Black joy
is
laughing with your girlfriends
about an old joke
an inside joke
each of you barely remembers
but can patch together enough lines to elicit
waterfalls of girlish giggles. Black joy is
hanging in the park on sunday afternoons
reading, on the subway, riding
in the backseat with your pops
behind the wheel, radio crooning
as you make your way back home.
Black joy is jasmine, shea butter,
and that other cream you put on
your hair so the curls be
poppin’, jollof, plantain, hoppin’ john, cornbread
on new year’s day we gather
surrounded by these scents, breathe in
the power of our diaspora, roots
running through the soil of everywhere
because, yeah, we’re there, too. Black
joy is not mythical but it is magical, it is
spiritual, a whole sermon on survival,
it is innocent and inviolate, a soul brand new,
but it can also be hella petty, three snaps
and a schadenfreude side-eye for the haters
who don’t know that if God be for us
any shame, any humiliation, any
sorrow they unleash can only be transitory.
for this suffering, it has been written,
our portion is double. our joy is
everlasting. it, too, is our inheritance,
is our calling, is our destiny, is
our legacy, Black joy
is.
--Nana-Ama Danquah
@danquahrising