but you weren’t together, not really. You were each alone inside your bubble of rage. 

In the evening, you went back to the beloved and lay on his living room floor, exhausted. I’ve spent the whole day in hate, you told him. Now I want to be in love. And then afterwards, you both went for a walk in the neighborhood, and the weather was balmy and kind, and the old folks were playing dominoes on folding tables out on the sidewalk, and the young men were on the stoops watching the young women pass, and you moved through dapples of music and light spilling from windows and cars and doorways, and you thought about how everybody there had originally come from places as warm and blighted as yours, and how hard they had worked to earn this night off, one of the last balmy late-summer nights before the harshness of a North American winter would blow in.

This, too, is the world, you reminded yourself. And I’ll tell you now: that, too, was being in love.

For inside your anger is grief, and inside that grief, love. Love thwarted, love oppressed, love wrenched from its object — our beings, our lives, life itself — by grave violation. You must find ways to keep cracking your anger open to reach for the love inside it. It is vital, urgent, necessary. Because to indulge in the rage and hatred that the enemy inspires in you is to become the enemy. Yes, this is a tinny platitude — until it is smelted into actual truth, and that only by walking through the fires of rage. 

Baldwin taught you all of that. He also taught you that living in love doesn’t mean relinquishing anger, but understanding its composite parts. Remember what he wrote in Notes on a Native Son, how the tragedy of Bigger Thomas, Ralph Ellison’s doomed anti-hero, lies in having “accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed him at his birth. But our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it, we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult—that is, accept it.” 

That means accepting it in all of its “beauty, dread, power,” otherwise this constitutes a “rejection of life, the human being.” Otherwise “we are diminished and we perish.”

For it is only within complexity, “only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation which is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over all other claims.” 

A more vast reality which must take precedence over all other claims. Your anger, the way you are allowing it to consume you, is obscuring that reality from you, reducing all of existence to the vilest of deeds. It is impeding you from that journey. 

Look, I don’t know how to make you put down that phone, get off that couch, take the first step. But I do know that your anger can become a generative energy rather than a destructive one through the careful, sustained attention that is love. For you, this is summoned by reading, by writing. I know that you are capable of reaching for life through the despair of violence because you have done it before, and you will doubtless be called upon to do it again. And again. And again. You must accept this. For this is the life you were given, and the one from which you must make.