Subhead

Beheading the Archbishop of Banterbury with the righteous sword of shouty, poetic activism

Friday 1 May 2015

Yes, it's fucking violent

Since the Baltimore Uprising began this week, there's been a lot of discussion in the media of the limits of nonviolence as a political tool, and the cheek that white people have in lecturing people of colour about how they shouldn't resist state violence with violence of their own. To take this position is to judge people for smashing a few car windows or looting a drugstore, while ignoring the fact that for nearly a year now, US police forces have essentially been on a rampage, killing black men, women and children with impunity. That's a hypocritical position to take, and I condemn it. As far as I'm concerned, it isn't for me to dictate exactly how black people should resist state violence. 

It also set me thinking, though: because one of the worries I sometimes have about 'You're fucking dead LOL J/K', the key poem in my show, is that it's pretty goddam violent:


So violent, in fact, that there are places I've chosen not to perform it. When I played the women's tent at Newcastle Pride in 2012, for example, I deliberately decided to leave this poem out of my set because I didn't want to bring such violent imagery and language into a women-only space. 

Of course, one of the first things I was asked, by another woman, as soon as I'd finished, was: 'why didn't you do that banter poem?'

Actually,  the poem tends to get its most enthusiastic response from women. Men tend to sit there rather uncomfortably when I perform it. Understandable, really, with all the talk of kicking balls and introducing sharp objects to the urethra masculina. Women, however, tend to absolutely love it, because they know where it's coming from. They recognise it as an act of revenge on a culture which does terrible things to women and then laughs them off as 'laddishness', 'boys being boys' or, yes, 'just banter'.

(I should point out that not all women have been quite as receptive. One cis woman told me after a gig that 'of course, a real woman would never write something that violent'. At the time I was just shocked at the blatant transmisogyny, but looking back I should have showed her the violent, graphic death threats I'd been sent by a cis woman just a few weeks before, and which led, years later, to me writing this



But I digress...)

So many women have came up to me after gigs where I've performed the banter poem and told me about their own horrible experiences at the hands - sometimes literally - of Rape Culture.  And of how good it feels to envision the people who did those things to them being on the receiving edge, for once.

I mention Lisbeth Salander in the poem, and I think one reason women react so enthusiastically to the poem is for the same reason so many of us felt a rush watching or reading about Salander's brutal revenge on her rapist in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Yes, it is brutal, yes, it's problematic, yes, it's fucking violent but this once, just this once, the tables are turned. 

'You're fucking dead LOL J/K' is a violent poem. But it is violent as an act of resistance. It's an act of linguistic violence which makes explicit the violence of Banter Culture and then reflects that back at the aggressors, the oppressors, the bantzmen, the boys-being-boys. And I don't apologise for that, and I refuse to be lectured by people who claim we will only win by taking the moral high ground. Women have been doing that for centuries, and men haven't exactly stopped treating us like crap. Maybe it's time we started making them scared shitless instead.

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