by SJ Sindu

In 2016, I wrote a blog post for Shade Mountain Press about the rage-trance under which I wrote two essays that appeared in their The Female Complaint anthology, and later in my first chapbook, I Once Met You But You Were Dead. The rage-trance, as I defined it, was the cycle of writing fueled by anger.

I was very angry in those days—angry at my parents, for trying to coerce me into an arranged marriage; angry at the world, for its abysmal treatment of queer people like me; angry at myself, for buying into dominant narratives about what my life and body needed to look like.

I still have rage inside me, but my anger has morphed into outrage. I don’t know how you can live in these times and not be outraged. I’m outraged that so many governments are doing nothing about climate change. I’m outraged that the onus for compassionate and low-waste consumption has been put squarely on us as individuals instead of where it should be—on corporations, the biggest producers of waste and pollution. I’m outraged that the rich are getting richer while most people struggle to survive.

But what I want to highlight is the difference between anger and outrage. Anger is self-destructive, and can eat you up if you’re not careful. Tying your writing to anger can at first be a great source of fuel, but eventually it becomes unsustainable—either because you have to keep producing anger and can’t, or because in the battle over your soul, anger has won.

What I argue for now is to fuel your writing with outrage. Anger can consume you, but outrage buoys you up. Anger is indiscriminately wide-lens, but outrage is focused fury. Anger lashes out, but outrage can aim true.

Let me be clear. When Twitter mobs attack activists fighting for a cause the mob believes in—that’s anger, pure and destructive. When organized Twitter activists push against soda companies stealing water from villages in South Asia and Africa—that’s outrage. There’s a difference.

Anger might have fueled my first chapbook, but it’s outrage that fuels my second, Dominant Genes. The rage is palpable—it is there in between the lines, gluing together the disparate and varied pieces of the collection. The collection features lyric and personal essays along with poetry, so cohesion was of great concern to me. I think it ultimately worked because there are thematic links throughout the chapbook—matrilineal heritage, love and marriage expectations, feminist resistance, queer exploration—but also because all these themes are linked by my approach of outrage.

So if you’re writing from a place of anger, I would urge you to turn that anger into outrage. Let the anger mature. Don’t let it consume you. Rather, use it to create art that does good in the world, even if that good is to hold up a mirror to someone who needs it.

SJ Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author of two literary novels, two hybrid chapbooks, and two forthcoming graphic novels. Her first novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award and her second novel, Blue-Skinned Gods, was published in November 2021. A 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow, Sindu holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University. Sindu teaches at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Sindu’s newest work, a hybrid chapbook titled Dominant Genes, was published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2022. More at sjsindu.com or @sjsindu on Twitter/Instagram.