I ran out of feminist fuel and into my freedom
A note on leaving anger behind, by OluTimehin Kukoyi
About a decade ago, I publicly named myself a feminist. It felt crucial to do so at the time: I was in a place where I was weighing my life experiences against what seemed fair or just, and the evidence was clear. It made no sense to me not to embrace feminism.
What I didn’t fully realise at the time though, was that I came to my feminism from a place of anger. I was angry at the unfairness of sexism and misogyny. I was angry at the ubiquity of rape, molestation and sexual abuse. I was angry at the utter stupidity of half the world’s population being silenced and systematically destroyed – just so that the other half could feel powerful rather than insecure. The more I learned about why feminism is so necessary and urgent, the angrier I became. The more I understood about systems of oppression and how they reinforce each other, the deeper my rage ran.
At first, when my understanding of feminism revolved around cisgender straightness and female autonomy, my anger felt tolerable – even productive. But my knowledge of feminist politics, myself, and the world kept growing. I began to understand that the solution I was furiously fighting for was much bigger than establishing less dangerous dynamics between men and women, equal pay, or better conditions within monogamous domestic relationships such as marriage. Over time, as I slowly embraced my identity as a queer African feminist, I began to intimately see that the problem isn’t gender or even gendered relations. The problem at the heart of feminism’s work is the distribution of power.
Something really remarkable has happened to our societies over the last century – indeed, throughout the latter half of this millennium. Family structures, education systems, religious orders, and all other important aspects of public and private life have been steadily consumed by a bizarre yet astonishingly resilient logic of power distribution. This logic, which has its roots in the European economic order that has come to be known as colonisation, grants or denies power to people based on a rigid, binary framework of superiority and inferiority.
This logic’s claim is not simply that women are inferior to men. It’s not even that Africans (and Asians, Indigenous Americans, and Eastern Europeans) are inferior to Brits and Western Europeans. Colonisation’s claim is that inferior humanity exists – inferior people exist – and should be exploited, abused, caged and killed for economic, political and social gain.
As an African woman and mother to a daughter, my early understanding of feminism enabled me to identify how I and others like me had been inferiorised. However, living out my politics over time brought me face to face with a simple and immensely daunting fact: what we are up against isn’t simply misogyny or sexism. Rather, it is a hydra-headed monster designed to create untold space and social sanction for interpersonal, structural and state violence, so that certain people can profit from the suffering of others.
Everywhere we turn today, someone is deemed inferior to someone else: woman to man, queer to straight, wife to whore, rich to poor, worker to owner, Black to non-Black/white, disabled to abled, citizen to state. This logic is so ubiquitous that we believe it is primordial, rather than just the extremely well-propagated delusion of a greedy, immoral and insecure class of people. This logic of less-ness, as I call it, is the unseen force at the centre of what bell hooks once described as the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy – or, if you prefer slightly obscure words to long mouthfuls, kyriarchy (coined by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza).
Armed with this deeper knowledge, I thought I could continue to use my righteous anger as fuel in my fight. After all, we are all equal under God, and no one has any more right to life, freedom, or personal power than anyone else. But it wasn’t long before I realised that there is simply not enough anger in my body to fight against such a monster. Its poisoned roots are too deep, its strangling branches too numerous and dense.
The body of the kyriarchy stretches back across time: there are people in my lineage whose bones lie at the bottom of the Atlantic, ancestors whose backs were striated with the hatred and anger of lazy profiteers who wanted the wealth of the tropics without any of the labour. It spreads across space, harming the Earth, its waters and non-human animals just as much as any human being. And perhaps worst of all, it shapeshifts so cleverly that its work can be done by anyone, in any body – even by those who have suffered inferiorisation themselves.
The logic of less-ness is a monster of mythic proportions. And I’ve realised I’m not no damn Hercules. I’m just a girl, standing in front of another girl, wanting only to be loved.
So I’ve simply stopped fighting.
Now, let’s be clear: it’s not that I don’t care anymore. It’s not even that I’m not angry anymore. It’s just that my life is short, and I know that the system that wants to get people like me has a 500-year head start. The odds are stacked so severely against those of us who tick the ‘less’ box in the social imagination that fighting no longer feels productive to me. Everywhere I look, people are swimming in indoctrination that tells them that for merely existing, some of us deserve violence and harm, while others deserve unchecked power and rewards for the same reason.
I disagree with this bizarre idea just as strongly as I always have; more so than ever, even. I just no longer want to expend my energy trying to fight the system. I no longer want to be fueled by anger, no matter how righteous. Gone are my days of making elaborate arguments to convince people who hate me that we all deserve to live; we all deserve to be safe; we all deserve autonomy and freedom to embody our truths without causing others harm or loss. Those are all really simple things: if you don’t get it, forget about it.
Instead of anger, what I now hold on to is the deep awareness that fighting against the system isn’t the only way to destroy it. There is another way, a gentler way. I found this way by climbing gingerly out of the system’s drooling jaws, having been thoroughly destroyed within it, and unearthing the quiet places, the safe spaces, where the logic of less-ness holds no sway. I found it by reclaiming my own power: to shape my reality, to choose my community and to evade the capture of both my body and my imagination, so that I can find the freedom that is my birthright.
I found this new way by soothing my anger to sleep and letting the rest of myself settle into the knowledge that I am loved. I know now, without a doubt, that I can restore myself to wholeness, no matter how much this diseased and dying society insists otherwise.
I found my way to queer feminist freedom by choosing my life over my anger.
I haven’t looked back since.
Further reading:
Your Power Ends Where Mine Begins, by OluTimehin Kukoyi
Everything in this article is me rn
This is such a profound article. “I know now, without a doubt, that I can restore myself to wholeness, no matter how much this diseased and dying society insists otherwise.” Is so affirmative! This is a quote I’d love to place on the ceiling over my bed. To sleep in and wake up to a bold reminder.
Thank you for writing this, T