About the UK Community of Practice Knowledge Production Series
This essay is part of the Liberatory Archives and Memory (LAMy) UK Community of Practice knowledge production series. Together, memory workers, artists, and archivists share reflections, research, and creative practices that reimagine archives as living, collective spaces of resistance, healing, and liberation.
By Corrd
Introduction / Non-Binary Thinking
There are many leaders, exponents, and supporters of the Black Joy Movement, and one of the common themes expressed is that the Black Joy Movement is the new wave, and serves us better than the movements before. This binary thinking, that serves to put up one thing against another in order to create opposites, is one of the intellectual tools, and Eurocentric constructs, that we need to just give back. Binary thinking programming doesn’t serve us, particularly those of us from marginalised communities.
Black Joy isn’t juxtaposed to other forms of resistance. Most of the portrayals of Black Joy centre on the perception of its oppositional positionality to things like Black Love, Black Power, Black Rage, Black Exceptionalism. We, as Afrikan Heritage people, have had to fight for every inch of real estate that we presently occupy, in art, culture, in the current societal fabric, yet our contribution has always been more that our occupancy, whilst being used to add value to mainstream culture, it is consistently undervalued, in and of itself.
By pitting Black Joy against other forms of resistance, we detract both from the power of each, and the accumulative power of them combined. This contributes to the fallacy that we need to qualify what we do in order to afford it a certain level of legitimacy.
Distillation
The Black Joy Movement is a misnomer. Black Joy is not a movement. It’s not marches, it’s not protest, it’s not even showing up. It’s not our art, nor our cultural expressions, though these things can serve to induce it. But to attach it to these things obscures it, diminishes our recognition of it, extracts from its true power. The mendacity of cultural hierarchy belittles Black artistic and cultural expression, marginalises it, references it to ‘ethnic’, and makes it orbital to Whiteness, by centralising the edifices of Eurocentric cultural expression, and by extension, the nature of personhood. So Black Joy becomes this thing, like power, that’s referenced and indicated in things that allow its display, but are not actually it.
One year I attended Notting Hill Carnival. As can happen, I walked into a crowd, close to a large Sound that was playing no music, that was so dense that no one could move. After a few minutes of everyone trying to push their way through, the energy in the crowd shifted. People were agitated, tempers started to flare, there was that ‘something is about to go off’ feeling in the air. Suddenly, the sound came on, and we heard ‘1,2,3,4!’, and James Brown singing ‘Sex Machine’. Instantaneously, all angst was released, the crowd, as one, fell into ecstasy and, just for that moment, everyone was attuned to each other’s Joy.
Non-Action / Non-Orbital
Black Joy isn’t an action. It is a feeling, an experience from within, that can be shared, and connect souls in the moment. It isn’t something that can be projected into the future, nor can it be experienced retrospectively, though a retrospective look can invoke that Joy.
Black Joy is the one form of resistance that is neither proximal nor orbital to Whiteness. The impact of Black Joy is vast, from its expression and reflection in its participants, to the unifying nature of its shared experience, and the legitimisation and validation it affords to both the cultural output that inspires it, and the people who experience, express, embody it.
Its experience allows us to heal against the wounds that occur from the violences and the microaggressions that we experience. It allows us to tap into, and remember, our genetic knowledge. It resurrects ancestral memories of a time before we had our current experiences, and allows us to lean back into our ancestral lineage when our souls knew what it was to be free. When we find it, and connect to it, it fills in a loss so deep, it’s almost forgotten. It takes us to the space where we remember ourselves.
Resistance / Surrender
The resistance from Black Joy is twofold. One which inhibits us, and the other empowers. As we develop our layers of self-identity, we simultaneously also develop layers of self-protection. This aids us in not allowing ourselves to be in positions that leave us too exposed and vulnerable. These layers, or walls, afford security, and whilst Black Joy is something we instinctively tap into when young, as we grow older, in our various modes of protectionism, we learn to, without thinking, lessen our exposure, and in the process lessen our ability to that frequency, and tap into that part of ourselves. That resistance to allowing ourselves to access and fall into our Joy can be lessened, for example, when we’re away from the White Gaze.
The vigilance that comes from our learned protectionism reminds us that we aren’t safe, and it’s in the remembering of ourselves situationally, whilst experiencing Black Joy, that we can collapse back into our everyday self, and into the reality where we’re not fully free.
Fulljoy / Erasure
However, when we find ourselves in a place where we are comfortable to release our layers, and fears, and let ourselves to fall into Black Joy, it requires us to give our tacit consent to submit and surrender, and in that surrender, fully expand. Rastafari uses the term ‘fulljoy’ to describe this. In that moment of surrender we expand and fully occupy ourselves, and bring into being our resistance to Whiteness, by making it absent. The surrender IS the resistance. and in that moment, the resistance becomes effortless.
It is resistance in the moment by absenting whiteness, in fact it defies its very existence, because it says that in this moment, in this universe, I exist, and I’m free, I’m whole, and Whiteness, by its absence, is a non-factor, and a non-consideration. The resistance becomes erasure, and the self-actualisation that happens when experiencing Black Joy is the fullest expression of self.
When we surrender, and fall into that space, we not only allow ourselves to fully expand, and absent Whiteness, but we also open a space inside that is far deeper than ourselves, that connects to the poetry of like souls, and our ancestral memory. This empowers us, through the action of non-effort, to self-actualise, and in the specificity of that experience, make our expression of self-expansive, whole, universal, and free. If only in the Present.
Active practice is active resistance.
Corrd the Seeker
Corrd is a thought leader, creative consultant, broadcaster, public speaker, writer, revolutionary agitator, director of the think tank Signifier, and Vice Chair of Ujima Radio
Further Reading (not that experiential knowledge is trumped by academic text, but for further insight, you can check out…)
Overstanding Idren: Special Features of Rasta Talk Morphology*
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326816207_Overstanding_Idren_Special_Features_of_Rasta_Talk_Morphology
Embracing Black Joy: A Radical Act of Resistance
https://reconciliationsa.org.au/stories/embracing-black-joy-a-radical-act-of-resistance