by Ashley N. Patterson
Every time I sit down to write (and then revisit and rewrite) this brief reflective essay—in fact, every time I write anything at all, at my computer, my desk, inside my shower on a waterproof notepad affixed to the wall with mini suction cups, or anywhere else—I feel feels. I feel a lot of feels. Some I sense in my stomach and other belly organs. Some I notice in my finger muscles as they type or scribble or carefully move my hand to inscribe individual letters in the rough proportion of one part print to two parts cursive. Some I identify in the tissues of my neck and shoulders. And some I feel in a way not connected to my body at all. If you force me to describe these latter, I will say I sense a cloud of dense, energized air around me. I sense varying degrees of opacity, intensity, and proximity depending on the day (and moment within the day). I experience a lack of clarity as to whether these physically ambiguous feels emanate from, or are attracted to, my body. A cloud of air full of invisible energy is the nearest description I can come up with. Sometimes the feels that animate the cloud are good and comforting and spur me to type to my heart’s content. Sometimes they make me want to immediately close the laptop or put the cap back on the pen. I’m not surprised to discover that this difficult-to-describe cloud of ambiguous feels produces a bundle of complexities that seem at first to contradict one another. I am not surprised that this cloud is often the strongest of my sensations when confronted by my own act of writing. There is something about translating thoughts that exist uniquely, irreplicably, and generatively in my head into legible and shareable words on a page that is otherworldly. It strikes me as a bit of preternatural magic we humans possess as a species that allows an intricate sharing of the most intimate parts of ourselves.
The reason I do the job I do as an academician—and why I choose it, continually choose and re-choose it—is that I continually find myself giving to the complicated collection of feels my profession evokes in me the name “joy.” Joy. I have come to realize that I now experience joy as a necessity which allows me to practice my profession as a way of life. In this essay I want to explore my intuition that this joy may be important in a grand, outward-focused sense against the backdrop of global outcries that are anything but joyful.
As I’m being energized by the thought of being able to think through these ideas with you, dear audience, I feel I need to orient you to who I am before I can begin to start playing with the larger public questions. Today I describe myself as a mother, a Black mother, a professor of social justice education, a word nerd, a person who is anxious, and a person who, as an introvert, has lots of conversations with herself. One of the ways I have found to cope with some of the anxiousness I feel is to stop, breathe, and talk myself through the process of focusing on identifying what is causing a certain feeling, especially in cases where these feelings radiate into something that threatens the (perceived) boundaries of my control. This personal practice informs my offerings within this essay and has greatly contributed to my evolving reverence for joy.
Another important self-description and source of access to joy comes from my adoption of a Black feminist lens. I call this self-description simply “my womanness.” While there are many, many Black feminist thinkers who have engaged the concept of joy, in this reflection I’m drawing from, and interacting with, the ideas of poet and intellectual Audre Lorde, especially as captured in her 1984 compilation of essays and speeches titled Sister Outsider. In preparing to write this essay, I took considerable time and care to exist in the same space with Lorde’s ideas. I read and reread her essays and speeches. I imagined my own thoughts and hers dancing with each other in ways that cultivated familiarity, affection, support, and intrigue. At the slowing of the dance, some thoughts dissipated. Others continued to resonate encouraging and contributing to an experimental rhythm and bounce I wanted to give my own ideas. In the pieces included in Sister Outsider Lorde establishes a multifaceted understanding of her Black lesbian womanness. She calls upon other Black women-identified persons to interrogate their knowledge of themselves because such self-knowledge is indispensable. Self-knowledge is a powerful knowledge. My essay is a response to her call and to what it incites within me.
Emotionality is not exclusively a feature of womanness, but the underlying fact that I’ve lived my entire life in a body that is recognized as woman, specifically Black woman, has shaped the ways in which I experience emotion. Putting into words the feelings and understandings that combine to create what I understand as my own womanness is extremely difficult. I don't have a reliable way of differentiating the components of my understanding that have come to me by some innate knowledge of self from those that the world has implanted at the various levels of my consciousness. Regardless, my understanding of Black womanness, generated by a variety of sources and partially constituted by their attending emotionalities, determines the perspective from which I write. My lived experiences are inextricably tied to Black womanness. A Black feminist consideration of joy is, for me, indispensable thought and heart work.
In a paper I’m co-authoring with friend and life-guide Dr. Cynthia Tyson, we offer a guide for reviewing multicultural children’s literature. We hope to move ourselves, reviewers, and fellow teachers beyond the typical, closed-form checklist-style evaluation usually used today. We invite the evaluator to assess the book’s ability to inspire in its audience deep inquiry along with traditional questions about the text’s surface form and content. A central question we pose is, “Does this book inspire joy?” Of course, there are crucial questions to ask about fairness and accuracy of representation, about whether the story is being told in a way that humanizes its diverse characters. But the question of joy, we believe, gets at what the very best children’s literature is most importantly about: creating generative connections between a writer’s mind and the minds of readers.
In our article we are careful not to conflate joy with happiness which we understand to be a more embodied emotional and intellectual condition of comfort and well-being. Joy isn’t only found in things that are pleasant or materially satisfying. Sometimes events, encounters or instances that are troubling, frustrating or saddening indirectly spark a feeling of joy that is a by-product of the witnessing or of the processing of consciousness itself. In our research we asked our evaluators not to consider whether they felt happy at the end of a specific book, but rather whether they felt an aura around the book experience that they would identify as joy. Acknowledging the range of possible manifestations of joy, we coupled this invitation with the plea that the audience take time to become familiar with their own personal descriptions of joy. We purposely did not provide a limiting definition. Instead, we invited audience members to lean into a careful consideration of what constitutes joy for them. Maybe it’s a feeling that the air being breathed is just a touch fresher and crisper than usual. Maybe it’s a sensation that the body is lighter or more in tune with its surroundings. Maybe it’s a temporary clarity or warmth. We wanted our audience to consider the possibility that joy was beyond reduction to language.
In her essay, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde notes that the relationship between intellectualized theory and poetry and between thinking and feeling are often presented as dichotomous and mutually exclusive. She explains why conceiving of each of the terms of the two pairs as categorically separate is itself an attack on Black womanness. As a people, our survival has been tied to our feelings as fuel for our poetry, our dreams, and our freedom. To divorce emotions from our best thought about our lives is another form of oppression and dispossession. The false separation between thought and feeling, and, more importantly, the positioning of thought as the more worthy endeavor serve to prop up hegemonic whiteness. Through the insistence that thinking is a precursor to being—“I think, therefore I am”—the act of feeling is falsely and destructively relegated to a position of “lesser.” Lorde encourages us to break the bonds of this notion through intimate exploration of our feelings. Our feelings, she shows, have the potential to become poetry and to provide a less-traveled path to theoretical understanding:
But as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes. (p. 37)
For Lorde, and now for myself through her inspiration, emotionality, feeling, and thinking about feeling all contribute to breaking down the dubious binary of “thought feeling.” Building up this skill is a necessary part of claiming ways of knowing and being that honor Black womanness. Breaking down the mutual exclusiveness of these categories gives us access to how joy requires both feelings and thoughts and leads to subsequent knowledge and action. I am a self-described educator for social justice who believes that anything claiming to be “social justice” must have an action component to it. Joy—and seeking and recognizing and embodying and celebrating joy (thought and act together)—is at the center of my life. If I can identify where the feels that I associate with joy are generated from, I can strategize how to engender more of this feeling and even how to process other less generative feelings into something more closely resonating with joy. This disciplined practice provides an avenue for resisting oppressive societal forces structured by the prioritization of thinking over feeling. When the two can be embraced as complementary and are not seen as being opposed, a way is opened for creating social justice.
Especially on the days that task seems extremely daunting or hopeless, I return to the core reason I have taken on being an academician as a mission. I am continually in awe of the fact that—for whatever reason—we are all here and sharing the world in this unrepeatable space and time. Experiencing and translating the connections between myself and those with whom I’m sharing the world constitute the enlivening enactment of joy. Writing and other communicative forms are sacred because they allow connection to occur. Through words or images on a page or screen, a subtle movement of lips and eyes and hands, a carefully chosen word or phrase spoken in the language that best captures a moment or feeling’s most authentic and spontaneous representation, joy is produced and provides a bond between individuals. Lorde explains that we communicate what would otherwise be silence through the act of “living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding.” When we partake of such joy, she continues, we are “taking part in a process of life that is creating and continuing, that is growth” (p. 43). She cautions, however, that “[w]e cannot settle for the pretenses of connection” (153). The most intense joys come from exchange of energy that is not fettered by presuppositions about what the interaction should be, or what might be expected given implications of the meanings we’ve attached to various markers of the identities we carry as individuals. Instead, what fuels joy-inspiring connections is an appreciation beyond all elements of one’s identity for what happens between individuals in the moment of mutual communicative encounter.
The journey toward joy is not strictly linear and joy does not exist wholly separately from other feels. Nevertheless, I know I cannot do work within the realm of equity and social justice without joy. As a matter of survival and preservation of the potential to thrive, I need to claim joy for myself even when the work itself is not joyful. Indeed, there are always additional conditions and feels at play: frustration, the unwillingness to accept the unacceptable, hopelessness, confusion and disbelief, indignation, fatigue, anger. All these are an inevitable part of doing social justice work. But I also assert that each of these feels is continually in relationship with joy. To be in touch with these feels and simultaneously with the ways joy can ignite action without minimizing them is my goal as an academician. Dancing with Lorde’s ideas helped me to find words to describe my thoughts about these complications (and seeming contradictions) and to contextualize them within a broader context.
To Move Forward
In many of the essays included in Sister Outsider, Lorde speaks of anger, an emotion far distant from joy. In two essays, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” and “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,” she explains that for Black women and women of Color an intimate knowledge of anger—and even hatred—has been sowed across generations through societal subordination and oppression. She notes that anger is imbued with strength and can be used as a tool against racism and sexism and other systemic social ills. As she also notes, an unfortunate side-effect of the deployment of anger is a chasm between individuals who stand to benefit from the connection that anger poisons, particularly women of Color who should be forming coalitions against outside oppressive forces. She emphasizes that “in the long run, strength that is bred by anger alone is a blind force which cannot create the future” (152). Drawing upon joy as a fuel for the strength necessary to battle societal oppression is to refuse to draw solely from a source that only provides means to focus on “what lies behind” (152). This, Lorde warns us, is what anger does. To choose joy adds an additional dimension of power to any act of resistance: forward motion. I embrace joy, including joy that can only be fully understood through recognition of its relationship with anger, because of its potential for momentum towards a better future. A choice to embark upon the work of world changing from a “stand for” perspective rather than a “fight against” position is a turning away from efforts grounded in depletion and eventual burn out and an intentional turn toward efforts founded in communal nourishment, shared growth, and collectively generated power.
Joy feels like a different offering and a different mode of intentionality because it is self-fulfilling. Its measurability lies outside of anything that can be materially tested. For Black women, strength that is sharpened in anger often reinforces the same societal inequities and oppressions that have inculcated that anger in the first place. In a vicious cycle, Black women are dehumanized, relegated to the bottom rungs of the social hierarchy and, as a result, we sow seeds of anger. When displayed publicly, that anger becomes attached to prevailing images of Black women as angry, irrational, emotionally driven, lacking in intellect. The stigmatization of that anger serves as a justification for dehumanization and the soul-stealing cycle begins again in the same manner it has been repeated from generation to generation. Oppression is strengthened by the very anger that oppression elicits though driven by hopes of alleviating and breaking it. This is not meant to demonize anger or to denounce it as an invalid or less than fully human emotion. Rather it is to point out the limitations of anger’s helpfulness. Lorde identified the utility of anger as a matter of its propensity for propelling bold action. But she also lamented its deleterious consequences both personally and for women of Color broadly. In joy, she shows, a different potentiality is revealed. Joy does not threaten to burden and destroy its bearer in the same way that anger does. The act of choosing to cultivate joy is a rejection of an invitation to play the game that has been rigged against its most vulnerable players. Choosing joy is an insistent demand for a new, just, equitable system. Joy’s unbounded and still unmeasured generative capacities suggest and prefigure the way new energies founded in new ways of knowing and connections to others can be envisioned, constructed, and cultivated.
[Exhale.] As I wrap up this composition, I experience joy mounting as a result of the exercise of transforming what could easily have otherwise been silence into language. That cloud of air and energy that is settling around me? I sense in it new possibilities through which to know and join others.
References:
Lorde, A. (1984, 2007). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches by Audre Lorde. Crossing Press.