
Introduction
T
o lean into or toward something is an act of surrender. A desire extending, and always risking. I like to think of joy—and many of its iterations, like bliss, pleasure, eroticism, fucking, exultation, laughter, etc.—as never a solely individual act but one that extends outward. Joy is communal; it needs—and bears—witnesses. Joy puts us into dialogue with something other than ourselves.
I don’t think we need to rescue joy; but, perhaps, we need to re-learn how to hold it, and gift it again and again. During one of my postcolonialism courses I taught last fall, one of my students, understandably frustrated, stated squarely to the class: I’m tired of reading about how oppressed we are. The “we” in this statement is that unwieldly collective of BIPOC experience, which, so entangled in multifarious forms of colonization and global capital, often feels like the defining characteristic of racialized life. This sentiment has always haunted me, but it feels even more painful when it is a student who utters it. This is mostly because teaching feels to me like distant motherhood—and it’s too much for one person to bear all this pain. I want to nurture and protect them; I want them to live—and to live beautifully. And, yet my job requires the teaching of painful histories. How do we live outside our pain? Can we? Is it a betrayal to live otherwise? The questions circle back—and I don’t have answers for them. We can, of course, learn to hold pain and joy together, but it’s not always that easy. I extend my pedagogical body out to them, trying to make and hold space for these difficult questions.
What does it mean to be joyful? What does it say about our world that there is a fear of being joyful? A shame of having joy?
Perhaps it is because we’ve been conditioned to believe we don’t deserve it. Perhaps it is because we feel that our joy is a violent contradiction when our communities are suffering. Perhaps it is because we are afraid of losing sight of what’s worth fighting for. Perhaps it is because we are not able to see it when it is right before us. But I think this is where the difference is.
Joy isn’t self-gratification but a relation, a stitching. Joy can be that communal space between friendship that only music hears, as in Elizabeth Mudenyo’s interview with her friend Fern, “On Fernship (Joyful Noise).” Mudenyo asks: “What did you think about the origin of our friendship?” Fern cuts in mischievously: “God forbid we be in the same place…that would be something else entirely.” This delicate moment of shared, joyful intimacy speaks to joy’s relational and enigmatic power: a knowing sentiment that is left unstated, this “something else entirely,” carries that magnificent weight of ecstatic bliss that friendship embraces. In Francine Cunningham’s “Spirits Coming Through,” joy is communion: “he wandered, day after day, looking for a way out, praying for his people to see him, to understand him, to listen to him.” Joy is extraordinary—beyond what is visibly manifest.
What, then, is joy as shared secrecy or communion? Or even a knowledge of one’s self as unstable, invariable, and decisively elusive? Joy as not only pleasure seeking but in the diffuse space of movement itself. We can follow the staccato lines of Bridget Huh’s speaker in “Sometimes I’m”—a title already signalling her incertitude:
Sometimes I’m not
breasts
I’m something
better.
Haven’t decided
what yet.
But if I’m it's a woman’s.
But this incertitude is joy as tactical maneuvering, brilliant and bold. We can learn to live “in the difference,” fragmenting ourselves towards fascination. Resiliency here is not a triumph for consumption but a surreptitious refusal, a vital code for those living in the margins. Here, then, is the joy of fuck you.
In The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed speaks to the ways that “happiness involves a way of being aligned with others,” notably in the ways that “happiness” is construed with capitalist fantasy (owning “good” objects, living “well,” being in “good” relation with others), so much so that the fantasy can obscure what we may actually desire and how we may come to know it. For Ahmed, the affective power of happiness and its attachments to things, as well as its relationship to a seemingly moral sense of goodness, renders the emotion dangerously vacant. Within this purview, joy isn’t happiness (living the good life) but an undoing of the social order. As the speaker in Alan Pelaez Lopez’s “i want to live without the fear of deportation” affirms:
how dangerous we are to know of our aliveness and pleasure
how criminal we are to experiment with our power, our softness
how terroristly of us to know that at that moment, the world is us, we are the world.
Joy’s political potential is therefore an unravelling of form. Let joy be a perversion of the good life. “You become guillotined by this leaning forward” (“Four Animal Frolics,” S F Ho, Julian Hou, Matt Smith, Fan Wu). Let our alignments be orchestral and inchoate. Let our misdemeanours excite us. Let us uncover what we never took the time to learn. And let us gift our pleasures so that we and our communities may live. Our experiences across racialized life are by no means universal but I invoke the collective voice as a joyful necessity.