Used with permission.
For the past several years I've joined the Read Harder Challenge from Book Riot. The challenge lists 24 categories to read from over the year, and readers choose the books they'll read to fit the categories. Last year was the first year I completed the challenge, not because I didn't read that many books; I usually read about six times that many over the course of a year. The challenge is meant to stretch readers––get us reading outside our comfort zones, and I must confess that in other years I didn't want to get stretched that far. One category last year was to pick a category from a previous year, and I picked number 4 from 2022: Read a book in any genre by a POC that's about joy and not trauma. There couldn't have been a better pick than Ross Gay's book of essays, Inciting Joy.
My book club of two, which meets every Monday afternoon to discuss books mostly about social justice and racism, has one chapter left in our current book, We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina Love, who teaches at Columbia University, where she's been instrumental in establishing abolitionist teaching in schools. Love says abolitionist teaching is 'built on the creativity, imagination, boldness, ingenuity, and rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists to demand and fight for an education system where all students are thriving, not simply surviving." She shares some wonderfully triumphal examples from the early abolitionists and from contemporary co-conspirators.
Some weeks the book has been a really hard read, as it calls on the White reader, to do the necessary work to build a foundation for conspiring to radically change the educational industrial complex, which is really about changing US society. This past Monday in our club meeting, Janet kept talking me down (or maybe it was up) from my despair over ever being able to get it right, over the violence (not only physical) against each other that humans engage in over and over again, seemingly without hope that we'll ever change. Tuesday, I was still in a major funk. Wednesday, with gentle self-coaxing, I began to come out of it.
One thing I love in this book is Love's repeated emphasis on the necessity for teachers to recognize and nurture joy in their students. She refers to it as "Black joy;" in other places she calls people of color "dark folx," and that led me to call this post, not "Black Joy," but "Dark Joy." Dark joy is joy that "originates in resistance, joy that is discovered in making a way out of no way, joy that is uncovered when you know how to love yourself and others, joy that comes from releasing pain, joy that is generated in music and art that puts words and/or images to your life's greatest challenges and pleasures, and joy in teaching from a place of resistance, agitation, purpose, justice, love, and mattering."
The urging that we must see and respond to dark resilience, dark joy, dark creativity, is what gives me hope, moves me to be part of the struggle for justice in ways that I can. It helps me think about times in my own work with dark youngsters when I called on their capacity for joy. It also reminds me of so many more times I could have and didn't and need to forgive myself for missing and carry on.
My choice of image on this page, exemplifies dark joy to me. My painter and poet friend Gloria, who is Diné, has fought for justice all her life, and she has done it with humor and creativity. If you don't recognize it, her End of the Trail is a parody of the 1894 sculpture of that name by James Earle Fraser, which has become almost kitsch in its popularity. Fraser intended it as a commentary on the travesty settler colonialism and the US government wreaked on Native people. But it has also been interpreted as a statement that Indigenous people were destined to die out. Jeffrey Gibson, a sculptor of Native heritage said in an interview, "I saw [End of the Trail] as an image of a shamed, defeated Indian. It always made me feel bad about myself, and I wondered if this was really how the rest of the world viewed us, as failures." As Ross Gay does in so much of his writing, Gloria has embodied "dark joy" in her satire, resisting projections of hopelessness with strength and humor, imagination, boldness and a rebellious spirit. She has given me and many others pause to both laugh and take her message seriously.
If you're not familiar with the original sculpture, you can find many images of it online.