It is a lesson many women learn young: the angrier you are, the less legitimate your testimony. There is dismissiveness: you are being sensitive. There is defensiveness: your perceptions are wrong. There is counter-accusation: you are bringing it on yourself, or, in the most double-backflippy of all mental gymnastics, you are the aggressor. To be believed, you must absorb the harm, and then absorb, too, the social fallout because others contest your experience, the internal fallout from the lack of social consequence for the perpetrator, and the clear message that all of this sends: you are not important, and also, you are nuts. So, often, we accept the psychic dissonance of letting a deeply felt feeling go unexpressed over the social censure - or the claims of insanity, or the violence - that would surely come for us if we allowed our inside feelings and outside actions to align. We learn to repress our anger in order to survive. But the more we trim its outward expression, the more the anger multiplies inside us like unexploded ordnance, hence, ‘send me away/put me away’, like, lock this chick up before she destroys shit, and/or herself.
Send me away is a track in which I am contending with my own anger, and, more broadly, the problematization and medicalization of women’s anger. For me, anger is a propellant, a source of endless kinetic energy, of rapid words, of vibrating inspiration. Anger is also a (not always effective) deterrent to those who might cause me harm. Anger can insulate from the demands of convention: once you see through the systems to their fundamental injustice, you catch a degree of liberation, because, like, why follow rules that are wrong, and also why follow any rules? But it’s a tricky thing. To the extent that I am allowed to be angry, it’s because I have white skin, and am fairly femme, and have an education that gains me some credibility, and have an ok amount of money, and men around me who will often cosign my claims. For me, and, I imagine, for many who have experienced injustice, the anger never goes away. The lyrics of Send me away are really a series of questions without resolution, a nod to the way I cope with my anger by intellectualizing my experiences, thinking and overthinking to find a shifting equilibrium. It’s metapunk: angry, but painfully self-aware.
The video alludes to the kind of poking and prodding women undergo to test if their anger is legitimate: Ok, we’ll hook you up to a polygraph and see if you really have grounds to feel this way. Or we’ll treat your anger as an illness, and put you in hospital and get you some meds to deal with your lack of calm. Or we’ll tie you down, but very gently, for your own good and for the good of the world.
I think of this video as a play in three acts. Act 1: the interrogation; Act 2: the hospital; Act 3: the metaphysical place. I play the role of The Body; Rob plays the role of The Mover. As The Body is more and more physically restrained and the spaces she occupies become narrower and narrower, we see the activity that is happening in her mind increasing. While I was working on this I was reading and thinking about Sylvia Plath’s medicalized and medically stilled emotions, Virginia Woolf’s calm surface/inner ache, but also the spinning discontent of Anna Karenina. The strings emerge from what I remember of Gulliver’s Travels, which to me captured the sense of being too big for a space, uncontainable and barely restrained (there’s a neat parallel to Plath’s “little smiling hooks” in that imagery). Literature has been a source of freedom for me, and remains the only way I’ve ever found to live lives other than my own. It’s an in-between space: not totally real, not totally imaginary. It’s operating in this work as a potential antidote to the psychic pain caused by un-freeness in life.
lyrics
I was only saying things we say
to keep our hate from sweeping us away
the smile was me giving you a break
a favor you’d do well to replicate
still propelled by incandescent rage
a searing thread that burns on to this day
I move this fast so I evade the flame
if I should stop I’ll surely melt away
what you are/and what I am
what you are/and what I am
send me away send me away send me away
put me away put me away put me away
at times it’s hard to see the justice in my rage (since)
I know I struggle less because I have this face (and)
sometimes I wonder if I earned that insulation
the way that people do believe in what I say
and is it fair to entertain my hates (when I know)
it’s my contempt that fuels the conflagration
they say forgive so others do the same (but)
if I do that the fire goes away
what you are
and what I am
send me away send me away send me away
put me away put me away put me away
must I relinquish scorn to pay for your embrace (or is it that)
a light defanging puts me in my place (I’ve grown convinced)
that people want to see my toothless face (they want)
to tally all the things I’ve said in haste
so I’ll just smile and say I’ll never change (then)
you’ll hold your face but say that you’re ok (so)
I’ll claim I didn’t mean to make you break (but)
I’m getting tired of trying to act my age
send me away send me away send me away
put me away put me away put me away
credits
from It's a Trap,
released September 15, 2021
Written, arranged, and recorded by Kritters.
Kritters are Kirini O. K. & Rob Steadman
Lyrics and songwriting - Kirini O. K.
Songwriting, engineering, and production - Rob Steadman
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