Guest post by I Am The Swarm author Hayley Chewins
Hayley Chewins is the critically acclaimed author of The Turnaway Girls and The Sisters of Straygarden Place. She grew up in Cape Town, and now lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, with her husband and daughter. She is the singer and songwriter for EIGHT THOUSAND BIRDS. You can visit her at HayleyChewins.com.
About I Am The Swarm: A propulsive YA novel in verse that blends the contemporary magic of Jandy Nelson with the simmering feminist rage of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Shout.
You need to tell the truth. So you use the most beautiful lies you can find.
To talk about a girl’s rage—to talk about how she felt trapped in too-small rooms—you use insects. Wasps. You don’t consciously choose this. The wasps show up in another book, a manuscript you couldn’t make work. You throw out the manuscript but the wasps keep coming. They have something to tell you.
You use insects because of how separate they feel from a body. How, when they land on your skin, you are struck by a sense of the alien. You use wasps because of how you still flinch when you see one in the garden. Because you once dreamed about them writhing under your skin like living blisters.
You want to talk about the squirm of feelings. The horror, sometimes, of having a girl’s body, so easily opened, so soft and pliable. You give the feelings wings and legs. Texture and weight. Movement. Sound. You give them the hum of life, the loudness of machines. The way they start as an itch in the throat, or as tingling on the backs of your hands. The way, sometimes, they swallow you.
You have to talk about separateness. About the unreality of being split off from something vital inside. You use white space (the weight of silence). You use magic.
You want to say there is nothing unusual about anger, let alone a girl’s anger. A girl’s rage is only different—in its own category—because of how it has been disallowed. Exiled from it, the girl pushes it inside, pushes it into someone else. But rage doesn’t cease to exist when it’s shut off. Blessedly, feelings don’t simply evaporate. They sprout and cling, more and more knotted.
When I first started going to therapy, I was anything but angry. I was anxious and I was depressed. But I wasn’t “an angry person.” That’s actually what I told my therapist. As if a feeling were a fixed identity. It took me forever to know (not just head-know, but bone-know) that I could feel angry without it becoming a definitive state.
I didn’t grow up listening to Rage Against the Machine, but my husband did, and he told me that anger is a gift. Anger is information. Anger is energy. Anger is the fed-up-ness of saying, “Nope. Not anymore.” Anger, aimed in the right direction, is protective. All of this I learned from a woman who sat quietly listening to me, who never once raised her voice.
My own anger will always feel strange to me. Foreign, like a language I learned too late in life. But these days I try to see it more as a visitor than an intruder. It’s not a polite visitor, but it isn’t an armed robber, either. Hasn’t come to steal something, hasn’t come to destroy. Here is a truth I have discovered: anger is someone coming in the night to hand me a secret gift.
We talk about artistic choices as if they are choices. Sometimes they are. But sometimes they are inevitable. A book has to be the way it is in order to say what it has to say.
So, how do you write about female rage?
Flunk out of music school. Forget yourself, then remember her again. (Forget and remember. Forget and remember.) Publish a book. Go to therapy. Slowly, slowly find your voice. Publish another book. Get to a point where you feel like you have failed at everything. Ask yourself: “Why do I write?” Find magic (again). Find poetry (again). Use white space. Use your shame, and your horror. Use wasps.
Put down, clearly, what you remember. Make a story out of it: cleaner and prettier than the original. Write it all down. Spin an exquisite lie to tell the truth.
