“I've spent a fair amount of energy dressing up my own rage to get it ready to go out and be effective,” said Sri Lankan Tamil-American writer V.V. Ganeshananthan. Her series of Twitter poetry, “Your Rage,” inspired by recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, has been making use of the social medium’s 140-character limit to create compelling in-the-moment messages.
The outgoing Delbanco Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at University of Michigan and author of the novel, Love Marriage, says although news from Ferguson served as the immediate catalyst for her work, she writes often on political violence in Sri Lanka. This time, Ganeshananthan says, she took to Twitter because, “I wanted to say something in solidarity with various sets of people—in Ferguson, in Gaza, in Sri Lanka.”
At turns lyrical, light, maddening, and funny, Ganeshananthan’s poetic tweets cross boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, and nation, but she emphasizes that readers do not have to be of a particular group to care. They only need “reasonable human empathy.”
Ganeshananthan’s entire thread can be read on Storify as “Your Rage.” It has no connection with Anonymous’ Day of Rage.
