There’s been a flood of feminist titles being published in the past couple of years throughout 2018 & 2019, many of which have been fueled by so much anger accumulated over so many years that it has bubbled over and had to find an outlet, be written out and find an audience. A couple titles listed below are quite new (e.g. Burn It Down edited by Lilly Dancyger, Seven Necessary Sins for Girls and Women by Mona Eltahawy), and I wouldn’t be surprised if the floodgates remain open with more and more titles being published over the next year or two at least, but all these books about women’s anger, the reasons behind the anger, what we can do to make things better for this generation and the next – I can’t help but wonder what will come of reading these titles. There’s a part of me that remains cautious while reading through them. I’ve made my way through portions of some of them, and come away feeling incensed and frustrated, but not really feeling quite incendiary or powerful because of being fueled by anger, necessarily. Perhaps that comes at the end.
Tag Archives: Anger
Grrrr… I’m Mad/Sad in Here
Does it ever feel like there’s a constant pressure on to be happy and to only ever experience positive emotions? (Nevermind the fact that we divide up the emotions between positive & negative, thereby already biasing them to be thought of as either good or bad for you.)
Well here are some picture books that talk about (negative) emotions and acknowledge them as being part and parcel of being human (… strictly speaking, animal, since when they feature, the humans involved are not the ones experiencing the negative emotions). Some of them discuss how it’s perfectly OK to be experiencing these ups and downs, whereas others highlight what emotions such as fear and jealousy (or in this particular case, the selfish personality of the giraffe) hold you back from the possibility of experiencing things you could never have previously imagined.
Grumpy Monkey by Suzanne Lang, illustrated by Max Lang, is great at portraying how sometimes our grumpiness can seem completely illogical: there’s nothing to be grumpy about, but you know what? We all wake up on the wrong side of the bed some days, and that’s alright! Having your friends there to be there for you, even if what they’re doing isn’t cheering you up per se, can be a boon to your emotional state. Grumpy Monkey yells at his friends, denying his grumpiness, but it’s when he actually accepts that yes, he just might be grumpy, and yes, his friends do still love & care for him, that he starts to feel a bit better.