Why is Black joy important?

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.