Memorializing Joy

How do you cope with being unwanted by your own mother? With racist taunts from white peers? With being entered even though you never said yes? With panic attacks and eating disorders and soul-crushing depression?

For years, I turned to the canvas. Sublimating my pain into paint, I visually conjured the demons I battled. My compositions were dominated by dark color palettes, screaming faces, tendrilled monstrosities. Harnessing this grief and indignation was cathartic, but reviving ghosts of the past inevitably wreaked an emotional toll. The process of painting became laborious and painful, like each time I put brush to canvas, I was carving into my own flesh.

I want to think beyond what I’m resisting, opposing, fighting against, and instead consider what I actively want to embrace. I want to make work not about what I’m running from, but what I’m moving toward. I want to turn away from “no” and instead seek the “yes.” This migration toward the positive and affirmative constitutes a small action in a larger project of worldbuilding and envisioning liberated futures. As Ruha Benjamin writes, “Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.” 

My emphasis on levity and silliness is not a flippant dismissal of the suffering that pervades our lives and the world. On the contrary: the backdrop of hardship is precisely what brings the importance of joy to the fore. Joy is not inconsequential, it is not unserious – it is a practice of survival. Joy is what emerges from having lost and having something to lose. Joy is what empowers us to resist the injustices of the present and open our imaginations to new possibilities. Joy is what galvanizes us to fight and go on. Joy is what binds us together.