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Report transcript in: Why is Black joy important?
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Why is Black joy important?
Please Report the Errrors?
I think Black joy is um
Critical.
It's,
it's,
I think of it as a
one of the many ways of moving through the world
where
the focus is not
on.
The pain never goes away,
but it's,
it's what you perform
and sometimes performing,
um,
Happiness,
performing whimsy,
performing,
um,
And
the freedom to take up space.
All of these things I think of as
interlocked with black joy,
and I also think of black joy really intersectionally.
So I think that
when we see black joy out there in the world,
I think
black men expressing black joy
does something visually as well.
It's a different,
it's,
it's,
it's.
It's wonderful to see.
Queer black joy.
Queer black joy,
you know,
it's something that
can get pocketed away.
It could be
underground in subcultures,
hidden away from everyone,
and when it is allowed
to take up space.
In public,
it's,
I think,
a way that
it's something that makes everyone's lives bigger and
larger and expands the schemas that people have
for
who and what is blackness and what it can look like in different spaces,
and I think that
For black people,
the ability to feel free
to be,
you know,
happy or whimsical or,
you know,
it's so important.
There's there's a film that came out in Kenya a few years ago.
It's called Rafiki,
and it was a film about two
Kenyan girls who fall in love with each other.
Now at the time,
Kenya's
film censorship Board.
A banned it and when they spoke to the director,
they told her,
if you change the ending of this film
we will allow you to air it,
but you cannot have an ending where it's OK
and they're happily they get to be happily ever after these two
lesbian.
Women.
She refused to change it,
so credit to her.
Wanui
is the is the name of the director.
She refused to change it,
and
there were court cases,
and
there was just this moment.
It lasted only a week.
I actually made a podcast about it.
You can put it as one of the things to link to,
just a week where because she wanted it
to be Kenya's representation for the International Oscar,
but it had to be in cinemas in Kenya.
The government allowed it to air for that one week,
and every time I went to that screening,
those screenings,
the
mood in this space,
suddenly this huge congregation of all these queer Kenyan and East African
people
just celebrating the ability to have something that was representing us in space,
but also
just seeing that,
seeing that happy ending.
It was powerful beyond belief,
and when that weekend ended,
they banned it again.
It didn't end up
going to the Oscars or winning or anything like that,
but
the thing that was
amazing is this particular director,
she had a theory
that she called Afro bubble gum.
And she was like,
there's got to be,
we've got to be allowed to have African stories
that aren't sort of wrestling with history
or like really doing social justice things or
the environment or we're just as Kenyans seen
as space for lions and conflict and colonisation.
We also get to be
about.
Cute love
and that I think is so powerful,
yeah,
just people
reckoning,
you know,
reckoning with the joys of heartache and love and romance and
all the other things that everyone gets to,
gets to be.
So I think it's so powerful and there is kind of
in a funny way,
revolutionary space of momentum
when
you allow
people to sort of revel in the frivolity,
the the
the whimsy,
the
The,
the non-heaviness of life.
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