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"I'm glad you found me entertaining," I grin at her. "Thanks for coming to my standup act!"
She is the fourth or fifth person since the morning to tell me I'm funny. It's an unlikely setting for this compliment: a weekend conference on journalism and trauma at Columbia University. The organisers have asked me to talk about my experience as a parent and writer living with mental illness, share lessons from one of my own pieces, and help this group of storytellers, each of them wiser and brave than me, refine their voices and ideas.
I feel utterly unqualified for the job. My neck is itchy with impostor feeling, but I have a strategy to mask it. I will make them laugh.
My first gambit is to talk about dinosaurs. I've rehearsed my opening line dozens of time during my 20-hour flight here: "Yeah, I'm the weird guy who's brought a T. Rex to a conference on trauma." On the day, the joke lands. There's laughter in the room. Emboldened, I launch into the BTS of a story I wrote inspired by my 6-year-old son's love of dinos. I scan the audience and am relieved to see many smiling faces throughout my spiel.
Later, in a panel discussion on the mental health challenges of caregivers, I compare stress-free parents with unicorns (neither exist). I talk about men venting with their barbers about the twin pressures of fatherhood and putting food on the table. I know many people who hate their therapists, but I'm yet to meet anyone who hates their barber, I point out with a practised chuckle. I bring it home with a punchline on how we men learn to trust our barbers with our necks in our childhood, an intimate bond we struggle to reproduce with a stranger on a couch poking around inside our heads for our most dreadful secrets. Men would sooner kill themselves – they do, in horrifying numbers – than appear needy before a person they secretly fantasise is their mother and lover rolled into one.
My sense of humour is a hit, I'm told afterwards. I have successfully become an apologist for joy in a forum to honour suffering.
On the second day of the conference, as I am walking to Columbia with a friend, I see a white man hitting a Black man with a baseball bat at a busy intersection. The attacker is within 5 feet of us. He swings his bat at us, yelling at us, daring us to call the cops. We freeze. He tucks the bat under his armpit and disappears into a supermarket. The Black man fades into the coffee, bagel, and sunshine of Broadway.
Another bright morning, I am waiting for friends at Bryant Park. A woman walks up to me and begins staring at me menacingly. She's within an arm's distance of me. I can count the furrows on her eyebrows. I freeze again. As a man of colour, an outsider in this country, I don't feel safe. But my fear for my own safety cannot erase the guilt I feel for not having done something to protect the Black man.
Someone suggests that New York City's rising burden of mental illness is to blame for these episodes. I am shaken – by the violence but more by this justification for it. The casual coupling of mental illness and violence feels like a slap on my own face. No one's going to praise me for being funny today. I have run out of jokes.
In a cruel, unfair, unequal world, campaigning for joy feels immoral and vulgar. For some of us laughter carries great guilt, because it is the interest we earn from our privilege.
Look closely though, and hopefully you will see that joy is so much more than its better marketed but flightier mutation, happiness. Joy's home is your spirit. Happiness lives and dies on the screen of your newly bought iPhone that starts developing scratches within days. Joy is a sage with a creased forehead and a wrinkled smile. Happiness is the biker in the bomber jacket. Unlike happiness, joy isn't about the individual. It is a public good. Joy is being reclaimed from precisely the margins that were historically denied it. Embracing joy is an act of resistance.
After the conference, I take the train to Washington, D.C., with my sister-in-law. We visit the National Museum of African American History & Culture. I am expecting a lot of sorrow. I do – but I also find a wellspring of profound joy:
"Kleaver Cruz, founder of The Black Joy Project, a digital and real-world movement said that, Black Joy is not … dismissing or creating an ‘alternate’ black narrative that ignores the realities of our collective pain; rather, it is about holding the pain and injustice … in tension with the joy we experience.' Black Joy is an affirmation and an action that claims control where we can. It is not escapism or a way of avoiding reality. It is active acknowledgement that your reaction to even the most horrific encounter resides with you and not someone else. It is an internal choice that is not a fantasy. It is not delusional. It is real."
Source:The Museum of African American History & Culture
