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Confrontations: The Function of Black Female Rage

by Leanne Francis

Being a Black woman means extinguishing your anger to avoid being labelled the ‘Angry Black Woman’. Confrontations asks us to question why our anger must be ‘productive’ rather than ‘destructive’. It asks why only men are allowed anger, and what happens to the women possessed by an innate anger that refuses to be subdued.

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Salomé wakes up in ‘The Donut’, a young offenders unit, having dreamt of blood-caked finger pressing against her neck. The hand around her throat is always there, tightening, tightening. Salomé, along with the other young women who have committed various offences, is there to come face-to-face with the anger that consumes her — and contemplate how she will move forward. This is a story of anger and injustice; of self-discovery, sisterhood, and reckoning with our shadow selves.

The winner of several Dutch literary awards, Confrontations is a bold, heart-rending novel about the complexities of rage and retribution as a young Black woman. Set in the Netherlands circa 2008, we follow Salomé Atabong, a 16-year-old girl born to a Cameroonian father and Dutch mother. Tormented by her classmates, who insult her appearance and make a mockery of her by swaggering around the classroom “like a gorilla,” Salomé has spent her short lifetime both being a victim of and witness to racist bullying.

She used to be a somewhat normal girl, but born into a dysfunctional family, Salomé has always felt out of place. Even the girls at the detention centre think she should be in a mental institute. She often thinks about the rage within her and how it has destroyed her family. She dreams of the ‘other Salomé’, the “Salomé who’s made off with all her luck”: the Salomé who meets millionaires and lives in harmony with her family. The Salomé who’s happy.

Confrontations flits between Salomé’s past and the detention centre in rhythmic, tense narrative sweeps, slowly revealing Salome’s fragmented, disrupted frame of mind as she schizophrenically cycles through the events leading up to her detention. She can’t seem to forget how back in primary school, her white classmates threw coins at a Black asylum seeker near the school. “Pick them up! Pick them up,” they goaded. Even as a young child, Salomé had an innate understanding of the function of race. Even back then, it was important to her that he didn’t pick the coins up. 

This is a story of anger and injustice; of self-discovery, sisterhood, and reckoning with our shadow selves.

As Salomé grows up, she remembers more and more — the Black asylum seeker, her Black father, her Black aunt — and finds herself increasingly filled with unbridled rage. The novel begins when she enters her six-month rehabilitation sentence after a long-overdue act of retaliation at school. The Donut — aptly named after its circular structure — is composed of six units. Salomé is in Unit F along with other young women who have done everything from being violent and dealing drugs to committing theft or simply displaying anti-social behaviour.

In spite of the circumstances, we are presented with a tender portrait of Black and Brown women dutifully caring for one another. When Salomé and Marissa become friends, they gently tend to each other’s hair as they listen to classic rap music. When Zainab experiences discrimination, Salomé expresses quiet solidarity with her. Even when our internal worlds are unravelling, the community is there to shelter us from the storm. But outside of her unit, Salomé’s own family is falling apart. Her father has recently been diagnosed with liver cancer; her elder sister, Miriam, is desperately trying to escape their close-minded village; and her mother is struggling to pick up the pieces.

Working with a counsellor named Frits, a man who earned his name through racist gaffes on reality TV, Salomé must find a way to her release. As time passes, Salomé begins to confront the crime she has committed and delve into the reasons for her anger. She’s constantly tormented by a gnawing feeling, by her conspiratorial memories. “They huddle together, mean and content… I don’t want to listen, but their voices get louder,” she whispers.

We have all felt this female rage, this unbridled anger barely contained and always simmering beneath the surface. We have all held our words behind gritted teeth and a scalloped tongue.

Salomé possesses an anger that is inherited, that is ancestral. “No, you don’t understand, I’ve studied it, I’ve studied, very few people understand, the structures are turned against you, Salomé Atabong, it’s important that you learn to deal with that,” explains her auntie. Black women are taught by society and the systems of power that our anger is unjustified. We must take a different form to exist in society. We must style our hair like they style it, talk like they talk, minimise our blackness just enough. We must always be kind and pleasant to men, even when they draw blood.

“Why is everything I do in extreme terms,” Salomé questions. As the novel progresses, anger takes over her entire body. It’s almost as if she is possessed by the women who came before her, becoming a vessel for the Furies – Ancient Greek goddesses of vengeance whose role was to divinely punish those who committed crimes. Even her name – Salomé – nods to the many women scorned throughout history. From the Biblical woman who danced in front of King Herod for the head of John the Baptist, to a femme fatale who seduces and punishes men in Oscar Wilde’s play, the name has become synonymous with female rage, revenge – and even beheadings.

Salomé’s experience is certainly not new. We have all felt this female rage, this unbridled anger barely contained and always simmering beneath the surface. We have all held our words behind gritted teeth and a scalloped tongue. From Medusa and the Furies to Salomé’s feminist Aunt Céleste and stubborn sister Miriam, Confrontations shows us angry and accomplished women, each expressing their rage in different ways. “Maybe they’d just been born angry, maybe the world they’d grown up in had given them every right to be,” we’re told.

Being a Black woman means extinguishing your anger, making it palatable and sanitised to avoid being labelled the ‘Angry Black Woman’. Confrontations asks us to question why our anger must be ‘productive’ rather than ‘destructive’, something to be watered down and forcibly subdued. It asks why men are allowed anger, as though it belongs only to them, and what happens to the women possessed by an innate anger that refuses to be subdued.

By Leanne Francis

LEANNE FRANCIS (she/her) is an English Literature and Creative Writing graduate from North East England. Being of South African and St Helenian descent, she is keen to pursue a career in publishing and poetry whilst pushing for representation across both. Find her at @leannekfr on Twitter or @leannekerenza on Instagram.

SIMONE ATANGANA BEKONO studied Creative Writing at the ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in Arnhem. In 2017 her poetry collection How the First Sparks Became Visible came out and was awarded the Poëziedebuutprijs Aan Zee for best first collection in 2018. The major Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant listed her as one of the 3 literary talents twice, for the year 2020 and 2021. 

Confrontations: The Function of Black Female RageConfrontations by Simone Atangana Bekono
Published by Serpent's Tail on 11 January 2024
Genres: Existentialism, Womanism
Pages: 192

Salomé was bullied for years and no one did a single thing to help her. One day she finally snapped. Now at just sixteen years old, she's being held in a secure unit for young offenders.

Salomé's counsellor, the man whose good opinion is key to her release, is best known for his racist gaffes on reality TV. Her father has recently been diagnosed with liver cancer and her elder sister Miriam's main preoccupation is to get out of their small, close-minded village as soon as possible. Both at home and in the unit, things are unbearably tense.

Salomé finds it hard to keep her temper and harder still to think about the crime she is charged with committing. But as time passes, she finds new strength to delve into the reasons for her rage and arrive at her own understanding of punishment, penitence and the paradoxical demands made on her existence as a Black woman.

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